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How Dealers Can Improve Retention With Sales Force Automation

Sales reps for security & integration companies have a lot of tasks to juggle and entering data into a CRM is usually the second to last on the list of to-dos. The last on the list is usually creating tasks for follow up so that managers have visibility into sales pipelines.

With a growing audience and leads are pouring in, your sales team may be having a hard time keeping up. While it’s a great problem to have, you also don’t want to short-change the amount of follow-up and guidance your sales team is able to provide to interested prospects.

Thankfully, Ignite RMR provides marketing automation and CRM tools & services that can help automate part of the sales process.

Our sales automation services allow your reps to spend more time with prospects who are ready to buy by freeing up the time previously spent chasing cold leads. Leads that aren’t ready to buy aren’t ignored – instead, they’re carefully nurtured.

Sales and marketing automation ensure that teams work together, and no leads or customers fall through the cracks.

What is Sales Force Automation?

Sales automation sometimes shortened to SFA (sales force automation), is an integrated service that automates frequent sales processes and tasks such as tracking customer interactions, as well as analyzing sales performance and forecasts.

Sales force automation services provided by Ignite RMR come with a web accessible and mobile app database, an email application, tracking software, and sales email templates.

Some SFA features can include:

  • Salesperson tasks and goals tracking
  • Customer contact records
  • Appointment scheduling and tracking
  • Lead scoring and assignment
  • Workflow management

While previously you may have needed separate applications for sales automation and customer relationship management, Ignite RMR offers an integrated CRM and marketing automation platform that includes a variety of sales automation tools.

Getting Started With Sales Force Automation

Despite being supported by an inbound marketing team that specializes in the security industry, like most aspects of successful Sales and Marketing, you need to take a step back and ensure you have a solid plan for how you want to sales force automation to enable your business.

Ignite RMR marketing automation services can enhance your strategies and bring greater efficiency and reliability to your sales teams execution, but you should be sure to know your sales process first.

During our initial marketing assessments, we will help you answer questions like:

  • How will you want to automatically assign leads to your reps?  Round robin? Based on geography? etc.
  • What sales tasks do you want to create based on demonstrated prospect interest?  Send a follow-email? Alert a sales team member?
  • How would you like to increase (or decrease) lead scores based on initial interest from your prospects (website interactions, sales emails, etc.)?

Once you’ve got an idea of what you’d like to accomplish, we can begin the process of setting up your sales force automations.

Setting Up Your Sales and Marketing Automations

For this example, let’s assume that you’d like to automate the sales process once a lead visits your website and signs up to receive additional information about your offerings.

What should the automated workflow (aka your “automation”) accomplish?

  • It should automatically send a thank you email, acknowledging the prospect’s form submission and interest
  • It should tag the lead with information about the submission (site page, demonstrated interest, etc.) within the CRM so that your sales team can easily segment this contact and understand where they come from
  • It should assign active leads to your sales rep for personal follow-up
  • It should send a follow-up email to the prospect and alert their assigned sales team member if a link is clicked
  • It should increase the lead’s score based on the email open and click activity

Now that we have laid out exactly what processes we want to be automated, it’s time to create our automation.

Creating the Automation

Using our marketing automation services, Ignite RMR constructs actions and triggers to create a new sales force automation workflow. Here is an example of how this could be set this up in our system:

illustration-source-automation

When a lead submits their information through a contact form, we apply a “requested more information” tag and send an email for more information. From here, the automation wait until a link is clicked in the email. If no link is clicked within 3 days, the automation will send a follow up email on day 4.

If the lead opens and clicks a link in the initial email, it will alert your sales team, increase the prospects lead score, and send a follow up email. From here, the sales team could make a determination of how hot the lead is and schedule additional follow-ups.

Now you have assurance that all of these “we should…” tactics in your plan will happen automatically.

Automation After the Sale

It’s easy to see how sales force automation benefits your team during initial sales stages, but what about the engagement and retention stages for new & existing customers/ subscribers?

illustration-source-automation-follow-up

Benefits of using sales force automation for customers:

Instead of having your sales team or customer success team create tasks to check in with customers, Ignite RMR will create a workflow via marketing automation that automatically does this for them.

One popular schedule includes creating automated check-ins at 30, 60, 90 days and beyond to make sure customers are happy and gather feedback. Much like during the initial sales process, automating these steps will help your sales team feel less overwhelmed while still keeping your customers happy.

Other ways to use automation after the initial sale

There are a variety of ways that clients of Ignite RMR can use automation to increase the productivity of their sales force.

  • Use lead scoring to build a segment of purchasers who have bought more than one product or become repeat customers.
  • Send automated emails to customers to cross-sell and/or upsell them based on information in their CRM profile.
  • Use CRM tags to mark customers who have cancelled or paused their account with your billing department. Send automated emails to these customers to ask them why they decided to cancel and what could your business do to improve for the future.

The ultimate goal of sales force automation is to increase productivity of your sales team and make sure no leads or customers fall through the cracks.

Ignite RMR is a leading provider of inbound marketing & sales force automation services for dealers and integrators nationwide. Contact us today for a complimentary consultation and demo of our inbound marketing platform.

 

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The Best Keywords For Your Security Business Are…

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) sounds like something a bit unnerving – but the first step to SEO success does not involve your computer at all. You’re going to have to go out and talk to actual people in person.

SEO starts with choosing the right keywords. There’s no point in making sure you’re at the top of a search if no one uses your words to find a company like yours. So for example if your website ranks #1 for El Monte Home Security but no one is searching using that keyword, then what is the point? No searches = no website visits = zero leads.

And guess what, the words you think are obvious choices may not be. You know the security business too well, and you may be tempted to use industry jargon over words that an average potential client would use to look for you (like commercial security vs. business security, which gets 45% more searches).

Also, don’t think of keywords as individual words. Think about how you approach a search. Suppose you’re going out to dinner in Boston and want to find the right restaurant. Do you type in “restaurant” and sort through the hundreds of thousands of responses? No, you might type in “top-rated seafood restaurant in Boston area.” There will still be lots of choices, but you’ve eliminated all of the chains and restaurants not within driving distance. Your potential clients approach a search the same way.

List Your Potential Keywords

First – talk to your clients. Pick a couple you feel particularly comfortable asking, and find out what words they would use or did use to find your company. Ask friends and family members for ideas.

Next, survey your employees. What words or phrases do they use to describe your business to potential clients, friends and family members? What words have they heard from clients when they ask questions?

Check with your sales team. What makes your company special? What words do they use to separate you from the competition? Keywords are about more than definitions, they also represent what your potential clients want in a security company. Be sure those important adjectives are represented.

Which products or services do you want to sell the most? Take a look at your highest profit margin areas or those items that get you in the door with a new client. Add these to the list of potential keywords.

Sort Your List

Keep a running list: you’re looking for repetition. The more often a word or phrase crops up, the more likely people are to use it in a search.

Avoid words with more than one meaning. For example, siren can be a loud security option, a police or fire sound, or some mermaid-type with a harp and a very compelling voice. This makes it a bad choice. With limited keywords, don’t waste them on words or phrases that could be confusing.

Think about your perfect customers. Do your keywords appeal to them? It’s not just about what the keywords say about your company, it’s also about how they fit with the clients you want to reach.

Pick Your Top 15

This is too many keywords, but you can trim them using these tactics.

Check for redundancies. Are some of these keywords saying the same thing? Choose the best one by looking at the sorting suggestions above.

Make sure you’re covering the waterfront. Does the list include all critical aspects of your company? Think of your competitive advantages as well as all of your products and services. You don’t want to lose a potential client because you didn’t have a complete list.

Determine your reasoning behind each keyword. Why is a specific phrase on your list? If you don’t have an answer, maybe it doesn’t belong there.

Narrow Your List

Aim for a list of 9-12 keywords. Once again, you may want to go back to your best clients and see which choices they would be most likely to use. Then try those keywords in a search of your own. Who appears? Are your competitors there? Who else? Not to worry. Once you have your keywords in place, you can optimize everyone else right off the first page!

As always, Ignite RMR is here to help. Contact us today for a free marketing analysis to see which keywords your security business should be targeting.

 

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Why Call Tracking Matters To Your Security Business

For security dealers, the marketing tools available today are much more diverse and complex than they were years ago. Most businesses will leverage a variety of different marketing methods in order to generate leads and conversions. But how do you know which of these marketing platforms are most effective? Which options give you the most return on your investment?

Many dealers utilizing web marketing strategies are already using the numerous analytics tools available in order to track the performance of their website. While these analytics can give you a great deal of detailed, actionable data, they can’t paint the entire picture of how successful your marketing efforts are. In fact, since they don’t evaluate phone leads from your website, these analytics tools can’t even provide you with the total number of leads being generated by your website.

If you aren’t using call tracking, you’re missing out on a wealth of data that can significantly improve your marketing efforts. By using call tracking metrics, you can compile important data about the phone leads you receive from the various marketing platforms utilized as part of your campaign. This will help you optimize your marketing channels so that you get the best possible return on your marketing dollars.

What Marketing Channels Are Ideally Suited For Call Tracking?

You can use call tracking to compile important data on the phone leads you receive from just about every aspect of your marketing campaign:

  • Pay per click (PPC) campaigns
  • Print marketing
  • Web marketing
  • Television marketing
  • Billboard marketing
  • Direct mail marketing
  • Email marketing

Ideally, you’ll want to use a different call tracking number for each different marketing platform so that you can more accurately track the performance of each.

What Can Call Tracking Metrics Tell Me?

Call tracking metrics provide you with much more information than just how many calls come from each of the marketing platforms in your campaign. These metrics give you the type of detailed data that can help you streamline your marketing efforts and maximize your ROI.

For example, if your business places a heavy emphasis on email marketing to generate leads, call tracking metrics can help you determine which landing pages generate the most calls and which ones need to be improved. If you’re not leveraging this type of data, you will never truly know how to refine your marketing efforts to maximize your success.

What Call Tracking Metrics Should I Pay Attention To?

The following call tracking metrics will help you get the most out of your marketing efforts:

Number of calls

At its most basic level, call tracking records the number of calls you receive, eliminating the need for you to manually track this data yourself. You can receive detailed reports regarding call patterns, allowing you to gather a more accurate understanding of your ROI.

Call duration

Not all calls are equally valuable. Some calls are likely to yield better leads than others. In general, the longer the call, the more likely it is to turn into a quality lead. After all, why would a prospect waste a lot of time talking to your team if they weren’t interested in your product or service? Call tracking metrics provide you with the length of each call, allowing you to determine which campaigns, keywords, PPC landing pages, and ads generate longer, more meaningful conversations (and most likely the best potential leads).

Conversions

Most importantly, call tracking metrics can help you track conversions for each marketing platform in your campaign. Not all calls convert to customers right away. Sometimes, it may take weeks or even months between the initial call and when that prospect becomes a customer. Call tracking allows you to trace new customers back to their original call, giving you a more accurate assessment of which platforms in your campaign achieve the most conversions. This data can also give you a better understanding of your sales cycle.

Cost per lead

How much are you spending to generate each lead? If you’re spending $1,000 a week on your PPC campaign and you generate 100 leads, then you are spending $10 per lead. If your direct mail campaign has a $500 weekly budget and it generates 100 leads, then you are spending $5 per lead. This is important information to have when deciding how to allocate your marketing resources.

Using Call Tracking Metrics to Identify Performance Issues

Wouldn’t it be great to know which members of your sales team are most effective at converting leads into customers? Call tracking metrics can tell you what percentage of leads each member of your team actually converts into sales. This data is extremely valuable and can help you:

  • Determine which team members to send the most calls to
  • Determine the training needs of your sales team
  • Evaluate the performance of team members with regard to raises, promotions, and dismissals

Ignite RMR offers phone lead tracking with every Digital Marketing Package. Since roughly 60% of new leads will pick up the phone and call rather than fill out a web form, we think that call tacking is critical to maximize the success of any digital marketing campaign. Email us today to scheule a free demo or call (877) 655-3779.

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Caring Not Scaring: How Security Dealers Should Write Sales Copy

You have choices to make when you open a security company. An important one is how you want to present your services to potential customers. Some think it’s appropriate to use scare tactics to talk people into upping their security efforts. They may even rationalize it with the perspective of, “it’s for their own good.”

In reality, if you use fear to get people to buy your services, you are doing your company and your customers a disservice. While they may pay you money, they will always be uncomfortable with your company.

In addition, they will see their security system as a defensive measure against the world, rather than what it really is; a caring step that provides a modern way of protecting their families from potential trouble.

Tip #1: Tell A Good Story

So when you write copy for advertisements, brochures, articles and blogs, focus on caring rather than scaring. Instead of telling a tale of a family’s home broken into and everything taken, talk about the burglar who was caught red-handed because the silent alarm brought the police while the thief was taking down the flat-screen television – and his statement that he was taking it away for repair didn’t hold water when the wife’s jewelry was found in his pocket.

Tip#2: Relate To Your Audience

You can also write about the extra secure feeling parents can have when their children are home alone after school – and that children are less uncomfortable when alone in the home if they know a security system is on and help is only a panic button away. For people who travel a lot, they know their homes are safe by a quick check on the Internet or a smart phone. When you sell people on caring enough for their families or homes to add an additional layer of safety, you become a source of support rather than someone carrying tales of modern-day bogey men.

Tip #3: Positive Selling

When thinking in terms of copy writing, also include your sales pitches in that category. Use training to ensure that your sales team doesn’t scare people into becoming your customers. You may get some business that way, but it may cost you in referrals later. If the message is upsetting, the messengers will not be looked on positively. Whether consciously or unconsciously a bearer of bad news is never popular and referrals are based on liking your people as much as they like your service.

As a matter of fact, you could even state truthfully that you hope they never need your services – and that you would be glad if those signs showing that they are protected against unlawful entry are enough to discourage any burglars that were considering their home as a target. You can say that if five or ten years from now your customers wonder why they bought a system because of their total lack of trouble, then you and your company have done your job well. After all, your first goal is to prove as a deterrent, and then as a final line of defense against a break-in.

At Ignite RMR, we have experienced brand journalists who write sales copy for security dealers every day. Contact us for help with your next sales flyer or website landing page.

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