LeadsCon Connect to Convert 2019 Recap

I had the recent privilege of presenting twice at LeadsCon Connect to Convert 2019 in Boston, which is an educational conference and expo dedicated solely to the Calls, Clicks, Search, and Shares sectors of the lead generation industry. This year, the focus of Connect to Convert was marketing and sales funnels, and over 1,000 industry professionals were in attendance.

Having worked in B2B and B2C lead generation marketing and writing for the past two decades, and especially now that I work at ConnectLeader to promote our all-in-one sales engagement platform, this industry is near and dear to my heart. In order to spread the word about this conference, I created this recap of takeaways from the day I spent there.

Email Marketing Fight Club

My first presentation was “Welcome to Email Marketing Fight Club”, which I co-presented with behavioral science marketer, Nancy Harhut, the Chief Creative Officer of HBT Marketing. After inducting the attendees into Email Marketing Fight Club (but telling them that the first rule was that they SHOULD talk about it – and also telling them that my second co-presenter, Tyler Durden, was refusing to speak because I broke his rules), I discussed the email marketing metrics that really matter; the unsubscribe button; using humor and fear in email subject lines; and presented two case studies on the power of scare tactics in email. Nancy then showcased her behavioral science background by presenting five moves and tips that give marketing emails a fighting chance, including “eye magnet” words and the ripple effect of the Consistency Principle. The audience was engaged and invested.

It’s Who You Know

During both of my presentations, I mentioned a statistic I read recently from Harvard Business Review that states that 84% of B2B buyers start their purchasing process with a referral. Do you include sharing buttons on your website, blog posts, and in your marketing emails? If not, it’s time to start doing so to increase the referrals that people are making for your products and company.

84% of B2B buyers start their purchasing process with a referral. – Harvard Business Review

Make Life Easier for Salespeople

After my first presentation, I attended some other talks, including one on “Tools to Make Life Easier for Your Sales People”. The presenters were Scott Payne, Owner and Principal Consultant of SDP Solutions, and host of a podcast called Lead Management Masterminds; Aru Anavekar, Founder and CEO of BotSplash (a company that engages customers over chat platforms); and Ethan Ewing, Founder and CEO of ProPair (a turnkey AI application that puts leads into the hands of loan officers that are most likely to convert them). Takeaways from this presentation included:

• Learn more about your own system by sitting down with your customers and your sales reps every month to hear their objectives to using your system and the responses they’re getting. You might find the system is more bogged-down than it looks to you because you’re not using it every day.
• Texting shouldn’t be just used as a reminder in a drip campaign. It should be incorporated into all of your marketing.
• There’s a 95% read rate for texts compared to the number of people who respond to phone calls.
• What do you do with leads that come in over the weekend? If you wait until Monday to contact them, you’re losing out. Leads that come in on Saturday and are replied to that weekend by a sales rep have a 10% higher conversion rate. If the lead comes in and is contacted on the same day of the weekend, that number increases significantly. The conversation that happens on that Saturday or Sunday can be just a 5-minute (if that) brief talk to set up a real call for later in the week.

Creating the Right Content

Another compelling presentation I attended was “Content that Converts: Creating Sales-Driven Content That Delivers”, which was presented by Kathy Bryan, Senior VP of Corporate Marketing and Communications at Digital Media Solutions and Patrick Cunningham, Director of Brand Marketing at NJ Lenders Corp. Takeaways from this presentation included:

• 50% of Google searches result in zero clicks (yes, you read that right. Half of all Google searches result in ZERO clicks on an organic or paid search result) because people don’t find what they’re looking for right away.
• Think about the content on your website. Is there any content on your site that you wouldn’t spend money to drive traffic to through a paid advertisement? If so, what is it doing on your site?
• Don’t create a blog just to have a blog. All content on your site, including a blog, should fully align with your company’s objectives and not just be a place to discuss your latest interest.

How’s Your Website Performing?

The last session I attended before my second one of the day was “Using Behavioral Intelligence to Double Website Performance”, presented by Tom Shapiro, CEO of Stratabeat, Inc. Takeaways from this presentation included:

• Heat mapping and visual sourcing of where people are viewing/clicking on your website is important to see where people are interested.
• “Rage clicking” is a real thing. People will click on a part of your website that looks like it should be clickable, and it’s not. However, they will click again and again to see if they wind up with a click at some point. If you see this happening during heat mapping and visual sourcing, make that section clickable or move things around.

B2B Industry Trends in 2020

My day at LeadsCon Connect to Convert 2019 ended with my second presentation, “2020 B2B Outlook: Where Do We Go from Here?” (and let me know if you recognize and are singing the second part of that title…). This panel discussion, which focused on results of a proprietary B2B marketing and MarTech research study conducted on line by Chief Marketer, was moderated by Beth Negus Viveiros, the Managing Editor for “Chief Marketer”, and my co-presenters were Ashley DePaolo, President of CommCreative; and Ruth P. Stevens, President of eMarketing Strategy. One part of the discussion revolved around lead nurturing and how important face-to-face meetings are in the sales process. I mentioned that here at ConnectLeader, our sales reps can have “face to face” meetings with distant prospects thanks to video conferencing. We have noticed that prospects are more engaged when they know they’re being seen on video versus when they’re on a call and could be doing or paying attention to anything else.

FOMO is Real

Do you have FOMO (the fear of missing out) and feel like you missed a great event? Attend LeadsCon Connect to Convert in 2020? The conference will be in Las Vegas at the end of March and then back in Boston in September.

Exceed Your Sales Quota

Reach out to us here at ConnectLeader today to see how the right sales acceleration and engagement software can help your sales team increase their daily productivity by up to 800%. Simply click here or give us a call at 800-955-5040.