The Best Ways to Convert Your Prospects into Profits

Blog: The Tibco Blog

Reading Time: 3 minutes

There is gold waiting to be mined…your prospect list. But how do you reach out to these prospects and how do you convert them into profits?

Some of the greatest marketing talent in the tech industry, both at TIBCO and with our partners, met to discuss this issue for organizations large and small. Not all businesses have the ability to test, optimize, and maximize resources to convert leads. TIBCO’s first LinkedIn Live sets out to discover the key steps to convert leads—regardless of existing marketing team size or support systems.

Judit Szabo, Director of Vertical Campaigns at TIBCO, and Zoran Mustac, Marketing Director at Ascention, joined me to discuss how partners can convert leads with low cost (or free) marketing campaigns that drive pipeline. They shared their tips on how to engage with prospects, keep them engaged, and how to leverage vendor-provided tools, like TIBCO’s new Partner Marketing Launchpad, to deliver results.

Here are 4 main ways you can leverage your prospects into profits.

1. Identify your Prospects

What are prospects and how do you get them?

Prospects are the names (or customer information) you have acquired through various sources such as a website form or from your booth at an event. Most importantly, your current customers are prospects for cross-selling or upselling.

Figures from Marketing Metrics show that your chances of selling to an existing customer are 60-70 percent, compared with 5-20 percent for new customers. Always keep an eye out on your “gold mine” of prospects.

2. Align with Your Sales Team

With the recent emphasis on remote working, now is the best time to mobilize around new marketing tools. Start by developing a cohesive workflow aligned with your sales and marketing departments. Both large and small organizations can successfully nurture their prospects if teams are aligned.

A recent McKinsey article states that some sales organizations are deverling double-digit ROI gains by bringing science to sales and by harnessing customer data.

When sales teams are better informed through increased data and insights, they can nurture a higher proportion of prospects along the sales funnel and convert them to the customer stage. Tools like TIBCO’s Launchpad can provide this automation and increased insights.

When sales teams are better informed, they can nurture a higher proportion of prospects along the sales funnel and convert them to customers. Tools like TIBCO’s Launchpad can provide this automation and increased insights.
Click To Tweet

3. Nurture Your Leads

Relationships with prospects need time to develop and build trust. An educational and supportive approach is often much more effective then an aggressive sales approach.

The best way to move prospects down the sales funnel is by “nurturing the lead,” which involves listening to prospects’ needs, providing the information customers need through engaging and relevant content, and maintaining a personal connection until they are ready to buy.

It is important to take the right approach in lead management that neither allows a lead to be routed to the wrong person nor contacted by sales before they are ready. According to a study by Marketing Sherpa, 73 percent of all B2B leads are not sales-ready—a figure that emphasizes the need for carefully nurturing prospects to convert.

We can find it easy to overlook prospects simply because they haven’t already made a purchase, but this could mean losing sales at a later stage. Taking a long-term view is key to maximize the value or “mine the gold” of your prospects.

4. Leverage Marketing Tools to Reach Your Prospects

The best way to turn your prospects into profits is to utilize marketing tools that manage your prospects, which involves determining how frequently you reach out to prospects and the most appropriate channels for doing so.

To get the most from your marketing, partner with vendors that provide assets or offer marketing automation tools. One example is the TIBCO Partner Marketing Launchpad, developed to give partners access to demand generation campaigns with the right marketing tools.

TIBCO launched this solution with partners just a few months ago, and the feedback speaks for itself. According to the CEO of Ascention, W Daniel Cox III, “Having industry-tested marketing expertise at our disposal as part of the TIBCO Partner Program expands our capabilities and means we are even more focused on, and dedicated to, serving our clients.”

TIBCO’s Partner Program has done all the work to pinpoint the most pressing customer concerns—ensuring campaigns speak to customer-driven issues and needs. Partners who have used TIBCO Launchpad have seen response rates in excess of 14 percent.

To grow a global partner community, our success depends on our partners’ success, and the TIBCO Partner Program aims to achieve this with the right marketing tools in place.

Watch the LinkedIn Live

The key to the prospect-to-profits nurturing process is the collaboration and cooperation with partners, which we systematically achieve through the TIBCO Partner Program.

Ready to drive your marketing pipeline? Watch the “Prospects to Profits” LinkedIn Live to learn more and comment on how your company handles leads and nurtures prospects.

The post The Best Ways to Convert Your Prospects into Profits first appeared on The TIBCO Blog.