Outbound Lead Generation Team Collaboration: Creating Multi-Channel Relationship Marketing Programs

March 19, 2013

Creating Multi-Channel Relationship Marketing Programs
This is the fifth and final post in a 5-part series on how managing inter-team collaboration can improve results for outbound lead generation teams.
In my previous post, I covered a few tips that outbound lead generation team leaders can use to collaborate with marketing to generate better lists for the team. In this post, I will cover a topic that most companies aren’t really good at until they have the fundamentals of marketing and outbound lead generation nailed: Creating multi-channel relationship marketing programs.

A Fast Track to Stronger Relationships with Your Prospects & Customers

The goal of any relationship marketing program is to drive awareness, interest, and purchase for all prospects that enter a buying process. Doing this extremely well (which most companies do not) requires the ability to pick up on buying signals, and deliver:

  • the right content
  • to the right prospect
  • at the right time
  • over the right channel

The outbound lead generation team is really just one of those channels.
Some marketing teams go down the road of building sophisticated marketing programs, (sometimes called lead nurturing programs), but they are not always integrated with outbound lead generation team calling efforts, or other channels for that matter.
A truly integrated multi-channel relationship marketing program touches a prospect/customer through multiple channels (email, direct mail, events, phone, social, etc.) to develop the relationship, and tracks the touch points to provide intelligence to the organization on the status of the relationship. A human touch point from an outbound lead generation rep early on in the process can help accelerate that relationship. When done well, this is a fast track to building a relationship with your prospects and customers, but is extremely difficult to scale without having the right elements in place.

Mapping Content and Touch Points to Your Buyer’s Journey

A great way to get started is by building a content grid to map out your buyer personas, their respective buying process stages, and finally content that aligns with each stage for each persona. Then consider what channels can best be used to deliver that content or message to your prospects/customers at the right time. Explaining this in further detail would require a lot more than a single blog post, but here are some great resources available to help you get started:

While these resources are a great way to get started none of them go into great detail about how to integrate outbound lead generation as a channel in a relationship marketing program. Ultimately, the outbound lead generation team can collaborate with marketing by providing feedback into the program, and by making sure it is aligned with the team’s process. When an outbound lead generation rep updates a lead in the CRM system that update should impact what content is triggered to be sent to the prospect, and vice-versa.
An excellent resource that includes more specific guidance on integrating outbound lead generation into relationship marketing efforts is the book Lead Generation for the Complex Sales, by Brian Carroll of MECLABs. This book does an excellent job of walking through the entire process step by step.
If you have any experience integrating outbound lead generation teams into multi-channel marketing efforts it would great to hear about your experience. Please feel free to leave comments below.
Google” target=”_blank”>by Ori Yankelev

VP, Sales

Ori Yankelev is Vice President, Sales at <a href="https://www.ownbackup.com/">Own Backup</a>. He was previously a Sales and Marketing Associate for OpenView.