Product-led marketing flips the growth playbook. Your product drives adoption and scale, redefining the modern business landscape.

Notion struggled to convert users, barely making any impression in the market in 2015.

It didn’t come as a surprise. Amidst the world of technological startups, few gain the kind of recognition Microsoft and Apple have come to afford.

But Notion’s rise to popularity is one for the books.

Beginning humbly as a single workspace for accessible and intelligent information management, the founder held a single vision: to consolidate tasks, notes, and databases in one place.

The frustration stemmed from the fragmented state of digital tools, irrespective of their advanced functionalities.

However, like every startup, Notion faced its simmering challenges – lack of funding and shortcomings in meeting user requirements.

The company knew it had to pivot.

And by 2021, Notion had come to be valued at $10 billion.

Its valuation skyrocketed, with it being used by 50% of Fortune 500 companies to refine modern workflows.

From merely a simple note-taking application, it has become a multi-functional and proactive workspace used by individuals and businesses alike – an indispensable tool to enhance productivity and optimize workflows.

All of this is due to its product-led marketing strategy.

What Exactly is Product-Led Marketing?

In simple terms, Salesforce defines product-led marketing as:

Product-led growth is based on the concept that customers who enjoy a product will become loyal users and share it with others, resulting in lower customer acquisition costs and a self-sustaining growth loop.

Product-led marketing centers your product as the narrative.

Narrative that sells on its own through the experience it affords users. Here, it’s not just about the alignment between marketing and sales, but the heart of it all lies in design and engineering.

Product-led marketing drives innovation And builds your narrative as you polish your products.

Becoming the go-to means for customer acquisition, PLG marketing has become a cornerstone for SaaS providers, with over 95% currently leveraging this approach, from Zoom to Slack.

And ever since, PLG has been established as a treasure trove to garner above-average returns. The product is at the nexus, and your customers have power over it from the get-go.

Traditional marketing playbooks react to this delusive loss of control by engineering desire and need, such as creating FOMO, grasping attention, or converting quickly. For them, channeling buyers means using retargeting loops and aggressive lead scoring — a method that can feel overtly manipulative and cold. Our approach to lead generation focuses on smart, human-centered strategies that build real trust.

But buyers aren’t giving in. They are self-educating and impulsive as ever.

So, what product-led marketing does is not promote this system. It helps marketers relinquish control, instilling mutual trust over coercion.

PLG strategies consider customers smarter than marketing gives them credit for. There’s no need to convince them; just demonstrate the value of your solutions.

So, instead of persuasive messaging, your brand must give them access – let them discover value on their own terms.

Marketing’s Role in PLG

What’s the role of marketing here, you may ask? It’s subtle.

You have to ensure that it’s not the marketing’s capabilities that are augmented. They shouldn’t be the ones dominating the conversations with buyers.

But orchestrate an environment where buyers progress from curiosity to a decision.

Marketing must engineer a journey without it seeming too sales-y. This is the actual tightrope of PLG marketing: avoid triggering a buyer’s anti-sell defense mechanism.

Buyers can rarely be persuaded through overbearing messages. They must feel like it’s they who hold the power to take the succeeding steps.

The product is the playground, while your marketing team is the architect. PLG strategies serve as curtains for marketing’s behind-the-scenes operations, such as designing touchpoints and triggers to embed content into the product’s user experience.

The traditional playbooks asserted the vendor power, but PLG dissolved it. It amplifies buyers’ autonomy and moves away from conventional power dynamics.

And businesses end up gaining more influence, not less, by letting users be in control.

How Can Product-led Marketing Help Grow Your Business?

Self-sustaining growth loop.

That’s your basic answer. We aren’t talking about virality or word-of-mouth marketing.

We are talking about changing the game through a self-reinforcing system that PLG marketing embraces.

1. Reduces CAC

This marketing model seeks active community engagement where users contribute towards your business’s growth, retention rates, and product improvement.

All without any substantial increase in your marketing spend.

This is quite a unique way product-led marketing helps you grow. It adds instead of chipping away.

This way, it cuts down on CAC because every new user becomes your marketing channel; the more, the merrier.

Source: Zendesk

In traditional marketing, every customer is accompanied by a price tag – ads, sales commissions, and outbound efforts. But product-led marketing pivots.

Here, sharing is marketing.

It leverages the onboarding process of each user as a micro-marketing event where the product becomes the funnel and the user is the channel. And acquiring customers doesn’t incur additional costs.

Over time, this could deflate or reverse your CAC curve, especially as the business scales.

2. Accelerated TTV (Time-To-Value)

Product-led marketing doesn’t let customer experiences marinate.

Traditional marketing persuades users to imagine the value of a product or service. And it has always leaned towards siloed comms, disjointed from actual customer interaction.

PLG leverages an omniscient approach, engineering the next best experiences in real-time. This marketing model helps users experience the value rather than feel it. This accelerates the path to activation.

Source: Command AI

Active customers are the essence of business growth. When brands offer customers personalized and relevant experiences, they are rewarded with activity.

It’s a give-and-take situation. And a predictive marker of customer retention and expansion.

The underlying logic: Consistently providing resonating experiences to active customers can compel them to become natural brand advocates.

Your marketing and sales teams don’t have to rely on external onboarding teams and excruciatingly long sales cycles. Users self-dive into finding the product’s value. And they feel the victory of this discovery.

The sweet spot? Your design and marketing teams can reiterate this. They can leverage product science to test the flows regularly, not just a messaging function.

3. Elevated Customer Retention

Source: HubSpot

In traditional marketing funnels, any leaks can be patched up through additional top-of-the-funnel spending. But PLM doesn’t endorse this.

Because users are onboarded through the product, they only stick around and purchase if it delivers. Any inefficiencies can only lead to drop-offs, i.e., higher churn rates.

In PLG marketing, marketing gets a tighter hold on the feedback loops. If users drop off, they know where and why.

This forces a much-needed alignment between marketing, product, and business growth.

The growth isn’t fragile or overly dependent on paid channels but on product usage.

And this creates a community of contributors, not users.

From user-made tutorials on Notion to design templates on Figma, each contribution is an asset. Ones that even marketing cannot create at scale.

It feeds back into the growth loop.

Flywheel of discovery to activation to product usage to evangelism to new user onboarding.

So, it’s no longer about marketing to your target audience but creating a network.

This strategy has helped businesses grow and compound, and Notion is a quality example of this.

Product-led Marketing Example: What Did Notion Do Differently?

In this age of impulse and ever-growing curiosity, buyers don’t want to be told what to buy; they want to explore.

PLG affords them this control. The product sells because the user is in control. They aren’t being sold to, but gauging the product’s value for themselves. But this isn’t accurate.

Customers feel that they are cruising this journey on their own. But it’s all owing to the intuitive design that you engineer. Ultimately, your marketing team is the invisible force that designs the experience users go through.

But their involvement is subtle. They are enablers, not manipulators.

Most SaaS innovators have come to recognize this holy grail.

Let’s take a look at Notion, a company that pioneered PLG marketing, not just adopt it.

Source: https://youtu.be/y-kM5kD2nm0

Notion excels at an invariable number of tasks, from project management to storing marketing materials.

At the nucleus of its success is not just its capabilities but its versatility.

With an all-hands-on-deck strategy, Notion:

1. Expanded internationally by localizing its platform in several languages to cater to a global audience.
2. Launched a freemium model to let the users experience the full value before they pay the full premium price.
3. Leveraged viral product loops through their subreddit community and UGC, fostering internal referrals and word-of-mouth marketing.

Notion’s subreddit community of 280,000 users and user-generated templates reflect robust brand loyalty. This has fostered hefty team collaboration, and viral loops have also led to explosive user growth.

This leap to product-led marketing didn’t merely make a remarkable dent in its ARR, but it also expanded its user base to over 30 million people globally.

Notion capitalized on a significant leap towards remote work as the world recovered from COVID-19, driving community-driven organic growth without any heavy investments in traditional marketing.

It demonstrates the power of a well-thought-out product-led growth strategy.

What did Notion actually do?

Primarily, it polished its customers’ experiences with the platform and then strategically leveraged this experience as a marketing tool – the essence of PLG marketing.

Notion capitalized on remote work.

However, to build a sustainable and compounding marketing engine, it recognized the prowess of the user community and product loops.

And the power of user experience itself.

But Notion could only become what it is today from a scrappy startup through a well-thought-out PLG marketing strategy.

Outlining A Robust Product-led Marketing Model: The Base

Going PLG isn’t about doing rush work. And it isn’t plug-and-play.

There are specificities to be met beneath the surface.

Just having a product isn’t enough. You need a product that can communicate its story and value without the need for additional drivers.

And a framework to translate user behavior into actual business growth.

1. Short and obvious TTV

Users don’t convert on potential but on experience. If your product requires external human explanation and takes a week to reflect its value, no amount of sweet marketing messages can undo this.

The first impression has been made. And in PLG, making a good one is non-negotiable. Your product must be the pitch, demo, and closer – all in real-time.

2. Precise tracking

Vanity metrics matter. But they don’t hold actual weight, especially when it comes to offering a 360-degree view of users. This is why tracking in-product behavior is crucial.

Or else, how do you know what the user is doing and what they aren’t? It will help you segment active and passive users.

With vanity metrics, you’re just flying blind. But actionable ones, such as drop-off points and activation moments, will define successive steps.

PLG requires a self-tuning funnel. And without marketing locking in with product and growth, there are no segmented user lists or streamlined flows.

3. Embedded narrative

In product-led marketing, marketing’s job doesn’t end with acquisition. It takes place internally, within the product, from nudges to upgrades to onboarding flows.

Here, the product isn’t the product in the traditional sense of the word. And neither is the content embedded in it.

The content is the storytelling embedded into the UX. It cannot just follow any flow but must be subtle and instructive. And delivered at just the right moment.

4. Organizational alignment

PLG marketing isn’t a marketing campaign. It’s a supportive hybrid system.

Marketing, product, and growth are locked in.

So, if your departments are siloed, your product’s performance endures a blow. Every team has a fundamental role to play:

1. Marketing sets the narrative and voice.
2. Product engineers design to bridge the experience and expectations.
3. Growth focuses on the loop.

A single unit is necessary because PLG marketing is an all-hands-on-deck approach. If any one of them misses, the whole system free-falls.

5. Shareability

Every marketing message must engage and compel, and your products must entail a shareable hook. This marketing model doesn’t just work for all products.

You need something that is inherently you and also follows the trends. It must be conversational, personalized, intuitive, and collaborative, with the ability to go viral.

Users share only when they look good doing it.

These surfaces should be acknowledged and tweaked regularly; value cannot be shared through closed doors.

Product-led Marketing is Your Compounding Engine.

In traditional marketing and sales, businesses gated the demo and controlled product information.

Through marketing’s subtle architecture, your product speaks for itself.

With PLG, you aren’t just designing a product.

You’re curating an entire system where your product speaks the relevant language to the right audience at the right time.

And you are turning your users into the next channel.

They aren’t just buyers through it all. They begin a journey, test value on their own terms, and influence purchasing decisions from the get-go.

Buyers are skeptical today. But the right product-led marketing strategies cruise through and invert the traditional funnel. Decisions are driven by user experience, not the sales pitch.

Appointment-setting isn’t about reciting scripts but orchestrating connections. How can SDRs build trust and momentum from the very first touchpoint?

The law of averages is often used as a driving force behind appointment setting, especially when the focus leans towards volume rather than value.

On the surface, it makes sense- more volume means more opportunities. By booking more appointments, SDRs create a pipeline of prospective leads for their AEs. And amidst this pool of qualified leads, some will eventually convert.

This has been the norm for several businesses. The logic is simple: SDR numbers influence revenue forecasting and business growth; they are the pipeline builders.

But there’s a catch.

The law of averages can prove to be a double-edged sword.

More appointments may indeed lead to higher conversions. But this approach creates a false sense of confidence. Merely focusing on volume can produce complacency within sales teams. In a rush to hit the numbers, the quality of meetings is forsaken.

This is where outsourcing appointment setting services becomes crucial. You aren’t offloading tasks but gaining a strategic edge.

The right appointment-setting service providers aren’t merely filling your calendars; they integrate into your sales strategy.

What Do We Mean by Appointment-Setting Companies?

Appointment-setting companies function as your sales team’s extension; it doesn’t replace them. With their expertise and knowledge base, they help polish your sales pipeline and build direct access to the right decision-makers.

But on the off-chance, choosing the incorrect appointment-setting company can also pad your pipeline with noise: volume that holds no quality.

There’s a drastic lack of strategic alignment with your in-house SDRs and marketing teams.

So, outsourcing them and how they influence your pipeline depends on two factors: how you leverage them and how they align with your GTM strategies.

Top Risks of Choosing the Wrong Appointment Setting Company

1. The primary and most significant one is the illusion of progress.

In 2024, 84% of SDRs didn’t meet their appointment quotas, while 67% weren’t expecting it to happen the following year.

What does this say?

SDRs missing their quotas might not always be detrimental. It’s crucial to meet their set targets, but it’s better than presenting inflated appointment metrics.

Booking numerous appointments isn’t synonymous with momentum, nor does it demonstrate a healthy pipeline. SDRs meeting their appointment quotas could easily elevate the possibility that the majority of meetings turn out to be ill-fitting prospects.

In reality, the dissonance becomes quite evident. Even though SDRs meet their appointment quotas, AEs later on notice high no-show rates, deal stalling, and weak engagement from these accounts.

What’s the point of it all?

SDRs waste their time, slowing down pipeline velocity. Meanwhile, when the burden of closing shifts to AEs, they burn their time in unproductive meetings.

Your AEs end up over-casting on these inflated numbers.

So, missed targets don’t always equate to poor closing skills, but poor lead quality, eroding trust in your lead-gen strategy.

2. Think of the B2B landscape: the total addressable market is finite.

It’s the underlying logic that not all set appointments will translate into closed deals and contribute to the revenue stream. Owing to this, organizations begin to notice diminishing returns on volume-centric appointment settings after a point.

You can’t use brute force or invasive outreach tactics to set appointments. Rather than contributing to your pipeline’s health, it could easily saturate your buyers and damage your brand reputation.

This is the second pain point.

3. Poor outsourcing appointment setting services drains budget and value.

Not only does a lack of strategic outsourcing efforts detrimentally affect your market positioning, but it also empties your pockets, with no value created.

One incorrect tactic can also fabricate a hole in your brand narrative, the third and quite significant pain point.

Most appointment setting services are assessed on a single metric: the total number of appointments booked. The entire focus is attributed to this one aspect.

What about the rest of the factors that truly drive conversion?

The understanding of the brand or customer pain points that the internal team is educated on isn’t delivered to the outsourced team. They are distanced and disconnected from the brand’s messaging and USP, resulting in a lack of personalized efforts.

They can’t qualify leads based on practical cases that mirror the brand voice. It becomes challenging for marketing to position its demand-gen strategies with outsourced efforts. All of which results in wasted budget and fragmented messaging.

There’s one thing to understand here:

Appointment setting isn’t about the short-term incentives, such as getting accounts on the calendars. When focused primarily on this, the long-term nurturing opportunities are overlooked.

Some term campaign targets can offer you momentary wins, but they also drive away a majority of your market who aren’t ready to purchase just yet.

How to Choose the Right Outsourced Appointment Setting Service

Most appointment-setting service providers sell “appointment volume” as the end goal. But that’s not the end requirement; a healthy pipeline is.

The best appointment-setting companies recognize this need. They aren’t just providers, they are outcome-oriented partners:

1. They understand your ICP beyond obvious firmographics.
2. Study and leverage your brand’s voice to function with value.
3. Align efforts with marketing and sales to create feedback loops.

If your vendor doesn’t help you understand why the lead booked a meeting or which pain point to solve, they’re here for a very different purpose than yours.

You want your appointment setters to drive the sales pipeline, not fill calendars. They must nurture intent and create the right opportunities.

This is what you should prioritize while choosing the right appointment-setting services. You must differentiate the best appointment setting services from the mediocre ones.

5 fundamental factors to single out the best appointment setting services provider for your business.

1. Hyper-personalization through advanced data intelligence.

The best appointment setting services vendors don’t just make calls and hope for the best. They take a more granular approach – reading the room by leveraging deep insights.

They wish to enhance the quality of the meeting itself.

Hence, the primary aspect is customizing their outreach and communications process. Providers must address specific lead challenges and needs within their industry. Insights drawn from surface-level criteria, such as job titles and industrial domain, prove ineffective.

It’s the actual buying signals that matter. And this is only possible through advanced analytics, past engagement patterns, and intent signals gauged by the tech infrastructure they leverage.

A provider cannot expect you to believe that generalized scripts and ICP-based commonplace insights are the essence of their “unique” strategies.

The quality of the approach must transform for the meeting.

2. Integrating seamlessly with your CRM and overall sales cycle.

Your appointment provider cannot operate siloes. They must integrate into your sales ecosystem, one that deeply integrates with your CRM systems, sales enablement tools, and marketing automation.

This way, there’s synergy between the internal departments and the outsourced team. It’s vital because, without any alignment, you’re just outsourcing a task, not building a trustworthy relationship. At its nucleus, the chosen appointment setting services provider must develop a professional and value-driven relationship with your brand.

With this, AEs and marketing teams can offer feedback to the external vendor, helping them adjust their strategies even in mid-campaign.

It fosters smooth handoffs between SDRs and AEs while tracking how leads proceed through the final stages in real time. This plays an integral role in optimizing the pipeline. And the possibility of closing more deals.

3. Agile and adaptive strategies that scale with the business.

Appointment-setting is more than the traditional “making a call” and blocking calendar dates.

With the transformations taking root in marketing and sales, SDRs must revamp their strategies. The best providers already understand that what worked in the past might not work today. There’s a vital disconnect in how sales were operated in the past.

To give your business the best of what they offer, appointment-setting providers must do things differently now. They must engineer strategies that are agile enough and adaptable, especially for the ever-shifting industry trends and buyer behavior.

These vendors should also be well-versed in executing strategies with advanced technology. And help you update the existing infrastructure, especially if it lacks significance in the current landscape.

4. Transparent reports with actionable and meaningful insights.

There are numerous providers out there that, in the name of transparent reporting, offer data dumps. These numbers are significant, but they are passive. They leave the entire interpretative work to the AEs in your team.

This illustrates the wrong dynamic in this partnership.

Transparency in reporting isn’t highlighting what is happening but why it is happening and what the next steps are.

For this, the appointment-setting providers must offer reports that don’t just mimic your existing dashboards. It must be a strategic conversation that spotlights the main friction points:

1. Why are the conversion rates dipping?
2. Why are the appointments in EMEA falling through compared to North America?

The questions that the reports urge should spark decisions, not merely represent what’s already happening. Truly insightful reports can elevate the alignment between the vendor and your internal teams, fostering consistent optimization.

Without making continuous tweaks, it’s tasking to gauge the long-term feasibility of your existing strategies. Your vendor should help map a solution – highlight the cracks and how to cement them.

The appointment setting services they offer shouldn’t mimic a call center. Their insights must be descriptive and interpretative. This signifies that the appointment-setting company has attention to detail, expertise, and infrastructure to go beyond just booking appointments.

5. Customer-first communications strategy.

Delivering customer-first communication isn’t just about elevating politeness or avoiding spammy tactics.

It means meeting the buyer halfway, especially when the power in this conversation has shifted to them. Leveraging meaningless persuasion techniques is ineffective on its own; you must establish relevance. That’s what truly matters to potential clients.

The best in the game know that it’s not really about numbers. It’s about resonance and relevancy, which is built gradually through tone and personalized communication delivered at the right time. Templated conversations are disconnected from the brand narrative.

And this isn’t the kind of impression you’re looking to make in the first place. Those who fall into this falsity often follow a single agenda. These appointment-setting companies overlook how they can leverage their domain knowledge and circle it around the prospects’ context.

Most often, companies are inclined toward a single agenda: booking appointments. But acting like cold callers doesn’t do the job today. They must pose as early consultants and:

1. Understand the prospect’s challenges
2. Ask the appropriate questions
3. Know when to move further or back off

In the initial stages, appointment volume might make your SDRs better aware of the possibility of conversions. But in the long run, fit and intent secure the driving wheel of your sales pipeline.

Remember, every outreach is a touchpoint; whether it’s accepted or ignored isn’t the primary issue. But if the communication is off from the nib, the damage is done even before the lead talks to your SDRs.

These facets aren’t best practices in choosing the right appointment-setting services, but filters. The right ones not only make a difference in lead quality but also in how the market perceives your brand.

Ciente’s Solutions: Designing Better Buyer Interactions

At Ciente, these aren’t just strategies for us. They are our operating principles.

Our appointment setting services don’t merely include blocking dates but building a positive brand perception.

To build a sustainable appointment-setting engine, we recognize that a one-size-fits-all script isn’t the gleaming solution that sales reps have thought it to be. So, we work closely with our clients to curate outreach that feels personal, not automated.

We abandon all templated playbooks to build insightful reports on accurate and actionable data, helping you ascertain when to double down and when to pivot.

At Ciente, we book appointments but also orchestrate conversations that help you guide your leads through the pipeline with confidence and purpose.

If you’re rethinking your cookie-clutter approach, reach out to our experts to vamp up your existing comms strategy.

The first impression sets the tone, and it should feel like you.

Qualifying leads isn’t about ticking boxes anymore. With the concept of SQLs gaining nuance, it’s time for a more sophisticated framework.

Your modern tech stacks collate data from multiple sources, which marketing uses to qualify leads to the next funnel stage as Sales Qualified Leads or SQLs. This qualification process is based on aggregated behavioral signals from email opens, subscriptions, responses, and chats.

But recently, sales have noticed a serious disjuncture.

Often, when SDRs approach the leads handed down by marketing, they hit a wall. These so-called SQLs don’t actually have buying intent or interest in progressing the conversation.

They were all false positives.

Imagine a lead downloads a whitepaper, opens three different emails, kicks off marketing’s score threshold, and is labeled as an SQL. When sales initiate contact, they realize the lead was merely executing competitor research or browsing casually.

This handoff was a dead end and a waste of time, eroding sales’ trust in marketing scoring models.

In the long run, this has caused observable friction between teams, inducing cross-departmental misalignment that results in low-quality leads that don’t convert.

This begs the question:

Is marketing really to blame?

The truth is that marketing’s approach is not entirely incorrect.

They are inaccurately analyzing the intent signals. It’s not about finding out that leads are engaging but about why they are.

This is known as intent context.

Most scoring models are straightforward. These traditional methods attribute specific scores to engagement signals. If whitepaper downloads are 10 points, subscribing to the newsletter is 20.

This might be a crucial step in the lead qualification process, but without context, these signals can be easily misread.

For example, an account might download your whitepaper or eBook, and signals are usually assigned a high score in traditional systems, but it is actually a competitor or researcher. There’s no buying intent.

Your SDRs end up wasting time and resources on leads that look great in the CRM but aren’t sales-ready.

A high score doesn’t equate to high buying intent, especially without context. And then comes intent, followed by sales-readiness. In simpler terms, MQLs’ qualification into SQLs requires precision.

But why?

Because sales-qualified leads aren’t just here for research or casual strolling.

What are sales-qualified leads or SQLs?

SQLs are leads who are past the stage of primary awareness or casual interest and illustrate a strong intent to purchase. They are sales-ready accounts that are ready to negotiate and talk numbers with your sales team.

At this stage, SQLs consume content that’ll help distinguish you as a potential vendor for their business challenges. So, they generally interact with case studies and pricing models to set your solutions apart from competing options.

An SQL generally demonstrates high-purchasing intent.

Sometimes, teams botch this up. Most teams use MQLs and SQLs interchangeably.

But they aren’t the same and shouldn’t be.

So, how do SQLs differ from MQLs?

The clear demarcation is the intent to buy.

MQLs are leads who are actively aware of your brand and have shown interest in knowing more. They are trying to research and gain knowledge about their own pain points while exploring other options in the market.

Their buying intent is almost null.

Meanwhile, SQLs fall on the other side. They demonstrate high buying intent. And at this stage, they are evaluating their options.

The content these two engage with is distinct. But how do you map your strategies in the first place without a complete grasp of the subject matter?

It all just leads to over-scoring and low-quality MQLs who never convert.

If the qualification process is where your leads take the blow, how will they ever progress further?

Structure a framework to accurately identify SQLs: what makes a lead sales-ready?

Qualifying framework to validate the SQL identification process

Start by asking the right questions and listening.

BANT is one of the most effective and powerful qualification frameworks out there. Developed by IBM in the 1950s, it has proved to be a treasure trove for modern marketing.

And every other framework, from MEDICC to NOTE, is a reiteration of BANT. But BANT has become obsolete in the modern landscape.

For example, take NOTE.

It poses a crucial advantage in today’s customer-first marketing landscape compared to the older models.

• N – Need: Understand the problem prospects face, i.e., what’s not working?
• O – Opportunity: What’s the upside if the problem is addressed and tackled?
• T – Team: Who’s pulling the strings for the final purchase?
• E – Effect: What would the short-term and long-term effects of integrating this solution look like?

NOTE underscores the long-term customer experience, while BANT has helped businesses efficiently close deals. It’s not enough to make a purchase; you need to assess whether the client is fit to adopt and integrate the solution into their systems.

This makes NOTE imperative for the modern buying landscape. It focuses not on the business’s need to sell but on the customer’s need for the solution.

Older qualification systems quickly push the sales process.

But NOTE acknowledges the organization’s need and timeline to ensure that SDRs gauge where the leads are in their buying journey. And whether this solution will set them up for long-term success.

If you think about it, the need for an appropriate budget is a single facet of qualification.

The newer model focuses on the nuances of decision-making, addressing its nonlinearity in B2B.

It isn’t about the obvious anymore. But truly listening to what leads are here for.

Nuanced qualification models help SDRs and marketing recognize the client’s growth potential.

And listen to understand what this purchase means to the leads.

By determining this, sales and marketing can move a lead toward being sales-ready.

Establish persona filters to segment relevant leads.

Most often, ill-fitting leads are still handed off from marketing to sales because they engaged with your brand.

This is where the disconnect begins.

Just because an account downloads the whitepaper doesn’t mean they are relevant. They might even hold purchasing intent, but are they in the market for your solutions?

This is where persona filters swoop in.

These filters, such as industry, pain points, and behavior, among others, help segment out the relevant accounts that fit your buyer persona or ICP. For example, the lack of budget may categorize an account as an MQL because they can’t afford to progress into a sales conversion.

Meanwhile, the wrong industry would establish that your solution wouldn’t help solve their pain points. This account is irrelevant to what you have to offer.

Persona filters help spotlight this demarcation.

And if the account continues to engage, they are likely doing so only for the information. They cannot move into being an SQL.

It’s not because they lack the budget, urgency, or authority, but because their wants don’t align with the industry you cater to. It serves as a qualification and an elimination process.

By focusing on leads that fit your ICP and buyer persona, SDRs expend their resources on high-intent leads with promising conversion potential.

Gauge buying intent from behavioral and third-party data.

Tech innovations have established a new channel for marketers to revamp their efforts.

It’s not about services that are marketable to a diverse section of the population. Each effort has become more niche, and the comms strategies are more targeted – the customer is at the center.

B2B buying was never linear, and it has become even more complex.

So, savvy marketers have invested heavily in leveraging behavioral data to understand their audience base, whether by studying the sequence of specific actions or even analyzing third-party data.

There would be two different scenarios here:

1. A prospect is researching queries related to your services on third-party sites – this is third-party intent data. These touchpoints are outside your jurisdiction, but they still illustrate that the prospect is in-market.
2. Another prospect from the same company is interacting with service pages across your website. And then, they proceed to download eBooks and respond to emails. These behavior sequences are direct proofs of engagement.

Both these data types help marketers pinpoint very different behaviors and also gauge the purchase intent of a lead. They facilitate marketers to move beyond guesswork and underscore buyer behavior with precision.

And when you combine third-party data with these behavioral sequences, specific patterns emerge.

The overlap is where SQLs emerge from.

Instead of relying on either internal or external signals, why not merge both for an accurate analysis?

Alone, third-party data often lacks context, and behavioral data doesn’t always signal sales-readiness. But combined, the data spotlights the relevance and timeline.

With this, SDRs get a clearer picture of what to say, to whom, and when.

CRM enrichment for confident sales qualification.

Traditional CRM systems entail basic information, such as industry, name, email, and company. By itself, this data cannot help you gauge whether a lead is sales-ready.

It requires contextual data that offers you better insight into who a lead is and what they are really in the market for. It could also be that they know the problem and are actively researching it, but aren’t confident where to look for solutions just yet.

This is where CRM enrichment can help your brand become the lead’s saving grace.

It helps transform raw lead data into actionable data by layering context to each data point. Each lead account is paired with contextual information that can’t be gauged from basic form filling or whitepaper downloads.

This additional data could actively change how you prioritize and qualify your leads.

Think:

A prospect enters your CRM through gated content. On the surface, you only know their name, email, and company. But what if CRM enrichment follows this up with – the lead is the IT director of a mid-market cybersecurity company? And your solution can perfectly integrate with tools in their existing tech stacks.

The company has growth potential and is actively looking to invest in new infrastructure.

So, they might not just be consuming your content, but could still be prospective buyers.

Moreover, CRM enrichment also works alternatively. In isolation, some data may flag an account’s engagement, but paired with context, it might not illustrate buying intent.

On the other hand, another account may be actively researching solutions in your market, but their interaction with your brand is quite limited. You can leverage this data from enrichment providers to help marketing reach out to them and nurture them forward.

CRM enrichment doesn’t add more data to an already exhausted database. It adds better data for sales to target the right leads at the right time, refining the sales qualification process.

Assess the lead source to gauge lead quality early on.

Not all leads are created equal, and neither do they come from the same source. When a lead enters your sales funnel, the channel they entered through gives the slightest clue about what’s their intention.

A lead arriving from a search for “best CRM systems” might hold far more intent than a like on a social media post. Both are at distinct stages of the buyer journey. While one is aware of the problem and is actively evaluating solutions, the other is casually browsing.

When these activities are tracked across past behavior, marketers come to see a pattern.

Leads from inbound marketing channels, such as content marketing and SEO, have higher conversion rates. They might move through the sales cycle faster or even have high customer lifetime value.

These patterns offer marketing and sales with predictive insight, improving the SQL identification process.

When paired with CRM enrichment, the collated data showcases that the leads from particular sources and channels have a higher possibility of fitting the SQL criteria. This helps marketing and sales develop a comprehensive understanding of what ‘qualified’ or ‘sales-ready’ actually means.

Overall, lead sources might not directly help with qualification. But it adds intent context behind the data available in your CRM. It enhances your qualification model and helps:

1. Prioritize high-quality leads early on.
2. Facilitate better segmentation.
3. Tailor nurturing for leads not yet ready.

Underscoring lead score gives you a head start on leads’ sales potential and helps your SDRs invest time in accounts with higher conversion possibilities.

The bottom line: The more information your teams have on a lead, the easier it becomes to qualify them as sales-qualified leads.

It’s not about closing deals per se. But elevating efficiency in a way that works best for your business.

And neither is it about segmenting SQLs and MQLs.

It’s about gaining a more strategic mindset that streamlines your efforts with the desired outcomes.

And finally, SQL qualification is also about understanding your prospective buyer.

With the advent of rapid digital transformation, the traditional definition of a sales-qualified lead has collapsed.

Today, there are more channels and touchpoints. And the concept has become more nuanced. So, the qualifying framework isn’t a lens to perceive leads as mere data points but to spotlight the nuances of the buyer journey.

A lead may be considered an SQL in the traditional sense, but it still requires passing through multiple criteria and nurturing stages before interacting with sales.

The focus isn’t just on demographic or firmographic data, though their significance remains. Behavior-based qualification has gained momentum, leading to more personalized experiences.

The buyer has come to occupy the central position in marketing and sales.

And owing to the subtle shift from forceful sales tactics to relational and consulting approaches, SQLs are no longer perceived as numbers.

They are now at a vital juncture in the customer-relationship-building process, alongside establishing marketing-sales alignment.

Propelling a much-needed shift in sales’ role: closing business deals to educating and consulting.

Meta: ABM is often misunderstood. It’s touted as a magic wand. It’s not. It’s so much more.

You’ve heard ABM campaigns work and that they’ll fix your pipeline problems.

Gartner reported in 2021 that programs that assign 32% of their budget to ABM campaigns had a high-quality pipeline.

Yet, many have found that their ABM campaigns are not working. And you’ve done all of it— identified accounts interested in offers similar to yours, accounts with intent, and everything a good ABM practice should entail.

But it just doesn’t work. Where are the high-quality pipelines that the statistics had promised you?

Leads are still down.

Marketing campaigns are still not reaching their audience. But trust in ABM is at an all-time high.

Why wouldn’t it be? It’s an effective way. But only when done right.

Businesses are missing a vital piece of the ABM puzzle: the multiple stakeholders.

Stakeholders and decision-makers have a list. And perhaps, you’re not on it.

The accounts you’re targeting have a committee of around 11 buyers (on average). These decision-makers, like most people, have vested interests that they wish to achieve from the sale. Maybe the CSO wants a tool with better security and integration. The CTO wants a tool that seamlessly collects and collates data.

There are many cases where the committee will want different things. But they’re working for one common goal: The organization’s profits.

To keep their vested interests protected and ensure organizational growth, the buyers come to a compromise— they create a list of vendors they would want to work with. This list is a shared one.

And as HBR puts it, 90% of the buyers buy from this list.

Even if you use ABM, if you’re not on the list, your tactics are going to be futile.

The solution is straightforward.

Multi-stakeholder engagement is the secret recipe to ABM.

Now that the secret’s out. What can you do about it?

ABM is not easy.

It’s resource-intensive, requires personalization, and a molecular understanding of the buyers. This is where most teams mess up.

ABM is not what the blogs are telling you— they lack depth and nuance to explain a complex process. And the fulcrum of this process lies in multi-stakeholder engagement.

Your first step for ABM is to understand if your budget allows for it. A chat with your finance team comes way before strategy and planning.

If yes, then

Identification

You must discover your high-value accounts.

• What problem is your product solving?
• Why is it solving it?
• How?

When you answer simple (yet multi-faceted) questions like these, you understand what market you’re catering to and the specific gaps you solve.

Once you have that, you have your high-value accounts.

1. In comes intent.

You can either use tools like 6Sense, Bombora, or an agency like your very own Ciente to discover the intent behind these accounts.

1. Are they actively looking for solutions?
2. Why?

But now comes the tricky part— competition and the list play a huge part in this.

Whatever solution you’re solving probably has industry leaders or a fair amount of competition. Your accounts/buyers are so self-aware that they know about the risks in their industry before even knowing about your solution.

That list helps them narrow down the options. And it is this list that you must influence.

There are a lot of conversations regarding ABM, but the one mistake everyone seems to make is not understanding that it isn’t a plan but a strategy to create a ripple effect. And that takes time. Quite a lot of it. For a successful ABM campaign, you have to start by engaging the buying committee. And how will you know who’s on it?

Spray and pray?

Two Methods

In a conversation with our CMO, the marketing team asked her: What actually runs the ABM campaign? Can you identify the stakeholders without talking to someone in the organization?

The answer she gave drives our conversations here. She said, “It’s not the person who visits the website a few times. That’s just interest. But if you see a whole group of people on your website or product listing and they’re from the same organization, you can bet some of those are going to be decision-makers or at least people in the know-how. We can start there.”

That’s the first one. The second one is a bit simpler but a bit on the expensive side.

Essentially, you will be running a campaign on your account. To everyone. The C-suites. The directors. The board.

This data is public knowledge. But that does not mean you just start blasting them with messages; your campaigns should reflect the role of the people involved and the specific problem you solve for them. From your email marketing campaigns and ads to informational content, all of it will be focused, in some way, to cater to your accounts’ needs.

This is resource-heavy because it requires hyper-personalization. This is what the successful ABM campaigns you hear about are doing.

Sales’ Role

Without your sales team’s active involvement, your engagement strategy is bound to fail. At the end of the day, no matter what the ABM campaign does, your SDRs must convey the same energy.

The faltering of your promise or over-promising something that does not exist will not be good for your sales teams. Ideally, after an ABM campaign, you would want them to call you.

But, ideal scenarios rarely pan out; there will be moments where your SDRs will have to call multiple people at the same time. They will have to ensure brand voice and understand the problem.

And they have to be savvy enough to have a conversation with them instead of pushing for an aggressive sell. As they will be engaging people who share common information and communication space, their job would be to: –

1. Create goodwill and trust.
2. Foster relationships
3. Act as consultants

The great news is that your sales teams know buyers better than marketing teams. All the marketing department needs to do is give them brand guidelines— the perception you want to display.

The rest is up to them. And seldom sales team fail at that.

As their support, you will have to: –

1. Craft sales enablement
2. Create brand guidelines – think TOV but personalized for the sales team.
3. Highlights of the product
4. Product demos and all relevant material.

As you work your way through ABM, you will realize.

ABM will not be a fix if you get stuck in rigidity.

There are a lot of ABM playbooks out there. The marketing noise, as the industry calls it. From ABA to personalization-at-scale, there are a lot of plays marketers are vying for.

But the industry needs to wake up to reality— the rigidity is not working. Either marketing is high art or it’s a thing to over-optimize.

Some traditional methods still work irrespective of what gurus say, and the converse is also true. But what’s not working is playing it safe.

And ABM does not work on safety. It is risk and wallet-intensive. ABM is the hunt, and make no mistake, the multiple stakeholders of any given account are your trophies.

Business deals are all about relationships. And developing long-term loyal ones requires spearheaded attention and a lot of patience.

“Lead nurturing is about building authentic connections,” states Salesforce.

A marketer’s pathway to generating leads shouldn’t be hyper-focused on the transactional value. Your clients aren’t just revenue reservoirs. They are the nay-sayers of how your brand is perceived, influencing its reputation and marketing positioning.

It’s a two-way relationship.

While they need your solutions, you need them, too, to improve your standing.

However, the increased marketplace contention has elevated the dilemma for businesses operating within the same industry and target market: Why would they choose us?

The truth is, if the prospective clients don’t deem your brand credible and reputable, they’ll rarely look back. This is far from each business’s actual goal: to convert prospects into active customers.

But modern marketers must do things differently.

Approach the ‘conversion’ process as more than just ‘closing a deal.’ And undertaking a value-centric approach, targeting potential customers at every step of their buying journey. 

The only schism here is an innovative understanding of what exactly a “value-centric” approach is. And not just a conventional reading of the benefits you offer.

Marketing has to move beyond promoting the same services and products. This old playbook doesn’t work anymore. Instead, it should be about rethinking and engineering an agile marketing method for buyers.

The reality has reminded marketers that originality comes in waves, but being unique isn’t always about being original. In marketing, it’s about taking what exists and molding it in a way that facilitates your business to prove its value in ways different from traditional ones.

But to deliver this value and prove its worth, businesses must relinquish the presumption that clients are mere buyers.

Even marketing at large omits that customers aren’t just consumers.

In B2B, the decision-makers in a buying committee are also creators and developers, trying their best to navigate familiar business challenges.

So, marketing’s customer-first approach can only take root when it offers an end-to-end partnership. This means working ‘with’ the clients from the beginning till the end to ensure their experiences seamlessly integrate with the marketing solutions.

HBR’s assertion that “people are the new channel” can work as the underlying basis of your customer-first value-driven strategies.

This thinking underscores that your marketing team isn’t just a solution, or the customers aren’t mere numbers – both parties are extensions of each other.

This is what lead nurturing is about.

Lead nurturing means building and communicating value to prospective clients.

To offer you the general purview of how lead nurturing works:

What is lead nurturing?

Fundamentally, this marketing strategy entails offering valuable resources to leads, persuading them to advance further into the sales funnel.

First, marketers focus on capturing or grabbing leads’ interest through compelling and personalized assets. Then, the efforts are directed at deepening the relationship by addressing critical pain points and positioning your brand as the go-to solution.

During this conversation, your brand is centered as a friend and a consultant. You hear the potential buyer’s challenges and offer advice as the subject-matter experts. At the nucleus is the unique value proposition and the tangible value you can offer them.

Through the nurturing process, you’re making a promise: to be their end-to-end partner, not just a one-off deal.

And this is why the tone of communication takes much precedence. There’s much to do even before your brand moves to its sales pitch. Lead nurturing earns you the right to pitch your proposal. 

Outlining the lead-nurturing process this way makes it seem demanding. And the truth is, in the modern B2B buying landscape, it is.

Why is nurturing leads Important for conversion in the first place?

The expansion and emergence of B2B businesses have saturated and overwhelmed the client with analysis paralysis. And even when buyers end up making a deal, lackluster solutions and unmet promises have only ensued distrust. It has led to a generic hesitance when leads first enter the sales funnel.

They cannot progress down the funnel on their own. But a little guidance can help them. In this case, lead nurturing functions as a guide to those who already illustrate purchasing intent.

But, for curious onlookers, the nurturing process might be an informative session for getting to know the brand. It all boils down to active and ongoing communication across all active channels.

And, most crucially, making an impression.

It’s imperative to your brand’s success. Not everyone who enters your funnel holds purchasing intent or purchases right away. With B2B buying going digital, it’s likely the buyer found you through an online search. And even though most buyers have become self-directed and make decisions even before talking to an SDR, they need convincing to move in the right direction.

So, once the lead’s been captured, it’s time to cultivate it.

It’s likely that the lead is researching alternate options at this stage. And any small active interaction with your brand is a win. Every touchpoint gives you the opportunity to nurture that lead, and that’s how it should be.

Once the lead has entered the funnel, they shouldn’t feel ghosted, or else they get easily siphoned off by your competitors.

Lead nurturing illustrates how valuable a customer’s time is to you and that you’re with them at every step of the funnel.

The customer should believe in your brand’s capability to cater to them. Ideally, the lead-nurturing process should assure the buyer that you won’t waste their time.

If you look at the bigger picture, lead nurture is paramount to:

• Educate your buyers
• Elevate brand recognition and recall
• Develop an external relationship with your brand
• Improve conversion rates

Now that we have outlined why lead nurturing is a requisite for each business, we move on to its working model. The process sounds easy in theory, but the practical execution is where marketers miss their mark.

To navigate this, marketers must focus on the basic structure and strategic approach.

But before diving into the strategy, let’s get into the generic framework. What does the lead-nurturing process look like?

Lead nurturing process: the basic structure.

Primarily, there are the underlying factors required to kickstart your lead-nurturing efforts:

1. Segmentation

Personalization has become the heart of marketing communications. From AI to automation tools, every resource is used to curate targeted campaigns and messages.

To ascertain whether these efforts are successful, start by segmenting your customer list. It will straighten the tailoring and customization of your communication strategies. While not all customers resonate with the same idea and message, some do.

Segmentation will ensure that your marketing team isn’t blasting the same email to each potential customer. The segments with similar pain points and interests will obviously resonate with the same type of messages.

This will assist you in streamlining the marketing efforts and creating content that actually engages the audience.

2. The right content

Your ICP is diverse. And even the decision-makers within a single buying committee have distinct tastes. Not all can resonate with the same piece of content.

The first ingredient is targeted content. Find out where your leads are in their buying journey and curate content that aligns with the buyer persona. This is crucial and includes the multiple touchpoints each customer interacts with.

Imagine firing off messages that are known to every business in the vicinity. Most brands do this by taking a single generic message and reshaping it to sound different.

Certainly, you don’t wish to be one of them.

Underscore what works best for your brand, personalize, and experiment because what works for you might not work for your customer. And to make it easier to reach them, expand it through diverse marketing channels.

From podcasts to SMS, cover all bases to find the line that works for you. Uncover the cadence and frequency of messages to ascertain you don’t overwhelm the potential buyers.

And most of all, find the resonating sweet spot that intrigues your audience.

3. Unique buyer persona

How well do you know your ideal buyer? – A question that entails the building block of each marketing campaign.

Knowing what your best customer looks like is fundamental to creating these campaigns from the tiniest nub.

• Demographic details
• Common pain points
• Interests
• Preferred communication channels
• Underlying motivations

Identifying your buyer and creating a persona will help you optimize your strategy and build the process around it. Simply, you can ensure your nurturing efforts are more tailored and customized.

4. The journey

From a broader perspective, B2B sales cycles are lengthy, complex, and time-consuming. However, as a marketer hoping to improve the hand-off with sales and influence conversion, you need to narrow down your understanding.

Outline how long your business’s sales cycle is: What is the typical timeframe for a lead to move from the initial contact to the deal closing?

Every single touchpoint adds to this. Understanding the sales cycle length can help gauge when the customers actually get ready to buy, along with a brownie point: how your customers move through.

This helps study the buyer and their patterns better.

Lead nurturing remains the same across businesses. However, some details in your customer journey might influence the particularities.

5. Brand building

Your customers don’t want to communicate with or buy from an organization. They want to interact with a person. Rather than communicating with a concrete corporate entity, they want to gauge the brand’s personality.

That’s what makes the first impression – the personal brand.

This is why it’s so crucial for your business to have this front – a story and a narrative. Storytelling is vital in sales, and a story with intent can work wonders. This begins with positioning your business as a credible thought leader in the market.

But it’s crucial to showcase your knowledge and expertise to build this credibility. If your brand’s broader market perspective is positive, it’s easier for potential customers to catch up.

Here, lead nurturing becomes simple.

So, when creativity is a constant at the nucleus of the road mapping process, don’t think of it only blooming in ad campaigns or personalized messages. It should rather be a driving force, encouraging creation and reiteration in your buyer’s imagination.

Beyond these underlying factors embedded at the crux of every nurturing process, there’s a framework to it. You amalgamate all these aspects into a mix and then hope for the best.

Lead nurturing doesn’t work this way.

It’s about supporting your customers through their business challenges and delighting them. The lead-nurturing campaigns should ‘wow’ potential buyers and excite them to get in touch with you.

Without the slightest intrigue, the prospect fails to see the unique value in your solutions, becoming one with the cacophony of market noise.

Lead-nurturing best practices?

While progressing through the funnel, we understand that leads are at different stages of the purchasing journey – some have made up their minds, and some are still hesitant.

This is where lead nurturing grows into different branches, each for a different stage in the funnel:

1. In the awareness stage (Top of the funnel) :-

the lead is cold, cautious, and hesitant. So, the initial contact should offer them value that urges them to take action.

What can you do? – send emails and newsletters, publish blogs on relevant topics that address their pain points, and run targeted ads.

2. The next stage is interest (middle of the funnel):-

where the lead has undertaken substantial steps to understand who you are and what you offer. Most often, this turns out to be curiosity rather than actual purchasing intent. But now that the lead is captured, intent can be built.

What can you do? – Guide them towards downloading more services-specific content, such as e-Guides and whitepapers, or initiate a discovery call to gauge their pain points.

3. The consideration stage is paramount.

At this stage, the lead compares your solutions with the competitors’ – pricing models, tangible benefits, agility, and integration capabilities.

Once potential customers become aware of the brand’s services and agree with you, your brand becomes one of the many. So, now walk them through the nitty-gritty (features) and dive further into how they’ll solve their pain points and help drive results.

What can you do? – Offer detailed content such as demos, pricing sheets, a customized sales presentation, and relevant case studies.

4. Engaging Leads in the Evaluation Stage

Interacting with a lead in the evaluation stage signifies that they hold serious buying intent. For this, you get into the USP – brand differentiators. To further establish this, offer a sales proposal highlighting personalized solutions relevant to their business requirements and pain points.

But it doesn’t end with closing the deal. Follow-ups are necessary, even with existing customers. Closing a purchase with a first-time buyer doesn’t automatically mean trust or loyalty. It’s the second purchase from the same buyer that actually holds prominence.

It means they trust you. And this is what lead nurturing promises to achieve.  

These techniques directly impact a customer’s decision to purchase or not. This is why nurturing holds such an imperative space in the funnel. But without the right strategy, marketers lose their way to convert even the most active leads.

An efficient nurturing approach requires a synergy between innovative marketing and sales strategies. It has to be smart and move beyond the generic.

But reaching this mountain top requires taking the first step. This means underscoring some of the best lead-nurturing strategies.

The lead-nurturing strategies to earn customer loyalty.

1. Leverage multiple channels in your campaign.

In the highly digital landscape, customers can be reached through more than a single channel, whether it’s through ads, social media, or emails – each of them is paramount. The more channels, the easier it is to interact with potential buyers.

Digital transformation has made customer communication straightforward. While many nuances are involved, modern lead nurturing has to transcend generic email drip campaigns. It’s just one of the many in this digital age.

Generic emails don’t do it anymore.

It gets lost amidst the same recycled messages with no value or impact. But now, marketing automation tools can help you set up multichannel campaigns.

An effective and robust nurturing campaign includes retargeting ads, social media, email marketing, sales outreach, and tailored website content. And a framework that allows these to perform effectively and cohesively.

2. Conduct periodic and timely follow-ups.

Most businesses let the interaction soak in, but sometimes, this results in a significant gap between communications. This error can cost them a customer, but most SDRs still fail to acknowledge this.

Automated lead nurturing focuses on the quantity, but periodic follow-ups demonstrate that you care about them. They are still as valuable to you as they were beforehand. Because, as HubSpot asserts,

“The odds of converting a lead into a sales opportunity are exponentially higher when the lead is contacted immediately following a website conversion.”

Your team already has information regarding the prospect – you know what they are researching and their intent. This can help lead a really informative and in-depth call that isn’t as disconnected as cold calling.

You know the prospect’s current behavior, and a timely follow-up is one of the best ways to convert inbound leads.

3. Leverage aligned lead-scoring tactics.

Lead scoring is one of the best pathways to optimize your lead-nurturing strategies. Once aligned with the brand guidelines, the only thing left is utilizing these scores to focus on what actually matters.

Lead nurturing takes ample time – sometimes, it works, and then, it doesn’t. So, marketing and sales cannot just spend most of their time nurturing a cold lead. Here, lead scores play an integral role.

It helps segregate how much time and resources should be spent on each lead and which are relevant and must be prioritized. Not only will leveraging lead-scoring techniques simultaneously help you prioritize hot leads, but highlight the channels that work best for your nurturing processes.

4. Personalize the process.

A customer’s behavior illustrates their needs, interests, and preferences. And this matters to marketers, too. And truthfully, if the communications are tailored according to these, the engagement and conversion rates are higher.

It makes the customers feel heard and understood.

So, savvy marketers are meeting their digital buyers halfway. They use data and analytics to curate personalized and compelling strategies that hit the mark. It could include anything from customized email content based on past purchases and recommendations to the frequency of communications.

There’s another facet – dynamic content that targets buyers based on their position in the funnel, industry, or job. All of this boils down to a single aspect – experiences that feel unique to the situation and need.

The bottom line is that the customer needs to feel valued.

Marketing’s solution was to establish a relationship-driven, nurturing technique, not a transactional one. At the heart of this is engagement and communication.

There are innovative ways to carry this out, but not entirely original ones. What’s impactful is how your marketing creativity approaches lead nurturing without straying from the brand vision and motto.

Building a lasting relationship, loyalty, and trust isn’t built in the blink of an eye. It requires patience, and with the nurturing process, this is what takes the front seat – to see what works and what doesn’t.

There’s no hard and fast rule for any marketing strategy, just experimentation. The only play here is to recognize the core: customers and value.

In an intensely competitive marketplace, buyers also need assurance that their demands and challenges are pinpointed. Nurturing remains a sure-shot way to highlight less intrusive methods for showcasing that your buyers matter to you.

Strategies are based on asking the right questions. Any successful business leader understands that inquiry in the right direction opens channels for a positive outcome.

But, framing the correct questions can be challenging, as is the norm for strategy. There are a lot of considerations a business and its teams must understand to enquire in the right direction. For SaaS companies that mainly work on a B2B model, asking the right question means the difference between success and failure.

After all, lead generation is anticipating problems (questions) of potential buyers and presenting solutions for them. And a major roadblock for most teams is prospects that go nowhere.

Why does this occur?

There is a good chance that the leads your teams are chasing might be losing points in the qualifying round.

The Role of Qualification in the Sales Funnel

Here, the value of asking the right questions is apparent. From marketing to sales teams, your campaigns should be designed to qualify your leads and push them through the sales funnel.

Frameworks such as BANT, MEDDIC, and ANUM help sales teams qualify their prospects. And it is necessary to implement them to help sales teams close more deals.

But there is a caveat: sales prospects also go beyond these basic frameworks to tailor their pitch for the prospect.

And that begins by listening.

Qualifying Frameworks Overview

BANT and other frameworks that help sales teams close more deals.

Qualifiers are vital for a lead generation strategy to work. A rich sales pipeline is based on the quality of leads generated.

But all leads are not the same. While some leads may be window shopping, others might not be relevant at all. MQLs can be generated in quantity, but if they are not up to the mark on quality, they will hamper future sales and profits. For any organization, that is a blow.

Marketing and sales are the gatekeepers of an organization’s success. These two teams are in charge of the qualifying questions.

As we know, there are a few methodologies that organizations should use to qualify the prospect.

Understanding the Key Sales Qualification Frameworks

First, let us touch on the basics. These frameworks are: –

What is BANT?

BANT is the most famous framework. It is a simple yet powerful concept developed by the sales team at IBM in the 50s. Sales teams can quickly identify if their lead meets the criteria. And it is easy to remember. For those who do not know, BANT stands for: –

1. B- Budget
2. A- Authority
3. N-Need
4. T-Time

It helps an SDR understand if: –

1. an organization can afford its product
2. the person they are speaking to has the authority needed to buy
3. the organization has a need
4. and if the requirement matches both organizations’ timeframes.

It is an exceptional and old qualifier, still used today and accepted by large organizations as a gold standard. All other qualifying frameworks are variations of BANT.

What is MEDDIC?

MEDDIC is a newer framework that adds more dimensions based on the BANT framework. It helps sales teams open up more possibilities for inquiry.

It stands for: –

1. M- Metrics.
2. E- Economic Buyer.
3. D-Decision Criteria
4. D- Decision Process
5. I- Identifying Pain
6. C- Champion

The MEDDIC framework goes a step beyond understanding the buyer with more depth. Essentially, it helps your SDR identify: –

1. The KPIs the buyer wants to meet and if your product can align with that vision.
2. Is the prospect you are talking to an economic buyer (or decision-maker)?
3. What are the make-or-break decision criteria for the buyer?
4. The decision process of the buyer and the people involved in the buying
5. A champion within the organization. Someone to vouch for you inside the target account.

MEDDIC offers a view into a different structure of asking questions. SDRs and Chief Sales Officers have realized the value of asking varied questions.

As the buying process becomes more complex, the need for such frameworks has become necessary.

What is NOTE?

Another effective yet simple framework is the NOTE. Coined by Sean Burke, this method takes on an empathetic role in selling.

It stands for: –

1. N – Need
2. O- Opportunity
3. T- Team
4. E- Effect

The NOTE framework helps SDRs by identifying-

1. If the buyer need our services at this point?
2. What are the potential opportunities and growth levers that your product will offer?
3. Who or which teams will be affected by the integration of the product?
4. What are the effects (economic) of this strategic partnership?

The NOTE framework presents a shift in the dynamic between SaaS organizations. Towards a more customer-centric approach. The market has been shifting towards the customer’s side for a while now.

And it will continue to do so as buyers self-direct themselves through the buying journey. Complexities are a norm in the SaaS market. The saturated snapshot of the current landscape has made the buyer cautious.

They cannot help but be overwhelmed by the choice. Frameworks are integral for SDR success. But what happens when the number of qualified leads drops, and sales teams find that MQLs will not go anywhere?

It is time for marketing to step up.

Marketing’s role in sales

High-quality content is said to be the biggest draw-in for a potential buyer. Yet, according to HubSpot’s 2024 sales report, SDRs have reported low-quality leads as their biggest problem.

MQLs are not up to the mark. Or the nurtured leads were not properly qualified before being handed into sales.

Marketing teams must improve their attribution if they see success. It means going beyond the basics and understanding the intent behind prospects’ behavior.

While CDPs and marketing automation tools have become beneficial in doing so. There are three things marketing teams must do:

1. Orchestrate buyer experiences to attract a relevant audience
2. Identify the behavior of most likely candidates by analyzing past behavior
3. Defining a lead with sales.

Sales and marketing alignment has been a buzzword for a long time. The two teams cannot work in silos anymore. It is expected of sales teams to listen to the buyer, and that has given them an edge over marketing.

Marketing teams must listen, too. And not just for sales but also for the buyer. When decision-makers interact on socials and on content, what do they look for?

For marketing teams, the best qualifier is their gated content and the rich history of data use. Data will reveal whether a buyer will qualify. Lead scoring can go a long way in helping marketing and sales align their goals together.

The main question here is: What matters?

Asking the right questions is crucial.

What are the right questions? Once marketing and sales teams have aligned and understood the buyer, they will have questions beyond the obvious.

The questions only come by enquiring into the industry they are selling to and learning everything possible about their ICPs.

One of the most important questions we have identified is: In their opinion, has their organization reached its potential?

It opens up all possibilities because every organization has room for further growth and improvement. And it lets you know where the organization is headed in terms of leadership and vision.

A potent indicator of growth.

With the right questions, SDRs can craft a personalized pitch for the right buyer and save time from the irrelevant ones.

On the other hand, marketing teams can craft market-resonating messages by asking the right questions and understanding the audience they are providing content.

Sales and Marketing is about listening.

BANT, MEDDIC, and NOTE are all designed to listen. The buyer has their needs and wants a remedy or risk-mitigating solution that will empower them to avoid risk in the market.

This need for growth can be fueled by marketing and sales teams listening to their ICPs and providing the right questions for them. By asking the right questions, marketing and sales teams will create intrigue in the buyers’ minds and help them break free of analysis paralysis.

By using the frameworks, sales, and marketing open up possibilities that go beyond the obvious.