In the day to day of demand generation and lead qualification, I can be tempted to be a little… misleading (pun intended). My goal is to figure out if folks who check out our website are a good fit for our service, and if they are, I want to get them all the information I can so that they can be as excited about TrackMaven as I am. Which is really excited.

Because it’s my job to assess fit with potential customers and do some serious knowledge dropping, I REALLY want leads to open my emails and respond to my voicemails. I’m confident that if I can just get someone to respond to me on the phone or by email, the amazingness of TrackMaven will speak for itself and they will become customers instantaneously.

With most leads, conversations are straightforward. If they’re interested in marketing competitive intelligence, measuring the effectiveness of their marketing strategies, and gaining actionable insights on what works, we move forward. If they aren’t, then that’s that and we go our separate ways. But occasionally, people who express interest initially don’t acknowledge my incessant but purely amiable attempts to contact them. Marketers are exceptionally busy people, so I don’t take offense. But if I don’t hear from them, I only want to share my enthusiasm for how TrackMaven can simplify their hectic lives even more.

When a lead is being particularly unresponsive, I find myself imagining all the stops I could pull to elicit an acknowledgement. I’ve thought about titling an email “OMG PLZZZZ READ THIS” or leaving a message along the lines of “(insert fake pained dog whimper here) IF YOU DON’T CALL ME BACK, THE CORGI GETS IT.” Thankfully, I’ve been able to control myself. Other than the fact that I would never hurt a Corgi (obviously), I ultimately come to the same singular conclusion about desperate and misleading attempts to engender the first conversation with a lead: it’s bad for business.

If we are trying to establish ourselves as experts in marketing competitive intelligence and as a company that our customers can trust (and we are), then it simply does not make sense to start a new relationship with a customer in a dishonest way. If the initial contact is tricksy, future conversations often begin with a combative and negative tone, which makes closing deals all the more difficult. Even if our team is able to overcome this obstacle and turn the lead into a paying customer, the potential outcomes leave much to be desired. Perhaps we’ve had to work really hard to reestablish trust, wasting valuable time and resources in the process. Or the relationship with our new customer is tenuous from the beginning, and our customer success team has a harder time engaging with them. Either way, in a world of demand generation sans integrity, everybody loses.

Every company needs to design its own demand generation processes, complete with its own voice. My style is to craft short, frank, and relevant emails that stand out in the sea of generic spam and outbound emails. I include specific information about a lead’s company and how TrackMaven can alleviate the chaos of modern marketing. Sometimes I do have to be clever, but I make sure that it’s genuine and light-hearted.

I can be as witty and upstanding as I want, but without these three tools, I wouldn’t be able to get the job done:

3 of the Most Useful Tools to Generate Demand

1) Rapportive

When a lead comes in, step one is to qualify it (aka do some minor stalking). We don’t want to waste anyone’s time at TrackMaven, so we want to make sure that the lead fits our buyer persona and other qualifications. Rapportive is a time-saving qualification tool. It embeds right into gmail and gives a breakdown of the lead’s professional status and links to the lead’s LinkedIn page in case any additional research is necessary.

2) ToutApp

My best friend. ToutApp is an all-encompassing email tool, which I use to build templates to send to leads at various points in the process. While I add in customization to most emails to ensure relevancy, templates form a foundation that is crucial to efficiency. ToutApp tracks open and click rates, which allow me to measure the effectiveness of templates and improve my process. ToutApp’s live feed is also a useful tool to receive updates on emails as they are viewed. As any company scales, an email tool is an absolute necessity.

3) Salesforce

Obviously, a CRM tool is a must. I might as well build a house inside Salesforce, I’m there so much. It helps me keep track of the status of leads, create tasks and reminders for myself and my teammates, and ensures that our team captures all communication and relevant information. I have no idea what any company that sells things did before Salesforce or an equivalent. It has been constantly named as one of the top CRM tools to use and believe me I completely understand why. The robust features, detailed dashboards and even the basics above all provide the essentials for the leads I’m tracking.

Salesforce also integrates nicely with a tool Hubspot recently released called Signals, which tracks when emails are opened, when they become leads or opportunities in Salesforce as well too. It allows me to add relevancy to my emails, intentional moves to follow-up when the receiver opens my email, and shows specifically what links the receiver has clicked in my emails.

Other companies may have a different strategy or use different tools. Regardless, of the annoyance you may be following up over a dozen times, generating demand should be done with relevance and integrity, so those leads do in fact turn into golden opportunities.