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In this week’s installment of our How We’re Managing Sales Teams *Right Now* video series, we’re changing things up...
Jeremy Boudinet, Director of Enterprise Marketing with Nextiva, talks with co-founder Brian Trautschold about how savvy marketing teams can work with their sales counterparts to keep quality leads flowing — even in this crazy climate.
Read on for key takeaways, or keep scrolling to watch the short video below!
1. Get creative with your lead sources
Now more than ever, it’s critical to meet your buyers where they are. Find out where they’re searching for products like yours — social media, Google, YouTube — and get in front of them.
Many buyers use platforms like G2 to get information about a specific category or product because they can read honest, unbiased and unfiltered reviews from their peers. Those people tend to make for high-intent leads, so Jeremy says Nextiva finds the ones who are missing their profile (and looking at competitors), captures them and then drives them to their sales team.
Other tools, like Snitcher, can help you capture people on your site who haven’t converted but are clearly interested — maybe they’re digging into tons of content or hitting the pricing page over and over again. Jeremy says with this approach, sales will often do a quick touch and then marketing will nurture them down the funnel.
2. Lean into your differentiators. (Hard.)
One of Nextiva’s key differentiators among their competitors is the level of personalization and service they provide to their thousands of customers.
Jeremy said they’ve been taking this a step further: in recent weeks, their CEO has made a point to make a personal connection with individual prospects via LinkedIn, seeking out ways to provide value to potential buyers.
While this may not be the right tactic for every company, the basic idea is that marketing and sales leaders should find every opportunity to stand out from the crowd. So if you’re a customer-first company: put your money where your mouth is and prove it to your could-be customers.
This same concept applies to marketing content, too. From articles to emails to social posts (or rants), people are getting bombarded with written content all day every day.
But we’re all using video conferencing tools to communicate with our own teams — so why stop there? Consider leveraging video to cut through the noise and connect with your audience.
Video is extra-effective now, as so many people are working from home and feeling siloed from coworkers and society in general. Seeing a real face and hearing a real voice establishes a connection that you simply can’t make when your prospect is skimming an article.
3. Let your customers speak for themselves (and you).
We all know buying trends have changed: as opposed to getting information from sellers, buyers are doing their own research and coming to the table with a strong perspective.
A key source of information: their peers (see #1). People want to know how “the other guys” are doing it; they want real insights from actual users. So: give the people what they want.
Nextiva’s marketing team has found recent success in letting their customers tell their story — not in a polished case study or a well-produced clip, but in raw, crowd-sourced video testimonials from their users. It feels authentic and organic because it is authentic and organic. It’s also mutually beneficial: while your product/service may be a central theme, you can use this approach as an opportunity to give your customers’ brands some love and position them as thought leaders.
4. Play offense and defense.
It’s not all about your prospects. The best marketing teams are also partnering with their customer success and support teams to find ways to provide value to their current customers. Both Nextiva and Ambition host product webinars, showing how our own teams or our other customers are getting the most out of the product.
We’ve found that these “events” are consistently well attended and feedback is always positive. Bonus: the recordings and resulting content become great collateral that you can repackage for prospects across every stage of the funnel.
Watch the video below to hear more great ideas from Jeremy and Brian!
