How to Quickly Generate and Close More Identity Management Leads

The key thing at the close phase is: Thou shall segment. 

Segmentation is critical in the closing stage of the buyer’s journey. If you try to use the same message to talk to everyone, it is not going to resonate. The CEO cares about different issues than the CTO, and the CTO cares about different issues than the compliance officer; this means you need to be dialed in and segmenting in a way that makes you hyper-relevant. 

To do this, you must create buyer personas; you need to know the lifecycle stage they are in and must understand the type of lead they are, for instance:

• Leads
• Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs)
• Sales-qualified leads (SQLs)
• Opportunities

Segmenting Clients

Are they already a client?

If they are a client, they certainly do not want to be treated as a prospect; not only will being treated like a prospect not resonate with them, it will insult them. Your clients expect the red-carpet VIP treatment. If you start talking to your clients like they are prospects, you could cause a major problem that could lead to client retention issues, making segmentation especially critical for clients.

Increasing Frequencies

Increasing frequency (as long as it is not overdone!) helps.

If in the past, you felt like prospects were leaving in the middle of their sales cycles and you might not have been staying in front of them, the buyer persona tells you that you should have a lead nurturing message hitting them every 3, 4, or 5 days.

These messages should not be “Can we schedule a meeting pretty please on top?” Those are the messages that make people cringe. You need to be providing helpful, educational information that teaches them something not only did they not know but maybe didn’t even realize they needed to know.

Your educational information should challenge their assumptions and take them to a completely different level of understanding relative to where they were when they first started researching their broad-based problem.

Revisit Notifications

The technology exists now where your sales team should be able to know when one of their leads are back on your website. Additionally, it can tell you what they are doing on your website, what pages they are looking at, which emails they have opened, and which links they clicked on. If you do not have technology that can do that compared to other companies in the IDM space, you are at a severe disadvantage. Your salespeople should be armed with this technology.

Workflow Automation and Scoring Leads

Are your salespeople frequently able to touch every lead? Or is there a certain argument for once you understand who they are and what they need---a certain amount of automation is in place.

Lead scoring ensures your company is focusing on the right efforts. You also want to make sure you have defined deal stages for your leads, so your sales team has a good idea of where people are in their buying journey and where they are in your sales funnel.

Personalization

There is tremendous value in being able to show a prospect something unique to compliment what they specifically told you about themselves or implicitly (based on their behavior).

Aligning Marketing and Sales

If you are at the stage where your company’s marketing and sales departments make fun of each other, that is a BIG problem that needs to be fixed by your executive leadership team. 

What tactics does your identity management business use to generate and close leads? Are you getting the results you need fast enough? 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.”