A new B2B sales director just inbounded through your gated video.
You captured their name, email, company, and IP address, along with their viewing behavior. This user goes on to watch one… two… three additional videos. Based on the high level of engagement, you automatically route this user into to a workflow in your marketing automation system for nurturing with additional content via email. This is a quality lead.
Well done. 
With your automated lead generation strategy humming along, you could kick back and simply wait for your content to do it’s work.
However, with the help of a simple account based marketing tactic, you have the opportunity to take this one lead and turn it into a half dozen.
Growth-focused marketing and sales teams are always seeking to increase their ‘sales velocity’. More leads. Better conversion rates. Higher value deals. Faster sales cycle.
Sales Velocity = Number of Leads x Win Rate (%) x Average Deal Size / Average Sales Cycle
In the never-ending race to amass new qualified leads and beef up your close rate, sales cycle length sometimes takes a back seat to the other variables contributing to your company’s growth. However, as the denominator in the sales velocity equation, shortening your sales cycle inevitably has a major impact on business growth.
One way to accelerate your B2B lead velocity is by complimenting inbound leads from gated videos with an account-based outbound email campaign. This approach involves syncing marketing and sales efforts to close an account faster than it otherwise might.
Here’s how it works.
An ‘account based marketing strategy’ is similar to what is traditionally called ‘enterprise sales’. The primary difference is that an account based strategy can be used to target a company of any size. Instead of messaging only to decision makers within a company, sales and marketing work together to simultaneously target multiple decision makers, with different roles and responsibilities. The concept is, in part, to use dynamics of group psychology to close an account.
With your new inbound B2B lead, you have at least two actionable data points you can use to launch your complimentary account based outbound messaging: an email, an IP address, and usually a company name.
If the user entered their business email, their company name is right there in the domain. For example, marketing@leadgenius.com. If the user entered their personal address, but watched your video from work, you can use who.is to look up the company name using their IP. Some marketing automation tools such as HubSpot’s Prospects will automatically pull in this information. In any case, you now know their company name.
For all inbound accounts that match your ideal customer profile, have your sales reps identify additional contact information and job titles for decision makers at the company. The next step is to identify where they fall within the organization’s hierarchy.
Maybe you got lucky and this individual is your primary decision maker. Probably not. But even if this is the person who will sign on the dotted line, B2B purchases always close faster with organizational buy-in. Even with SMBs, there will be, at a minimum, someone who approves the spend, someone who uses the product, and someone who is impacted by the product.
Using the free Synoptic View Salesforce app, your reps can visually identify the dark spots in the account’s organizational structure, one by one. The same visualization can be achieved with most other CRMs.
Your complimentary outbound approach might go something like this. First, a quick round of light social touches such as Linkedin profile views or Twitter likes. These can be executed manually by your reps or automated. Next, a 5-10 touch outbound email sequence using a service like Yesware or Outreach.io. Your goal is to get a positive response to a simple question.
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For example,
“Do you experience this industry-specific pain point?
Do you use X technology?
Are you tasked with with such-and-such goal?”
These emails should be short — less than 50 words each.
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Once you have templates written for each of your buyer personas, you don’t have to write one-off variations for each new campaign. You simply personalize with name, company, industry, and other merge fields. Perhaps mention that other individuals at their company have been visiting your website and watching your videos. The messaging is up to you.
From your one inbound lead, you now have multiple other contacts that are actively being developed into leads for the same account. Some will respond to your email. Some will visit your website and be served retargeting ads. Others might inbound separately by watching the same gated videos now that your product or service is top-of-mind.
With this approach, by the time that original sales director eventually requests a demo, there will be a whole panel of people at the company, who are at the very least, aware (and hopefully somewhat knowledgeable and instersted) about what you offer. When they go into their next meeting, your company’s name is on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Social facilitation is a powerful dynamic.
This type of organizational awareness allows you to speed up your lead to close and address internal objections before they ever come into contact with one of your sales reps.
For more information about How To Align Marketing And Sales For Better Demand Generation, check out this free webinar.
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William Wickey is the Content Marketing Manager at LeadGenius. LeadGenius is a fully managed, customizable lead generation and customer data enrichment service.
The post Using Gated Video To Ignite Your Account Based Strategy appeared first on Altitude: Elevating Video.
