Getting Exposure for Identity Management Leads

To get more exposure for identity management and new leads, the key thing is to differentiate. 

Differentiating requires considering things like who your company is, what makes your company special, and what will make your business stand out from other businesses. Content is one-way businesses can stand out. Using educational, relevant, thought-leadership content helps to attract leads to your business. 

Things like features and analyst reviews are certainly important in the last 30% of the sales cycle, but what are you going to do in the first 70% when people don’t know that your company exists?

The strategy must be done before you start diving head-first into tactics and must include the following key elements. 

SMART Goals

First and foremost, your strategy needs to be grounded in SMART goals. SMART goals are goals that are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

Premium Content

There needs to be plenty of premium content. Premium content is the stuff that’s so good that it can sit behind a landing page. No one is going to convert on a landing page to read a blog post; they will, however, convert to read a whole bunch of blog posts that have been grouped together and built into an eBook or a special report. They will certainly convert on a landing page to attend or watch the recording of a webinar.

It has to be good enough and have high enough perceived value in the eyes of your buyer persona that you’re looking to attract. Your persona must be able to see that content and think “Yeah, sure. I’ll give him my business card information in exchange for access to that.”

To use an offline analogy, think about if you or one of your executives wrote a book for one of the stakeholders that was going to be attending a trade show. You think, “Okay, this is a brand-new book to seed some traction. I’m going to bring a pallet of books with me because it’s a large trade show of about 100,000 people. I’ll bring 2,000 books for anyone that stops by the trade show booth to get an autographed copy from the CEO or author of the book and ask for their business card in return.” You’re using this premium content to build a database.

Your online content should use the above approach except digitally, allowing you to knock off some of the effort, resources, and time and have a more modern buying process instated. Premium content needs to be good enough that people are willing to trade their information.

CRM and Closed-Loop Reports

Tie the above strategies, tactics, and resources together to your customer relationship management system (CRM).

Marketing and sales cannot exist in silos. If they exist in silos, sales is saying “Those marketing folks are just playing with arts and crafts project and with color charts. I don’t know what the heck they’re doing all day long,” and marketing is saying “Sales are a bunch of overpaid prima donnas. They don’t work the leads, and they complain too much.”

If the above scenarios are going on in your company, it is toxic and will hold you back in this era where marketing and sales really need to be joined at the hip and totally aligned.

CRM integration is a big part of your sales and marketing alignment. It enables marketing to get feedback on their activities, such as lead nurturing, and content that has led to the best sales outcome.

With CRM, they can say “This thing has led to two fantastic clients, we have to put some more gasoline on this particle campaign,” or on the flip side “Whoa, we did a whole bunch of this stuff, and it led to nothing, so we need to stop doing that.”

This mindset must be in place, and the only way to do that is to tie your CRM into your marketing platform; we call this closed-loop reporting because you’re closing the loop between marketing and sales. This way marketing has access to much better information about sales, and in return, sales is making certain promises to marketing; like leads will be reached out to within a certain amount of time, will be called a certain amount of times, and segmented through buyer personas. 

How is your identity management business attracting new leads? Let us know in the Comments below. 

If your identity management company is ready to accelerate its revenue growth and learn more initiatives to take you to the next level, check out our webinar “Identity Management Revenue Growth Acceleration Q&A Webinar.”