How technology companies can attract and nurture more sales leads

As a technology business making sure that you have an advantage over your competitors is extremely important. It ensures that your company stands out from the crowd and helps you attract more sales leads and eventually win more business.

There is always a chance that competitors will develop a better, cheaper, or more appealing product which means that in order to stay ahead you have to attract and develop more sales leads than your competitors.

The current economic climate means that your business is operating in an environment with significant challenges including:

• Budget cuts – prospects are reducing the amount they spend, even in traditional big spenders such as government departments, because they do not know when the current crisis will end

• Greater competition – with budget cuts comes greater competition. Companies who traditionally might think that your prospects were too small are now pitching for and winning business that previously they would not consider.

• Changes to prospect behaviour – the way your prospects engage with your business is changing. Redundancies mean that your traditional target personas have changed; B2B engagement through social media (not just LinkedIn) is increasing; the time taken in each stage of the sales funnel is increasing.

Regardless of how good your business and services are, whether you are selling SaaS solutions or managed services, you need a way to stand out from your competitors which is where a Marketing Information System (MIS) such as HubSpot can be an invaluable tool in helping your business attract and nurture sales leads.

Everything in one place

HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales platform that will help you attract more visitors to your website, nurture leads and turn them into customers.

It brings together a whole range of functions and tools which will allow your marketing and sales teams to manage all their activities in one place. HubSpot includes content creation, social media, workflow automation, lead capture, customer relationship management, sales pipeline mapping and performance tracking.

Because of HubSpot’s intuitive design it delivers significant power directly to sales and marketing teams so that they can improve their own performance and attract and nurture more sales leads.

Developing a content strategy

As competition increases and prospect behaviour changes your business needs to look at different ways to generate high quality sales leads. One of these is to develop inbound marketing campaigns which utilise your website content to improve engagement and move customers through the sales funnel.

Inbound marketing for technology businesses is based on knowing what kind of content to create to bring in the most leads. Content needs to be both SEO friendly as well as usable across your inbound and outbound marketing campaigns.

HubSpot’s integrated content planning tools are focused around topic areas rather than just keywords which means that you create content that associates your business with the topic area not just the keyword to attract a much wider audience. By linking to pillar pages you are then able to guide prospects on a journey and turn them from strangers into qualified sales leads.

Lead Capture

Your business wants to identify and capture leads. With HubSpot you have the ability to integrate a number of proven lead capture tools into your website including:

• Pop-up boxes to capture data based on user behaviour and activity

• Integrated forms on landing pages feeding directly to your sales funnel

• Build in progressive questioning for returning prospects

HubSpot lead flows are a powerful tool for grabbing. When used effectively and as part of your inbound campaigns they can significantly increase the number of leads you create.

Marketing and Sales Automation

Designed as a tool for both sales and marketing professionals HubSpot includes automation tools which can drive your marketing and sales processes.

For your marketing team automation can be used to deliver multi stage inbound campaigns that deliver content based on prospect interaction and push them towards the right sales funnel before they are passed over for closing.

For the sales team HubSpot includes an integrated CRM which, when combined with the automation functions, can highlight activities and help them deliver a business winning playbook.

Performance Monitoring

For a technology business success lies in your ability to gather relevant data on prospects that you can use to refine lead generation campaigns. HubSpot analytics are integrated across all its features so you are able to look at both an overview and activity in detail.

The ability to see how specific leads interact with your campaigns means that you can use the information to refine your campaigns and develop more higher quality leads which are easier for your sales team to turn into customers.

HubSpot delivers:

• The ability to view results in real time and react as required

• To quickly report on, analyse and adjust campaigns

• To view and replay successful campaigns

• To provide both general and detailed performance monitoring of all your sales and marketing activities

Even if HubSpot is not right for your business you can adopt and implement many of the principles of inbound marketing using existing systems and resources which will help you build your sales funnel and deliver more business.

If you would like to talk to one of our team about how Volpes Marketing can improve your return on investment in HubSpot or you would just like to know more about our inbound marketing programmes please call us on 01625 403199 or fill in our contact form and we will get straight back to you.