It’s Down To Three: You’re In The Running, And It’s Up To Sales To Keep Them Moving
Now, after careful consideration, they have decided to go with you or one of your two biggest competitors.
Welcome to the Evaluation Stage!
This is a big step, and it’s even bigger because it means your marketing produced a sales-ready lead, while your prospect has agreed to jump out of the shadows and engage in a live conversation with your sales team.
The lead is handed over from marketing to sales, and the experience has to continue to be just as advisory, just as guided and just as educational as it has been to date.
Next step? Turn the lead into a sales opportunity.
We’re doing massive amounts of research into why buyers do what they do. When we ask them why they chose company A over company B, 80% of the time the answer is that company A had a better sales process.
This means the Evaluation Stage is the make-or-break stage for your company. Not only is it the stage where sales enter the process, but it’s the stage where your prospects get to know you and your people in a much more intimate way.
The secret to successful execution in the Evaluation Stage of the Cyclonic Buyer Journey™ is to make sure you’re helping your prospects get to know, like and trust you, your company, your salespeople and your products or services.
Since sales is now carrying the ball, creating a remarkable sales process and supporting that sales experience from a marketing perspective is the key to the tactical execution.
The sales team has to guide, advise and educate — not sell.
They have to listen more than they talk. They should be actively questioning to gain a deep understanding of the prospect’s specific situation.
They need to provide content in context to the prospect’s challenges, issues or concerns. They should provide valuable and actionable insight that the prospect finds helpful.
Prospects should get an experience that includes both written and visual content. Video is an excellent way to enhance the sales experience for prospects in the Evaluation Stage.
Because of these requirements, the tactics, analytics and technologies that go into planning the Evaluation Stage execution is a blend of both marketing and sales-related deployments.
Sales and marketing alignment is key here to manage the handoff, use the assets effectively and provide feedback to marketing on the effectiveness of the tools.
Believe it or not, you can botch revenue generation in a lot of ways, and this stage is one of the places most companies get it wrong.
One of the biggest is salespeople start selling. Marketing created an excellent educational experience that moved the prospect into Evaluation, but now sales has the full-court press on: Always be closing. That’s a big mistake, and it’s the fast track to getting a prospect who felt safe to start feeling anxious.
Another mistake is having a big disconnect between marketing and sales. Now that the lead is turned over to sales, marketing has no idea what sales is doing or saying, has no clue what materials they’re providing and no feedback is flowing back into marketing.
When the leads die, sales will blame marketing and marketing will blame sales. It’s 1990 all over again. This can’t happen.
A mistake we see often is when companies execute a bland and uninspiring sales experience. Your prospects are looking for a reason to buy. They’re begging you to inspire them to do something different.
The more you can “edutain” them (educate and entertain), the more you can inspire them to attain greatness and the more you can paint a picture of what their future will look like with your solution, the faster they’ll close, the more frequently they’ll close and the more they’ll buy.
The last big mistake we see companies make is they have a general lack of urgency around potential leads. Either companies don’t know how to handle inbound leads, they don’t think those leads are important or they don’t realize timing is key when people express interest.
The Harvard Business Review found that 37% of leads are followed up with within one hour, while the average response time for all leads is 42 hours. It’s no secret that about half of all sales go to the vendor that responds first, so if buyers are contacting you when they are ready to talk, why wouldn’t you make every effort to speak with them immediately?
Make sure you’re highly responsive to people who want to talk to you. It’s a great way to make a remarkable first impression and it’s easy to do. It’s shocking so few companies take the time to figure out this important first touch in advance.
Since this is where marketing hands the lead off to sales, there’s a cross section of marketing and sales-related tactics described here. We also have some tactics covered in other stages of the buyer journey mentioned here but in a different context.
For example, the content marketing execution here is going to be different than the content marketing execution for prospects in the Pre-Awareness or Awareness Stages. This is important to understand. The content you need here is different than the content you needed in these earlier stages.
Here you go:
If you’ve been following along in the series, you should be starting to see a pattern. A ton of tactics could be deployed all along the buyer journey. The key is selecting the right tactics, setting them up correctly, optimizing them over time and then prioritizing them against other tactics that might enhance or improve overall performance.
All in all, not an easy thing to do.
The metrics in this stage have almost everything to do with the conversion of leads into sales opportunities. Prospects in the Evaluation Stage should be high-value leads, if not sales opportunities.
You might also start looking at some sales metrics, too. One of the advantages to the buyer journey stage dashboard is you get to see marketing and sales metrics next to each other and measure the effectiveness of your aligned program during this stage, instead of separated marketing and sales metrics.
Here’s what you could be looking at to measure the effectiveness of your Evaluation Stage revenue growth tactics:
You should set up some specific Evaluation Stage dashboards to keep real-time track of these metrics. If you’re reviewing these weekly and rolling them up monthly to look for gains month over month, you’ll be well on your way to having a good handle on the performance of the tactics in your Evaluation Stage.
Here are the stage-specific software tools we’ve looked at, tested and recommend to clients building a rich tech stack around the Evaluation Stage.
Remember, these are all built on top of platform software like HubSpot, Marketo or Salesforce.
Here’s your Evaluation tech stack:
By smashing the funnel and applying a new map (the Cyclonic Buyer Journey map), we’re encouraging people to start building more buyer-centric marketing and sales strategies, executing tactics more thoughtfully, tracking the performance of everything and using technology to automate and analyze your results.
The business outcomes? Month-over-month revenue growth and consistent, scalable, repeatable and predictable revenue generation machines. Give it a try, it works! That’s why we guarantee results for our clients.