Sell Twice as Much by Showing Your Prospects What They Actually Want to See

If you want to be a great marketer, you need to keep your audience in mind by providing content that’s relevant to them. If you stop talking at your prospects and start talking to them, you’re going to start a discussion driven by value. You’re going to need that if you actually want to sell.

At Mitratech, we've primarily provided legal matter management—“matter” being anything that comes across the desk of someone in your legal department. The software gives everyone in the company a central repository where they can access reliable information. We also handle e-billing, legal hold, contracts management, entity management and compliance solutions. Over the course of my two years at Mitratech, I have moved from an intern position to my current role as Marketing Operations Associate. I’ve seen just what it takes to keep a highly skeptical audience (legal departments) engaged and interested. 

We use Marketo to speak to our prospects in the most effective and engaging way. We don’t just have a list of emails and blast them with any and everything we produce. We make sure to send only the content that we feel is most relevant to our prospect. That’s where marketing automation comes in.

Part of marketing automation is certainly about saving time with automating emails and other tasks. But for me, it’s really about helping us execute quality marketing at scale. I can reach these prospects in the most effective way by showing them exactly what will resonate with them the most. I know that information, not because we’ve spent tons of time figuring it out, but because we’re able to use Marketo to do that.

They’re Right in Front of You

Over the years, Mitratech has expanded its services outside just the legal department. This presents a huge cross-sell opportunity for us. 

When you have a breadth of product offerings like we do, chances are many of those products are applicable to your customers. The key is uncovering what is relevant for them. Using Marketo, we can see what products they will be interested in based on their activity and how they’re interacting with emails and other content. All of your existing clients are prospects, which is a considerable opportunity. 

Cross-selling is so effective because it’s building off of the relationship we already have with the customer. This isn’t a cold lead. It’s not someone we haven’t spoken with before. It’s someone who knows our company, knows how valuable our product is, and because we can see what they’re interacting with, we know the right thing to show them. When you combine all of those aspects, it becomes a compelling offering. 

From Any Lead to the Right Lead

First on my agenda was to improve our lead lifecycle system. Historically, Mitratech had a “quantity over quality” approach to our leads. We’d focus on getting as many leads as we could, then pass those off to sales. But we’d only think about the number of MQLs we got, not whether they made sense for our sales team or if the leads cared about what we’re selling. We needed to realign sales and marketing and make sure that we were finding more relevant leads for sales. 

In order to do that, we needed to improve our understanding of their lifecycle. Now when a lead enters our system, we’ll timestamp it, along with every other stage that they hit. This allows us to see how long they’re spending in each stage, how fast they're moving through, and then we can see which channels are moving the quickest and closing the biggest deals. You’re not going to improve your velocity if you can’t track it.

Using Marketo for these automation tasks is turning us into a data-driven company. We no longer simply throw money at an email campaign or event and hope it does the job. We can see exactly what’s working so we know where to shift our resources. 

We have bookings goals that we’ve separated by information like segment, region, or product. Now that we have the data on which of those should be converting, we can understand where we’re falling behind. We also truly know how long it takes us to go from an MQL to a closed deal. Using this data, our average quarterly count of cross-selling opportunities have increased by 2X, with the average deal size of those increasing by 8%.

Since we also now know how much money these deals bring in, we know how much money we can spend on the campaign. And if we know how much a campaign like an event should bring in, we know we can run X number of events to finish off a successful year. 

Putting it All Together

At Mitratech, I know the content that we’re putting together is great. That’s a hard thing to do well. But even harder than that is knowing how to get it to the correct people. 

Using Marketo, we’re able to see that someone has taken the time to read our page on our policy management software, for example. We have a ton of other great content, but that person doesn’t have the time to filter through it all. 

But now, we can present that content to them because we know it’s right for their needs. Best of all, it’s all automated. Not only is it saving time, it's doing the job better. We’re thinking about that prospect and what they want to see. That’s the only way we can cut through the noise and reach them.

Think about the amount of irrelevant content you see every single day. Do you interact with it? Do you buy that product? Of course not. Don’t be that content.