Brochure: The Lead Automated Marketing Process (LAMP) Overview

Copyright © SMDI Ltd Aug. 2012 Contact: www.lamp-360.com 020 3397 0725

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Introduction

Lead generation, lead Nurturing and other customer facing processes are important in all industries, especially B2B and high tech. The challenge you face is educating prospects about new, complex and often niche propositions, especially if they are new or revolutionary products. Even when the proposition is simple or evolutionary, the competition can make getting ‘air time’ tricky for any company.

The LAMP is software with built in processes that consist of content, social media, email and intelligent application of sales/marketing resources. LAMP is available as a SaaS service. Subscriptions are available on a pay per user basis or our unique "pay per click model". The price point also makes LAMP attractive to SMEs.

It’s aimed at small and medium enterprises as it pre built processes are quick and effective, and easy to understand. Just one integrated product containing all that’s required, including the CRM functionality to full marketing automation and content marketing to undertake lead generation and other processes.

This brochure describes what LAMP is, how it works, its applications in business and its key features. We also describe the next steps available if you wish to see a demonstration, take a trial or purchase LAMP and how to get started.

What is LAMP?

We have coined the phrase Lead Automated Marketing Process or “LAMP” to describe this important process. Firstly LAMP is a process not a complicated toolkit. This means SMEs can set up the process quickly without having to worry about configuring hundreds of options and rules. Over time of course, users with more experience can control more complicated options.

LAMP is sophisticated software known in the market as marketing automation or content marketing software, it also includes all the functionality associated with CRM (Customer Relationship Management). LAMP has key additional features to CRM systems, think of it as CRM on steroids. This type of software also covers processes known as inbound marketing – measuring the results from inbound activities like Google Adwords and Social media. It also incorporates outbound marketing with email and tele-marketing. Over all LAMP is a very functional product. Note: if required, LAMP can be used as a standalone CRM product, ignoring the clever marketing automation features, and still provides good value.

BROCHURE: LAMP OVERVIEW LEAD AUTOMATED MARKETING PROCESS – “LAMP” - AN INTRODUCTION


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There are many applications of LAMP but predominantly these are important customer facing processes such as lead generation or lead nurturing. Hence LAMP is about initiating and managing the on-going relationships with prospects (and clients).

We use the world relationship, however a software program will always have a poor relationship, with anybody, compared to a human. LAMP however, cleverly integrates the relationship aspect using humans, along with its personalised, message selection and communication technology in an efficient way to generate leads with your prospects and then manage and nurture those leads until they become active sales opportunities and eventually hopefully customers.

The process does not stop there as you can then manage the on-going relationship with your customer, with LAMP, such as upsell, cross sell and renewals.

How LAMP Works

If we are going to build and manage a relationship with a prospect or customer we need to manage the “conversation”. This conversation is initiated and maintained using email and social media channels to manage the relationship based on a number of factors including:

The prospects positions in the buying cycle or awareness cycle

Demographic information

Activity and responses to emails, profile surveys, messages and human conversations

Lead score

Before we discuss the options available however, it’s important to note that your own company’s proposition1 has to be of interest to the prospect or customer or no interaction will occur.

Initially the challenge concerns your proposition and how to communicate this to prospects. LAMP handles the part of the communication by distributing the proposition message through email and social media. However, the first issue is that “content” must be created, found or re-purposed to describe your proposition to the different buyers.

This content could take many forms including:

Your web site

Videos

Graphics/images

Whitepapers

Blog articles

Facebook Pages, LinkedIn Pages

Infographics

Email template

There are many types of collateral/content and only are few are mentioned here. This document you are reading is a brochure, it was designed to explain an overview of LAMP to prospects who are already “interested” or “aware”. It is not designed to generate that interest in the first place, with the “unawares”. For this purpose, we would probably use a “whitepaper”2.

1 A Value Proposition is the triad of the target audience, the features and benefits, and their customer application

2 Whitepaper – a long exposition usually about an industry issue or topic. The length allows an in depth discussion

of issue and potential solutions. It is usually written in the 3rd

person and is not an advert for product or company. It may however demonstrate your expertise and thought leadership to anyone who reads it.


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Figure 1 - The Awareness Cycle or Buyer’s Journey

LAMP has a module to help you manage the content – its curation. We start to understand that content can take many forms and cover many topics. However, only certain topics are relevant at certain stages of the Awareness Cycle or Buyer’s Journey.

A typical prospect starts out Unaware and moves to being Aware and eventually through to Interested, Looking and Customer. These descriptions of the buyer’s journey stages are arbitrary, but serve well for many purposes.

In the diagram above, we show five stages of a typical buyer’s journey through the Awareness Cycle, these stages are described in more detail below.

Stage Description

Unaware They have no concept of who you are or what you do, they may not even be are or acknowledge they have a problem

Aware The buyer responds to one of your marketing campaigns and becomes aware of who you are and what you do, he recognises he has a problem

Interested If the buyer recognises a need for your solution, they may show interest and request information about your product. He recognises he has a problem and may be interested in finding out more about the issues and ways of handling them

Looking The buyer starts to actively research solutions. If the buyer is impressed with your solution, then they may consider actively looking at it. At this point, pricing, case studies and implementation issues are of most interest

Customer The buyer purchases and becomes a customer and you need to service and educate them

For each Awareness Stage and proposition combination a communication “Stream” of emails (and other contact channels such as social media, tele-marketing and SMS) and associated collateral / content that should be of interest to the prospect is created.


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We now have content, and now we need to communicate that content to prospects depending on where each of them is in the buyer’s journey. This is where the built in processes and automation come in handy, it makes the complex and laborious task of managing all these interactions easily.

So the LAMP software selects or is told which messages/communication are relevant to each stage of the buyer’s journey and communications can be personalised to each prospect as well.

These messages are then distributed to prospects via a variety of channels:

Email – personalised emails configured for the content type

Social media sites such as Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest

Sales or tele-marketing – calls made to prospects at key times

SMS messages

The main channels for generating interest are email and social media because they can cover a lot of prospects and are cheap. We recommend the use of sales and tele-marketing working in a reactive way to deal with incoming leads, generated as a result of the outbound communications. This is much more (cost) effective than cold calling.

The diagram below shows the typical steps we have now outlined in a simple process.

Key points in this simple email only example:

Initial batches of bulk emails drip fed out at 250 per day to drip feed leads through to ales/tele-marketing

Each email is customised and relevant to its associated piece of collateral


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Mainly whitepapers used as collateral in the Unaware stage. They are sent out on a regular basis i.e. every 29 days or so

Responders to emails are ‘profiled’ by Profile Survey forms and called by intelligent tele-marketing staff who refer to other interaction and demographic data and sources (social media). In this example prospect responds on 3rd email./whitepaper.

Leads qualified and passed to sales or move to appropriate Stream for further email communication, next Stream is Unaware

Leads can also scored, so only leads <x points are passed to sales or internal sales/tele-marketing as appropriate

Buyers move through the Awareness Cycle at their own speed

Nurture or Lead Nurtures become very important (see Applications of LAMP section below). These Nurture campaigns, whilst not shown on the diagram, themselves can consist of many individual Steps in the Nurture Stream.

The diagram below shows a more comprehensive LAMP process with additional steps in each of the main Streams of communication. If this process is set up at one time over a few days, subject to availability of collateral, the lead generation process can then run automatically for many months. However, with more attention and regular review and tuning, more effective results will ensue.

Notes:

In the Nurture stages, you are able to schedule tele-marketing calls as part of the Stream.


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In the Aware stage, note we have shorter timeframe between steps (1-2 days), in case we have just discovered the interest at a crucial stage in their buying process and they are active and ready to move forward.

Applications of LAMP

Once the LAMP process is understood it can be applied to many different sales and marketing situations, the most common are:

Lead generation: Perhaps the most important use of LAMP is generating new leads. The LAMP process is ideal to create brand awareness and product knowledge in your chosen markets. Based on the quality and accuracy of your emails, contact can be obtained with very senior people in large organisations to be called by your experienced, intelligent telemarketers.

Cold opt-in contact data can be legitimately purchased to widen your base of prospects. Whilst conversion rates are quite low the process still works effectively.

Lead nurturing: The perennial problem in sales and marketing is what to do with leads that are interested but not yet ready to move forward. The problem in most organisations and systems is where does responsibility lie. The challenge is that leads may move quickly from marketing to sales and back and it needs to be clear who and what is occurring with these leads. Often long lists of call backs are maintained in a spread sheet or CRM system, follow up is sporadic at best.

The LAMP process automatically handles this challenge and through the use of focussed emails and the collateral ensures that prospects are nurtured until ready to buy. If a prospect re-engages via email they can be swiftly be re-qualified by tele-marketing before being progressed to sales, again.

Call backs can be scheduled at the appropriate time, or with longer intervals, safe in the knowledge that regular emails will stay in contact with the prospect, and keep our company and solution in the front of mind.

In the meantime, use lead nurturing with any of your existing prospect data and with cold opt-in data (see above) once interest has been generated.

Renewals

With many products and solutions these days, such as SaaS solutions as well as traditional on-premise licence offerings there are often key periods, usually after each 1 or 3 year anniversary where the customer is susceptible to switching, as they come out of a contractual period.

A LAMP process can be set up to automatically recognise the shift in treatment of the customer as they come up to a critical deadline. As well as reminding them of the deadline and ensuring that new contracts or invoices are raised, the system can educate the customer in the new features, product road maps as well as considering upselling training and support.

Customer retention

Closely related to renewals campaigns the customer retention problem is ideal for LAMP. The key to keeping customers is training and service. Training is ensuring they understand the functionality and use of the product or service they already have. Ensuring they are aware of new releases and kept up to date ensures they will have a better experience. Service and support help create a good impression. Many companies have extensive support and maintenance services but are very poor at educating their customers.


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Events and user groups: In addition marketing and relationship building opportunities such as customer events, user groups and entertaining can also be put through the LAMP process.

Events are attractive in the LAMP process because a single event is normally a justification for a whole series of communications:

Attending events is a softer approach than a face to face meeting and certain decision makers may respond well to this approach. Finally a well organised, repeatable event can be a cost effective lead generation technique – you meet many people in ‘one’ meeting.

Non Prospect / Customer: LAMP can also be used with other relationships in a similar way. Other groups to consider using LAMP with are:

Employees – on boarding

Suppliers

Partners

Application by Industries

LAMP is applicable to any industry that wants to generate or nurture leads and/or manage relationships. It has particular relevancy to a few specific sectors or industries, including:

High Tech

Franchises

Marketing Agencies

Tele-marketing agency

Next Steps

Now that you have learnt about LAMP, you have several options available:

View a Demonstration

If this is your first time learning about LAMP we recommend you view one of our demonstrations. There are number of ways to access the demonstrations:

The best option is to ask us for a personal 1-2-1 web based demo

Alternatively you can join one of our weekly webinars at 9.30 GMT/BST on a Wednesday morning

See one of our online demonstrations

All these options are detailed on our web site demonstration page here.

http://www.lamp-360.com/product-and-proposition/demonstrations.html


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Take a Trial

Once you’ve seen the demonstration, you may wish to progress to a free 30 day trial. This gives access to a one user system that allows you to send up to 1000 emails. As a bonus, once you have sent 1000 emails, you are allocated another 1000 emails, both must be used within the 30 days.

In the trial you have access to the full functionality of LAMP but are limited to the single user, amount of data and number of emails/messages. You can continue to use LAMP for free with the “Open” edition which allows 2 users, with limited emails, data and support.

Sign up for the trial here, then access the Getting Started Guide here.

Get Started with LAMP

a. Purchase

Once you have completed the trial, or are ready to move ahead with LAMP, you need to go to the pricing page to select a plan and then purchase the software. LAMP purchases operate with the pre-purchase of credits – these credits are used up depending on the pricing plan you choose. All plans give access to the software and processes on a subscription SaaS basis.

There are two main plans:

Price per user: With this option, the pricing is based on a number of parameters based around the number of users, amount of data and number of emails sent. Prices from £25 per user

Price per lead: You are using a product like LAMP to get results, drive the business through lead generation and increased sales. Pay only for various results and leads. From £1 per lead.

Click here to go to the pricing and purchase page.

b. Get Started Guide

The product provides a getting started guide (here), which is designed to take you through the process of running your LAMP campaigns. It divided into Getting Started, Next Steps and Advanced.

Each section runs through the steps to develop sophisticated campaigns in increasing levels of detail and complexity to match your experience with LAMP.

We recommend running through the easy Getting Started section, which should only take a couple of hours, depending on the availability of data and content.

c. Marketing Plans

Whilst it is very possible to sign up to LAMP and get started, we do recommend that you take a short time to plan out your marketing and led generation activities over the next few months. Access our planning templates here. Alternatively contact us for help with a marketing plan.

Learn More

Review the web site: www.lamp-360.com

Check out the LAMP Proposition, Theory, LAMP vs. CRM pages etc.

Contact us for more information

For any other queries, please call us on 020 3397 0725 or email [email protected]

http://www.lamp-360.com/subscribe/trial.html

http://www.lamp-360.com/resources/getting-started.html

http://www.lamp-360.com/product-and-proposition/lamp-pricing.html

http://www.lamp-360.com/resources/whitepapers.html

www.lamp-360.com


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Appendix – LAMP’s Key Features

Comprehensive, single product (ease of maintenance, lower costs and skills, no duplication): LAMP is unique in providing all the functionality of CRM and marketing automation and content marketing in one single product, with a consist set of data, results and interfaces.

Full CRM: LAMP can be used as a normal CRM product but it has a couple of unique features that no other CRM has:

1. Hierarchical campaign structure 2. Single instance of contact and multiple relationships with a contact 3. Integrated sale sand buying cycles 4. Pre-defined best practice sales process with sales and marketing alignment

Inbuilt Processes (quick start): The LAMP system embodies a best practice approach to lead generation, development and management. The benefit to an SME is that you can have best practice processes more or less "out of the box".

The problem with traditional CRM systems used for lead generation is that whilst they have a lot of functionality, in fact it’s too much for most users, so it takes days to configure it to work as you want it.

With LAMP, there's limited configuration, you don't need to change what works. You concentrate on creating the collateral (content), usually in the form of whitepapers that is of interest to your prospects, load your data and off you go!

Pay per click and user subscriptions models (low risk, flexible): LAMP is available on a "pay per user" basis, where there are generous limits on the number of emails, data and storage per user. However, if you want you can pay by results - you only pay when you generate interactions and sales ready leads.

Hierarchical Campaign Based (keeping things simple): When you "login" to LAMP, uniquely you actually login to a specific Campaign, and a user can only login to the Campaigns they are allocated to. This Campaign (which in turn is part of the higher categorizations of Project and "Division") could be as simple and general as 'new business' or 'account management', or it could be very specific: '23rd April Road show Event'. When you are "in" a Campaign, multiple aspects of the product are automatically configured to reflect this, including: activities, opportunities, emails, data, templates, collateral.

All of these automatic settings, save time, remove mistakes, and remove a lot of distracting things from your work process - keeping things simple and focussed.

This allows organisations with branch, franchise or divisional structures and operations, where they currently use different CRM system, to provide a coherent single solution across the business – one CRM with many compatible CRMs within it.


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Agreed Lead Definition (sales and marketing alignment): sales and marketing resources are expensive, they need to be “singing of the same hymn sheet”! A key way of ensuring this is to have agreed definitions of a lead and who has responsibility for it at any stage/time.

We have a specific definition of a Marketing Qualified Lead, this can be accepted or rejected by sales. Normally, if its rejected it needs more qualification or it’s a longer term lead nurture.

The clear definition allows better reporting and insight into the efficacy of lead generation and sales departments.

Lead grading and qualification (manage sales closure): Classify and score all leads according to (y)our methodology or use ours. Leads are scored and surveyed automatically and can be passed to sales automatically.

We have BANT and MANDACT built in for sales qualification and these can be changed to your requirements.

Unique Contacts exist only once (Reduces data duplication): Normally in a “CRM” system, you create Opportunities which are given a Sales Status, or in tele-marketing terms often some form of Grading. So your company/division could have multiple Opportunities with a prospect and they will all be registered in the system, with their own grades.

Now in the case of an agency, who represent multiple clients, potentially to the same prospect, you need to manage multiple statuses per Contact. If you have created an Opportunity, each can have its own Status. But if the Prospect or Contact is at the "lower" Unaware or Aware stages of the buyer's journey you won’t have created Opportunities yet. So if you wish to maintain different relationships with the same prospect on behalf of your different clients, you have a problem.

LAMP handles this. It also allows you to have 1 unique contact for each real contact in the world. Avoiding duplicates as much as possible is key for on-going maintenance and cost reduction for CRM type systems. Along with the automatic data audit, cleanse and synchronization, these make LAMP accurate, compliant and easy to understand.

Another use of this unique feature is for Global Account Management - where in a complex, international sales process, multiple people from multiple subsidiaries, partners and divisions are dealing with the same global account and its contacts. Franchise and branch operations can also benefit from this approach.

Opportunities and sales features

Sales cycle and buying cycle catered for simultaneously (correct handling of prospects): Most CRM systems allow you to track the status of a lead through the sales cycle. There are normally statues that can be set on an Opportunity to values such as Lead identified/ Qualified/ Value Proposition given/Proposal/Client intent/Closed Won or Dead Lost. LAMP however, extends this in two ways:

Firstly, it allows you to have multiple relationships and associated sales statuses with the same contact, this may be for different divisions, brands or propositions.

Secondly, and importantly, LAMP keeps track of the position of the contact in their buyer's


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journey through the Awareness Cycle. When somebody starts out as a suspect in a contact list for your marketing campaigns they may be classed as Unaware. After a conversation or responding to an email campaign they start to become Aware of your propositions. Other stages in the buyer's journey could be Looking, Interested, and eventually Customer.

Intelligence Gathering (Maximise intelligence and investment in CRM): when you find out useful information or “intelligence”, that can be used on other projects, the information can be catalogued (by Focus Sector) in LAMP. This facilitates automatic retrieval when setting up new Campaigns or researching data. Understanding what's happening in a market, uncovering leads you already have, before you start a campaign can be very useful

Survey – when specific surveys / or questions are required to be asked LAMP allows you to add these custom fields to the system – useful for market research and market entry purposes

Marketing Features

Content Management (keep track of media): LAMP is in many ways a content based marketing system for generating leads. LAMP works by sending emails and messages via Social media, but to generate interest and avoid being spam, it uses supporting high quality collateral in the form of whitepapers, media files and events.

LAMP allows you to keep track of your collateral which is important when key content pieces like a whitepaper, will often be repurposed into other forms – like blog articles, info graphics.

LAMP understands and works with these different media types - for instance in an Event - you need a venue, a date and attendees - not so with a video file.

LAMP also tracks views and downloads of all content via the different channels so you can see what content is most attractive to your prospects.

Telemarketing and sales workflows (efficiency and ease of use): Tele-marketing and sales personnel are vital for generating leads. These resources are expensive but have a high conversion rate compared to other methods. Support for these job functions in LAMP is key for lead generation. If you are using tele-marketing or internal sales, it’s important to make this process as efficient as possible and to avoid cold calling as much as possible, which is what the LAMP process provides.

LAMP's tele-marketing and sales interface is designed to specifically enhance the efficiency of those following up leads, whether they are in sales, internal (inside) sales or tele-marketing. Lead follow-up with LAMP is not so much about volume of calls, it's about understanding the potentially rich interactions your company has had with a prospect and making the calls into relevant conversations, at the appropriate time.

At the end of a call the user writes up the notes of the call as per usual and can then record several the required actions very easily and quickly: log calls and call backs, send emails, change Streams, record opportunities and intelligence.

The benefit is an optimized workflow with less distractions, allowing the caller to concentrate on the call and how to move the prospect to the next stage of the buying and sales journeys.


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Other features

Landing pages and micro sites: Whenever you load and configure an item of collateral into LAMP it creates its own dedicated Landing page, which can be optimized. This allows anyone visiting and registering on this page to be created as a lead in LAMP. Any campaigns outside of LAMP such as Google Adwords can be sent to these pages to generate leads and conversions.

Profiling and profile surveys: To support tele-marketing conversations, profile questions are invaluable. Profile questions are not detailed surveys, but a few simple quick to answer questions that establish the profile of the prospect along with some aspects of his needs and issues.

Typically, 10-12 questions will suffice, but these are delivered in 3-4 batches. The first time a prospect interacts with us, he is asked the first 3 questions, the next interaction the next 3 questions and so on.

Usually you should start off with company profile questions (size, industry etc.) and then progress to needs and issues.

About LAMP-360

LAMP-360 (SMDI Ltd) was founded in 2003 and became one of Europe’s leading sales and lead generation consultancies. SMDI has provided market evaluation, lead generation and sales outsourcing services to a variety of companies, small, large and across multiple sectors.

In 2011 SMDI commercialised software it had developed over several years to manage its internal processes, predominantly working n lead generation and sales for clients. This software (LAMP) contained many innovative features that eventually came to be known in generally as Marketing Automation. More recently, LAMP has added in Content marketing features including integration with Social Media

LAMP-360 is now fully focused on building out the product and marketing this worldwide to its target audience of small and medium enterprises, and sticking to its mission of being a software company, providing easy to understand, value for money marketing processes.

LAMP-360 (SMDI Ltd)

UK Office:

Unit 12, The Power House

Higham Mead

Chesham

Buckinghamshire

HP5 2AH

Phone: 020 3397 07265

Email: [email protected]

Web site: www.lamp-360.com

http://www.lamp-360.com/

Brochure: The Lead Automated Marketing Process (LAMP) Overview

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