Last week we were proud to be included in the Marketo ecosystem as part of their newly released LaunchPoint partner programme. Marketo provides marketing automation software that helps enterprises to turn awareness into opportunity and in this post we will look at how customers that use both Marketo and NewVoiceMedia can drive more revenue.

One Agenda

Voice has not traditionally been treated as a business application. People across offices or departments make calls and receive calls, but few businesses deploy any intellectual rigour around how these calls are handled.

• Does a customer with an open support case continue to receive calls from telemarketing?
• Is a customer with an overdue bill still allowed to place telephone orders?
• Does a customer that has just viewed a webinar hear specific product messages in the queue?

At NewVoiceMedia we are driving One Agenda – a belief that any telephone calls your customer receives from or makes to your business should have a single business process applied to them, ensuring your customer receives a consistent experience whether they are speaking to your marketing, sales, operations or support teams.

The inefficiency of the marketing to sales hand-off

It is estimated that up to 70% of business value is lost in the transition of leads from marketing to sales teams. Companies spend their valuable resources on advertising their products and using marketing platforms like Marketo to develop their prospect’s awareness into an explicit need. This often culminates in a ‘successful’ call with a telemarketer who qualifies the lead and passes it over to the sales team.

Up until this point companies have been able to deal in facts, supported by Marketo evidence:

• Which webinar was attended
• Which email was viewed and clicked on
• Which web page was visited
• Which whitepaper was downloaded

These things are facts and help companies to provide more customised and valuable information to support the buyer in their journey.

But as soon as the phone call from the sales person comes in fact gives way to assumption:

• My colleague said…
• I believe that you….
• It sounds like…..

This information has been gathered in a conversation between the telemarketer and the sales person (or worse still in some call notes). The telemarketers version of events is liable to be skewed towards a positive opportunity, and salespeople traditionally have ‘happy ears’ that skews the anticipation even further.

It is easy therefore for the buyer to intentionally (or unintentionally) disagree with the state of events – what has happened so far and what the future opportunity is. The call cn easily fail to meet the expectations of both the buyer and the salesperson leaving both the participants frustrated and consigning another possible opportunity to the “Closed-Lost” or “Nurture” pot.

The Cloud Tripod

Our partnership with Marketo completes the cloud tripod – NewVoiceMedia, Marketo and Salesforce.

• Marketo tracks buyer activities and allocates a lead score
• Telemarketers use Salesforce to focus in on buyers with lead scores above an agreed threshold
• Telemarketers use NewVoiceMedia to click to dial within Salesforce to call the buyers
• NewVoiceMedia logs a task record including a link to the recording of the call
• Salespeople listen to the recording before making their own call so they understand the facts of the previous call, and not the assumptions

We are working hard with Marketo and Salesforce to help drive out the inefficiencies between marketing and sales and we’re proud to be part of both Marketo’sLaunchPoint and Salesforce’s AppExchange.

Do you record the calls your telemarketers make? Do your sales teams listen to calls to improve their understanding of the opportunity? We’d love to hear your thoughts here on the blog.