Sales Enablement Perspectives: A conversation with Blair Symes, Demand Generation Manager at Ifbyphone

By Jerry Rackley

Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series of interviews with sponsors and speakers at the upcoming Demand Metric Sales Enablement Virtual Summit, which will take place on April 3, 2014.

Blair Symes is demand generation manager at Ifbyphone, a gold sponsor of the upcoming Sales Enablement Virtual Summit. We asked Blair to share his thoughts on Sales Enablement:

What is the connection between Sales Enablement and lead generation?

One of marketing’s main goals is to drive quality leads to sales. But when marketing and sales aren’t aligned, marketing can feel like it is lobbing leads over the fence to sales, with no idea what happens to those leads. Is every lead being worked? Is the quality of leads high? What campaigns are driving the most opportunities and revenue? And sales can feel like they are being inundated with leads from nowhere, with no context as to where marketing found them or how to frame their initial conversation.

First, marketing should always keep sales appraised of new campaigns. Second, sales and marketing should agree on the definition of a lead, and marketing should institute filters to only pass people that qualify as leads to sales. Third, sales should always be aware of where each lead came from. And fourth, marketing should be able to see which campaigns generated the most leads, opportunities, and revenue.

Three pieces of technology can help you do all four:

• Marketing automation tools like Marketo and Eloqua can help filter web leads and content downloads using registration forms and behavioral scoring.  These tools can integrate with your CRM system so sales will know where every lead came from before calling, and marketing can follow each one through the sales cycle.
• Voice-based marketing automation (VBMA) tools can do the same for phone leads using IVR (interactive voice response) technology to score callers before passing to sales.  VBMA tools also have call tracking technology that tell marketing which of their campaigns are generating leads.  VBMA can also be integrated with your CRM to track each phone lead through the sales cycle. What’s more, when someone calls in, sales will see what campaign or keyword search the lead came from before taking the call.  Knowing where a call is coming from can be a significant help to a sales rep trying to close a deal. 

In an increasingly mobile world, how does email marketing fit into the Sales Enablement and lead generation landscape?

Smart email marketers know that 88% of people check their emails daily on a mobile device, and they optimize accordingly.  But this means more than designing mobile-friendly emails.  It means considering the increasing probability of calls from mobile devices to your business, which means you need to have a phone number in your marketing emails.  Marketers with successful email strategy are using click-to-calls to address the needs of mobile users…and getting great results.  As mobile adoption continues to increase, so does the probability of calls from mobile devices to your business.  The ability to track these calls back to the specific marketing source, including your email marketing, is an important part of understanding your ROI.

Marketers are making big investments in content marketing. Do traditional lead tracking approaches work for content marketers, or are there new considerations?

If your content is effective, tracking web leads and online sales makes a strong statement about the value of content marketing.  But it still only tells half the story.  What if instead of visiting your web page or filling out your form, the lead picks up the phone and calls you?  Can you tell exactly what piece of content drove that call?  Can you tell if the call even came from content marketing at all?  If you aren’t tracking phone leads back to your content and through to revenue, you aren’t doing your work justice.  Not only are you almost certainly underreporting lead volumes to execs, but you also aren’t getting proper credit for the revenue those calls will bring in.  And since inbound calls to sales usually turn into revenue at a higher rate than web leads, this could be a significant gap in ROI reporting.  What's more, you don't know what content is truly resonating and getting existing leads to re-engage with your sales team.

About Blair Symes

Blair is demand generation manager at Ifbyphone, a leader in voice-based marketing automation (VBMA) that connects, measures, and optimizes sales and service calls for businesses and organizations. He has over 15 years of experience as a writer, editor, content manager and marketing manager.