Your Pipeline’s Gonna Love Us!
Over the past few months, Activate has undertaken a project to “practice what we preach” – we conducted customer interviews to get a deeper understanding of our own customer buying journey, and key buying triggers.
The practical result is our new site, and a new “brand” promise: Your pipeline’s gonna love us! But perhaps even more importantly, we gained key insights into what marketers care about, what problems they’re trying to solve, and why they buy. Here are a few of the headlines:
Better Leads = More Pipeline
Please don’t think this to be merely a statement of an obvious truth (of course better leads convert more readily to pipeline!). What’s important to understand is why this is of increasing importance today. Marketing automation, scored (segmented) leads, the integration of marketing efforts into the sales CRM – all of these factors make lead conversions more measurable, and make lead quality more actionable.
While many providers have long said they had better leads, it’s only now that the majority of marketers can actually know which leads are indeed higher-converting, and (importantly) be able to do something about it (e.g. let’s no longer hand sales leads that haven’t done x, y or z, as those don’t convert as well).
Buyers Journey = Content Performance
The key engine moving buyers through the funnel is marketing automation, the fuel is content. But time and again our customers told us that filling top-of-funnel (or any stage) nurture tracks with the right content is a challenge. Mostly because there’s lack of clarity on what triggers matter to buyers at a given stage or, if that’s known, which content assets address those triggers. Add in multiple personas and you have a quagmire.
Those marketers need help identifying key influences to the buying process, understanding who’s involved at which stage of buying, and then mapping content to the right buyers and stages – or developing it where it doesn’t exist. In that light, the huge upswing in our own persona, audit and content development business is not a surprise.
Service = Success
Obviously the quality of the product & deliverable has to be there. That’s a given. But we also found validation that beyond automation and analytics, service is a key driver of success.
Given multiple choices, a service team that goes the extra mile, that cares about the outcome, a team that makes customer success a priority – our customers told us it matters, a lot.
Did I miss something that’s important to you? Drop me a line and let me know!
