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The Revenue Generation Framework™ Step 5
One of the most crucial steps in your strategy, is tracking. Today companies are extremely careful not to violate any GDPR stipulations, and it is very important that you abide by the regulations. But it is very possible to do this tracking quite legally, and with the customer’s consent. You have to have stated in your privacy policy what you are collecting and why. Also, make sure that people can unsubscribe at any time they wish. Make that extremely easy.
What you want is the person’s email address. Once you have this, you will be able to identify the customer when they interact with your content on your website. I am not a marketing technology expert, so I do not claim to know the technology behind this.
Before everybody gets upset, let’s play a little game: if you are a person, a man in your 40ies. How happy would you be to see ads about teenage girl’s favorite make-up? Yes, you might have a teenage daughter, but you wouldn’t really appreciate this targeted message. Because it isn’t targeted.
Image by Yanalya on Freepik
Personally, I love to get targeted messaging, as long as it is helpful. This needs to be taken into consideration.
How do you get their email address? By asking for it!
It’s as simple as that. Ask, and you shall (sometimes) receive. I am not talking about just gating every piece of information. You may gate some if you wish. Then that content has to be really good, really worthwhile. When you host a webinar, you ask for people to sign up. Do you have a newsletter people can sign up to? Do you have a chat bot? If you ask for the email address at any point (not right from the get-go), they will probably give it, if you ask nicely and you can show value to the customer.
Once you have identified your visitors on your own website, you can start to track their movements. What did they read, how long, what did they do next etc. This is gold, this is the equivalent of the customer asking the salesperson for a reference case, and the salesperson provides the reference case, and logs this in the CRM. What happens here is that this prospect or customer will get a tick box (or something) in the CRM stating “has read XYZ reference case online, Sunday 8th March 2020".
But this is not enough – what about other interactions?
Social Media
There are tools to track actively what is happening on social media. They are however not free. LinkedIn has a tool called Sales Navigator. It’s very effective on tracking what you tell it to. But you should not be looking only at YOUR postings. Let’s say you are a bookkeeping firm. You want to know when people are posting about doing their books, about filing their taxes. So that you know when people are discussing issues that you can help them with. We are back again in the value discussion.
As individual salespeople, you can also track ad hoc. I usually recommend to, on a regular basis, type in the search box “[the customers pain that you are solving]”, and then select posts.
Search bar on Linkedin
You can then filter your results. By doing this, I was able to interact with people, give them advice, and establish my professional expertise, without selling to them. Of course, I would make a note in my CRM about this person and company, so that I can start building an understanding about their challenges.
It was a bit manual, but if you are a Key Account Manager, you should absolutely do this!
The idea about tracking is not stalking, but to provide relevance. If we know who’s interacting with us, we are able to provide them with relevant information that helps them move along their buying journey.
I already said this: I am not the expert on the technologies, or even on all the possibilities. But I will find you the right partners to work with, who are experts on the subject.
The next step will be about how we nurture these leads, once we know who they are.
Next post:
The Revenue Generation Framework™ Step 6
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