Let’s continue the interventions of the Marketing Engagement Breakfast with the presentation of Nicolas Woirhaye, co-founder of IKO System and “Lead-Gen Padawan” who chose to explain to us how to automate its prospecting, both inbound and outbound marketing. The objective? Demonstrate the merits of intelligent outbound marketing and discover in depth the results that can be obtained thanks to IKO System and Marketo. Let’s get started!

IKO System inbound version

Very simply, inbound is for prospects who are interested in the company and who will take the step to go and get the information themselves, whereas outbound prospects are those that the company will look for.

In inbound, the process remains the same: Create content according to the stages of the customer journey and the buyer personas concerned, do nurturing and feed the database. Once the prospects are sufficiently interested, they will either be naturally directed to the sales department (130 requests per month for IKO), or they will be recognized as “hot leads” thanks to the pre-established scoring. Amongst these requests and wall leads, Emilie, the “Lead-gen rockstar” will be able to sort out and filter the best prospects to pass on to sales. To do this, she starts a real conversation with them, in order to understand and qualify their projects and to reach about thirty “project meetings” – which allows to reach a rate of about 4%.

Feedback on these practices: The conversation is much more natural and pleasant, both for the prospect and the prospector. Non-intrusive method, commitment, natural flows… The system of 80 phone calls per day is far away! Beware, however, that despite high volumes and a constant flow, inbound cannot be considered as a growth lever because you cannot “force” people to be interested in a company. The processes also take time, and you have to filter the entries because you will also find interns, retirees, or people interested but without any particular projects. Finally, beware of the durability of the process since incoming traffic is quickly dependent on the acquisition channels (and if Google changes its algorithm, how can we do it?).

Feedback on smart outbound

When a company already has defined targets, waiting for them to be interested in you enough to fill out a form can be time consuming. Especially since the “nurtured” are rarely decision-makers but rather “middle” managers, which slows down the whole sales process since you have to climb the food chain. But how do you do outbound, and especially how do you do it well?

The outbound we see too often

Classic cold calling: buying lists, making 80 phone calls a day, and an often extremely low conversion rate despite the best will of the salesperson. To avoid having to deal with this, these processes are quickly outsourced to telemarketing companies. Conversion rate? Around one to two percent. This is logical, since it is the proportion of prospects in your market who are ready to enter your sales cycle in the more or less long term.
So what is the solution?

IKO System, the solution to detect prospects that are highly likely to buy

It’s a bird, it’s a plane … It’s IKO System !

Magic? No, just identifying buying signals through different channels (websites, articles, etc.) – now you know who to contact. The new question: How do you engage them? The tendency is to want to make a phone call, but this technique is intrusive and does not start your relationship with the prospect on the right foot. So how do you go about it? Nicolas’ solution is to send a series of qualitative emails with content, gifts, etc., to start the relationship gently and initiate trust.

In terms of process, this results in leads identified on IKO, pushed to Marketo and who can now receive emails tailored to their preferences for a progressive non-intrusive engagement. What happens now? No more phone calls, only response processing. In numbers, it looks like: No outbound calls, 5 emails in the flow, 50% responses, 12% projects detected.

Conclusion, two not so different processes that are 100% complementary! Both teams have interactions with more than a thousand leads per month, and conversations that always last at least 30 minutes, while remaining in a qualitative process.

Now, it’s up to you!