Speaker 0:
Hello, Mardreamin. Welcome to day two. We’re so excited to have you all joining us today. My name is Rana, um, from sercante, and I’ll be moderating today’s session. So if you have a question, post it in the q and a tab above, and we’ll try and get to it at the end of the session. So let’s get started. I’d like to introduce you to our speaker, Mark Kuyak, who has a great session where he’ll share with us his secret recipe for lead follow-up success. Take it away, Mark.

Speaker 1:
Thank you, Rona. Uh, thanks for joining. Uh, so my name is Mark Kujak. I’m marketing automation manager with Alert Labs. Uh, Alert Labs develops commercial AI powered water leak technology. And at the risk of aging myself, I’ve been doing marketing in some capacity for twenty plus years and automation and building marketing campaigns as a Pardot, now account engagement, and Salesforce admin for about a dozen years. So, uh, we’re gonna be talking about lessons in lead follow-up today, and specifically turning inbound leads into booked meetings with sales. Like many account engagement users, we work in a B2B model. We’re not doing e commerce. The model is you’ve got to book in with sales to book a demo who can then sell a solution to you. I’m going to outline a framework for you to ensure that your in inbound lead process is airtight and that nothing falls through the cracks.

So firstly, thanks to our incredible sponsors. Events like this can’t happen without them. So Circonte, Salesforce, Stencil, the Spot, StoryLane. Uh, be sure to visit the sponsor tab above during during your downtime today.

Quick agenda. Uh, so we’re gonna talk about the pain. What what are some of the lessons that we’ve learned from traditional lead follow-up, um, and what is what is the prescription to that pain? So we’ll talk about a flow to ensure that your leads are followed up with quickly and consistently. It’s going to be a very practical session. We’ll get into the nitty gritty of the building blocks of building custom fields, automation rules, e mail templates, and what the engagement studio program looks like. We’ll talk about the integrations that make everything and that ultimately keep sales engaged with engagement. And of course we’ll talk about some of the, uh, the good results we’re seeing in our context.

So what is the the pain? Why do we have so much trouble with traditional lead follow-up? Well, it starts with, uh, the weighty expectations around lead follow-up. Um, and there’s tons of studies out there, uh, but they all say basically the same thing. Uh, you need to follow-up early and often. So, um, the the first visual here showing that, uh, your chances of contacting, let alone qualifying a lead, drop off dramatically, uh, even after five minutes have passed. So, uh, almost immediate lead follow-up is crucial, uh, as are the as is the frequency of follow-up. So, uh, the number of attempts that you’re making to follow-up with these leads, One or two attempts just just doesn’t cut it. Uh, you need upwards of six, seven, sometimes eight attempts to truly maximize your chances of contacting a lead.

A few more fun facts to set the stage. Uh, so the first 78% of customers will buy from the company that responds to them first. So, uh, really, really important to be first past the post. We talked about the chances of qualifying a lead and the number of attempts necessary. You’re also seven times more likely to reach decision makers if you follow-up within the first hour. So despite knowing all of this, uh, only 7% of cost the companies actually follow-up within the first hour. And that’s with a substantive response to to an inquiry, not a, uh, you know, we we got your message. We’ll get back to you later. And forty four percent of salespeople will give up after one follow-up attempt.

Um, so, you know, I I’ve worked with a lot of sales teams, um, and and most of them and especially our current sales team, they’re wonderful at selling. But, uh, you know, they’re not experts in appointment booking necessarily or, uh, you know, chasing people around is not necessarily part part of their core skill set. So It’s not surprising that we struggle with this process.

What lessons have we learned in our travels? We’ve tried a few different models. The most basic model is uh, marketing generates leads, and we pass those leads directly to sales. And we hope and pray and we say, pretty, pretty, please, sales. It’s really important to follow-up with these leads quickly. Um, but invariably, this leads to inconsistent lead follow-up. Some leads are followed up with within an hour, some within, uh, you know, twenty four hours. Uh, some slip through the cracks altogether. Frequency can be even more of a challenge. You know, very, very hard to compel sales to to follow-up more than once or twice, uh, on an inbound lead. Uh, and then you get into a situation where sales is busy chasing and not not selling. Um, and marketing spend and leads get wasted.

BDR. BDR can have a role to play here. It’s often part of their role to help qualify leads. Saw a great presentation yesterday about embedding the BDR function within marketing. But for us, what we found was we’re really sort of imposing our sales process on the prospect and we’re just creating another hurdle for them. Um, so especially for a really good lead, they’ve got to meet with somebody before they can meet with, uh, the person that’s actually gonna sell to them. So it can add days to the process during which time your competitors have have moved along, uh, maybe further than you have. Again, it’s just another headcount that’s busy not selling product.

Well, why don’t we just let people book directly into sales calendars? We’ve tried that, but that requires one of couple of a couple of things, uh, some immediate pre qualification. So you either have to extend the, uh, the number of fields that you’re asking for, um, increasing abandonment on your forms. You can onboard a real time, uh, lead qualification solution. There’s some good ones out there, but that obviously adds some some cost and complexity. Um, and the other issue is sales will get trapped on bad calls and end up burning sales calories on unqualified leads.

So what is the antidote to these common struggles that we face with the inbound lead process? When we start to think about it, a number of goals, uh, come into focus. So we know that our process needs faster follow-up, uh, almost immediate, and that requires a commitment in marketing to to prioritizing Fast Lead follow-up. We need more contact attempts before, you know, uh, exhausting our attempts on a lead. We need these touch points to be personalized to the greatest extent possible and we want to improve our inbox deliverability. Give us the best chances of getting to the inbox. There’s nothing worse than a hot lead coming in. We send them a reply. It goes to their trash or their junk folder and they think we never replied to them and they move on to a competitor. At the end of the day, we want more meetings booked more quickly.

For us, this translated into some requirements for this process. We decided that we were going to completely remove the email burden from sales. We found it was more work to try to implement the right actions and police that process than just to take it back in house. We need to make it easy for leads to book into sales calendars. And again, let sales focus on selling. Uh, we want the follow-up to be fast, not necessarily instantaneous but it needs to be fast. We want to balance that with the ability to personalize our outreach and ensure it’s optimized to book meetings. We’ll talk about some of those techniques. We also want to automate the call tasks for sales. We’re talking a lot about e mail here, but phone calls still have a role to play. Sales still needs to call leads. Some leads will ask for a phone call. Some leads will pick up the phone where maybe they, uh, ignored, uh, an email. Um, so we’re facilitating that, um, that process through through this, uh, as well.

We’ll get into the details. But at a very high level, how it works is that marketing sends the first e mail. It’s using a Salesforce template through email or Outlook or whatever email client you’re using. Um, and we’ll talk about why that is. It’s an introduction to their expert point of contact. Words matter. We select every word carefully. People don’t always love talking to sales, but they certainly love talking to experts. This template includes some dynamic merge fields. We’re entering lead owner information, uh, their calendar link. And from there, after this step, an engagement studio program will take over and send the rest of the follow-up emails and call tasks from the, uh, the lead owner. We use automation to pull the lead from the program when a meeting is booked. And, uh, all in all, we’re talking about eight contact attempts over, uh, eight days. So, uh, four emails interspersed with, uh, four four sales calls so we can ensure that we’ve exhausted our attempts to, uh, follow-up, uh, with this lead.

This is a takeaway slide, so we won’t go into to all this, but just to show you, uh, the steps involved, uh, in the cadence. And this is a result of seeing a a lot of different presentations at Salesforce conferences and elsewhere on, um, you know, the right cadence, the right the right, uh, techniques and verbiage to use to get people to to respond. So it starts with that first email piece, um, and then, um, steps two to seven are completely automated through the Engagement Studio program. Email number one again, that’s coming from marketing, introducing sales to their new lead. Then emails two, three, and four are sent on behalf of the sales rep through account engagement. And when we get to the end of the program, uh, if we haven’t been successful, uh, the lead is removed from the flow, uh, they’re marked as nurture. Uh, we we drop them into to one of our targeted nurture campaigns and hope that they, uh, put up their hand and come back to sales at some point.

When we’re building out any kind of new program like this, we need some building blocks. So that includes, uh, custom fields. Uh, so these are ours. You’ll you’ll you’ll have your own for your own process. Uh, we have a number of custom fields so we can populate lead owner information. So this is separate from just the owner and account engagement. We have custom fields to drop in the lead owner’s name, their calendar link, their headshot. We have a custom field for the lead owner’s Slack ID. We use Slack so that that powers some of our integration work, which we’ll talk about at the end. Total number of calls, this is a custom field that helps manage the call piece. It’s essentially just a roll up of the number of activities on the Salesforce record that are of the type call. You can Google how to set that up or talk to your Salesforce admin for creating that role field.

Lead status is technically a custom field in account engagement, but every account engagement instance should include a lead status field. There’s really just one simple automation rule that’s pulling people into the program. So we’re looking for folks that, uh, leads that have been created in the last day that are assigned to sales. So in our case, that’s essentially anybody but me that belong to a particular business unit. Then they’re added to a list called inbound lead cadence.

We also use dynamic content in our e mail templates to customize. But quick sidebar on this one specific piece of e mail content that we use for e mail signatures. If you’re sending e mail on behalf of a number of people, uh, or sales reps, uh, you you can control all that from one piece of dynamic content where you’re pulling in their sender information from Salesforce. You have that custom field for their calendar link, for their headshot, where that image is located. When it comes time to update your e mail signature, uh, you can just do it in one place. You don’t have to be mucking with 20 different email signatures or heaven forbid, uh, you know, hundreds of different email templates.

So email number one. This is, uh, where it starts. So a lead comes in. Um, it’s it’s assigned to sales because it’s it’s it’s qualified as somebody we wanna talk to. Um, and this is arguably the the the controversial piece of the program because this is where I tell a bunch of automation professionals to resist the temptation to fully automate this. I would say that to anybody starting out in automation is learn how to edit yourself. Uh, you know, just because you can automate something fully doesn’t mean you always should. Um, just like a a musician. Right? You don’t have to put out that double album. Uh, you you can edit yourself.

If you think you can get better results with a hybrid, a template with a little bit of manual effort, that’s what we found here. This is that first email. It’s an intro to their expert point of contact and we’re using a Salesforce template and the Salesforce integration with either Outlook or Gmail to trigger that template. And we’re doing that for a couple of reasons. One, um, it’s diversifying our email sending. So we’re going to increase our chances of hitting the inbox at some point during this program. If you’re like us, a lot of account engagement users send email via Salesforce’s shared sender IPs and Salesforce does a great job of protecting their um, their sender, uh, reputation. Uh, but the truth is, more often than not, you’re gonna have more success hitting the inbox with a personal email sent from your Outlook or Gmail. And that’s not always the case. Sometimes you’ll have folks for whatever reason, uh, they’ll, um, they’ll they’ll respond to your account engagement email claiming that they never saw your first email. Uh, but the point is diversification, uh, you have a better chance of of hitting the inbox.

The other one is is maximum personalization. So, uh, we want to personalize a little bit more, especially with this first email, than we can just do with merge fields. Uh, so we do use merge fields, you know, inserting first name, company name, and all that. Uh, but we like having that extra layer of customization. So what we’ll do, um, with the email is the first line is really just thanking them for taking the time to share how company is looking for x. And the x is I’ll I’ll usually just read back to them, uh, the the the same verbiage that they’ve used when they filled out our form. Um, and the the second line, we talk about our very specific expertise, uh, in their in their industry or their area. So if they’re talking about uh, a laboratory inside of a university, we can say, oh, absolutely. You know, we have several applications with with labs inside universities.

And the other thing we might customize is, uh, the nature of their request. Are they asking for more product information? Are they asking for pricing? Are they asking for a demo? Just recognizing what they’re asking for. It usually takes about thirty seconds to call up this template, customize it, click Send. The other benefit here is that you can copy a sales rep. You can’t really copy a sales rep on an account engagement e mail. They have visibility there as well. Obviously, this isn’t going to scale if you get 100 leads a day and you have one person managing this. But for us, we find it is manageable and it just takes a commitment as a marketing team to recognizing the importance of immediately lead follow-up and it becomes part of your DNA. If I’m on a team meeting with my marketing peers, I’ll say, hey, I got a lead come in, I’ve got to leave for a minute and come back and everybody understands that this is a priority.

The email also includes one clear call to action to book a fifteen minute meeting. It’s very purposefully a fifteen minute meeting. Uh, very low barrier to entry to have that, uh, that first conversation, uh, with sales. So most people will book from this email. They’ll never see the rest of the program. But for those that don’t, that’s where Engagement Studio kicks in.

The first thing it does is it manages the call process for sales. So, uh, you’ll see this better when you download the slides but, uh, the program here, um, the first thing that happens it’ll it’ll look for, um, a phone number. Uh, so usually we will have a phone number from from data enrichment. Um, if there is one we’re gonna create a call task in Salesforce, uh, and then, uh, the clock’s gonna start ticking.

Speaker 0:
So sales has

Speaker 1:
we have an SLA where they have twenty four hours to make that first call assuming they haven’t already booked into a meeting with that first email. Uh, after twenty four hours, we use that custom field total number of calls to see has a call been made. Is it one or more or is it zero? If it’s one or more, great, we don’t have to do anything. They can keep going down the path towards the next e mail assuming again they haven’t booked. If they haven’t made the call yet, uh, we’ll do a complex rule check to see has the lead status changed. So has a meeting been booked here? Is that why the call wasn’t necessary? And if not, then we trigger a reminder to sales. And that’s that’s why this program is is called Inbound Lead Call Now because that’s the subject line of the email that’s triggered from Pardot, that goes to sales to say, Hey, you’ve just missed your call window. It’s time to drop what you’re doing and make that call.

It’s amazing once you start reporting on calls, uh, how it starts to drive the right behaviors. So we have in Salesforce a call compliance metric that measures, uh, the percentage of time that different reps, um, uh, call their lead with within twenty four hours or not. You can also start filtering, uh, this information to your email or to the email of sales leadership and dumping these emails into folders for them so they can start to see, like, a running tally of, uh, you know, who who’s doing who’s meeting their their call requirements and who’s not.

So that’s the call piece. You know, Engagement Studio, uh, you know, we always talk about how it powers email campaigns. It can really power any kind of process that requires reminders and action, uh, like phone calls.

Then from there, emails two through four are triggered through the account engagement program. Again, every step of the way, we’re doing that complex rule check. Has the lead status changed? Has a meeting been booked? Um, and, uh, there’s an integration that that’s telling us that that a meeting is booked. We’ll talk about that in the next step. We’ll do another check. Has this lead been converted to an account and a contact? That would be an indication that they are engaged. Uh, assuming those two things have not happened, they’re going to get the next email in the string. And it’s it’s very important that that sales buys in and does their part because, you know, this first email plays off the phone call. So it’s, sorry, I missed you on the phone. I was calling in response to your recent inquiry with Alert Labs. So we’re reminding them you asked for this. This isn’t a cold email. Right?

So, um, and the other thing that’s key here is I’ll try again in the next day or so. So so that’s a polite way of telling people we’re not gonna give up. We’re gonna keep bugging you. So, uh, now is a good time to to reply. Uh, so they may or may not, uh, email number three, still trying to respond to your inquiry. Please pick a spot in my calendar at a time that works for you.

And then, uh, sometimes we get down to email number four, which is the, uh, permission to close your file. So this is a very a popular technique, uh, that that we found really works for us. Uh, it says we’re in the process of closing files for the month, which may or may not be true. Uh, typically, when we haven’t heard back from someone, it means they’re either really busy or aren’t interest interested anymore. So you’re forcing them to choose between those two options. And nine times out of 10, they just got really busy. So they filled out a form on your website, they got swamped, they didn’t have time to book a meeting. Uh, so you’ll often get an apologetic reply saying, oh, I’m I’m gonna book a meeting now, or I’ll book one next week, or can you call me tomorrow, um, something to that effect. So, uh, email number four for us actually performs, um, um, it’s second only to the first email. So so we got a lot of, uh, pickup from that sort of last ditch attempt.

So I’ve been referencing integrations that that power, uh, some of this process. Uh, so Zapier, uh, anybody working in automation knows Zapier is a really powerful tool for, um, managing, uh, data between platforms. We have a very simple Zap that, speaks to our calendar application, which is Calendly, uh, as of now. Uh, so when somebody books through Calendly, um, there’s a lookup in Salesforce, uh, to find that record, and it will automatically change that record to a working status which will pull them from the the campaign that we just looked at.

We’re also sending a message into Slack. Now if you use account engagement and you use Slack and you have not taken advantage of this integration, start doing it tomorrow. We have seen so much value from the the visibility, uh, that especially the sales team gets into engagement by pushing it into Slack where they live. So we have a channel in Slack called prospect engagement, um, where all of our new leads land, important information on existing leads. So if they fill out a new form, uh, you know, your lead is on the contact page, might be a good time to reach out. So a really powerful way of getting sales to act on that real time engagement. We’re pushing in meeting bookings and maybe more importantly meeting cancellations as well so that sales knows it’s time to rebook.

Again, when you look at the slides more closely, you can see the syntax that I’m using in my completion action in account engagement on the form. It includes their Slack ID. So that’s a custom field and account engagement that we push into Slack so that we can mention them in Slack so that we can assure that they get notified of that. Uh, we’re also integrating with our, uh, our call system. Uh, so we have phone calls, inbound phone calls, voicemails, transcripts, and recordings all coming into this Prospect Engagement Channel giving sales and sales leadership a really good view and into what’s happening.

ZoomInfo we talked about. ZoomInfo does a lot of things including data enrichment. We’ve really pared down our forms. We literally ask for an e mail, a company, and an optional message field because again nine times out of 10 we’re going to be able to to get everything else from data enrichment. So don’t ask people to supply information that you can easily find through through, uh, other platforms.

So we talked a lot about the pain off on the outset. Uh, what what is the gain? What results have we been seeing? Well, we did an analysis of, you know, three months before, three months after. And we found that the percentage of marketing qualified leads, uh, that were, um, booking meetings went from below 50% to now 70%. The average time to meeting booked uh, went came way, way down. Now there’s always outliers. Uh, so if somebody books after that fourth email, you know, factoring in weekends, that’s gonna be, like, nine days into the process. So you really have to look at your median time to meeting booked. When are people usually booking a meeting? And it’s usually from that first email, uh, within, uh, two hours where it used to be almost a day. So that gives us a pretty good chance of being in that, uh, 78%, who are, uh, you know, the first ones to, uh, to talk to a lead.

And we’re seeing evidence of accelerating our sales pipeline as well, where previously it took eleven days to go from lead to opportunity. And now we’re seeing opportunities being created in in less than a week.

Uh, so that’s it. Uh, there was a lot in there. Hopefully, um, you can take some of that and adapt it to your own use case. Feel free to reach out to me if you have questions about building this type of program. I’ve left exactly one minute for maybe one question if we have one.

Speaker 0:
I don’t think we have enough time, but a few more seconds left. But thanks for such an insightful session. You can reach out to Mark in the event chat directly. But thank you everyone for joining us and thanks to our sponsors for helping make this happen. Appreciate it.

Speaker 1:
Thank you.