New prospect generation, sometimes referred to as Lead Generation, positions itself at the beginning of Marketing Automation and at the top of the sales funnel. Companies that don't have a grasp on their leads and a methodology to generate them, probably aren’t quite ready for a Marketing Automation system, which helps handle the next steps.

Whether leads are generated via traffic to a website, attendees at a trade show, or a purchased lead list, this part of the funnel is the widest. Lead nurturing enables a company to automate drip marketing campaigns that send relevant messages over time, based on prospect behaviors and predefined campaign steps.

In a social media-driven world, an enterprise cannot simply abide by traditional marketing logic. Social Marketing seeks to develop and integrate marketing techniques to influence social behavior and benefit the target audience. Social analytics provides insight into who shares a company's content, social conversion rates, and how much social lift results from your campaigns. Social engagement and promotion creates social applications such as polls, sweepstakes, and referral programs. Social sharing and campaigns can be shared via automatic posts to social sites, or via intelligent share buttons. Social listening and tracking can then tell what is being said about a company's specific campaign.

All of this information can then be tied back together to a given campaign and provide a beneficial impact to the bottom line.

Marketing Automation allows companies better insight into scoring and grading leads based on demographics, specific prospect behaviors, & BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeframe) criteria.

• How frequently are customers and/or potential customers interacting online with a company and its offerings?

• When was the last time interaction occurred?

• Is this a Marketing Qualified Lead or a Sales Qualified Lead?

Online behavior tracking can be linked with real-time triggered emails that listen for specific customer behaviors and events and respond with appropriate real-time messages. Triggers like these can be highly customized and based on any data that you are tracking.

Customer & account maintenance is a critical process for all types of companies, but especially enterprise clients.

Companies in this space typically keep careful track of Company Lifecycle Duration (typically the number of months or years that a customer retains their service) and Average Revenue Per User (ARPU – which tracks the dollars that are spent per month with the company). Companies that are able to keep their customers longer and raise the average revenue per month over time, typically become leaders in their space.

Customer & Account Maintenance includes a broad set of process service modifications including up-sell/cross-sell, suspension, and disconnect/cancel. Customer Maintenance is closely related to the sub-domain Customer Service, which handles important though not service-impacting customer requests.

Overage notifications inform customers once they have reached a certain percentage threshold of the allotted usage of their service. One example that most people would be familiar with would be an alert from a mobile phone provider stating the user has reached X% of their data usage for the month. Depending on the needs, multiple thresholds for these alerts can be set.

Customer Success is focused on proactively meeting and exceeding clients' expectations. In a call center environment, a customer success agent is monitoring customer usage, product and service performance, churn, trialing results - all things related to creating and retaining customers.

Customer Success agents are the gatekeepers for CSAT/NPS surveys, following up on results one-on-one with all deemed worthy. It is also within their purview to reengage to determine if their wants and needs have shifted, and provide an up-sell/cross-sell path to meet the customer's evolving needs.

Data - both customer and transactional - drive the customer success agent's focus, and extending each client's lifecycle with their organization the brass ring.

These sales processes are the central methods for increasing average revenue per user, an essential growth metric for most businesses using a recurring revenue business model. These businesses also focus heavily on annual contract value.

Up-selling is the process of selling more of a particular service. For example, moving from 6 MB internet speed for $25 per month to 18 MB for $45 per month is a typical up-sell.

Cross-selling is when a customer purchases a separate product or service in addition to what they had originally anticipated buying. For example, if the customer originally intended to buy internet service, but the sales representative convinced them to purchase phone and cable services too, the sales representative successfully performed cross-selling.

Expansion is the process of broadening the selling engagement with the customer to additional locations, business units, or channels. This process is not independent of up-selling and cross-selling, but it refers to specifically growing the size and buying power of the customer. For example, if a sales representative is selling software to the accounting group at John Deere in Missoula, MT, and they expand the sale to include the sales team plus two other locations, they have achieved expansion. A good CPQ application assists this process by allowing many child accounts, groups, and locations to be quoted at once.

The combination of up-selling and cross-selling is the primary method of driving more revenue within an existing customer base. Another common phrase is wallet share. Many enterprise clients have a goal of increasing the wallet share from their customer base, which is often done through up-selling, cross-selling, or both. The concept of bundling or packaging is a method for accelerating an up-sell, cross-sell, or both.

Marketing efforts shouldn’t stop once the deal closes.

Marketing automation allows companies, whether B2B or B2C, to reach out to their current customer base via an automatically triggered message based on their renewal date. This ensures that each customer is aware of upcoming renewal dates to be sure clients won’t slip through the cracks. These messages can be tailored to a specific company or person’s interests and activity, along with any special actions you would like to suggest.

Renewal time also presents a great opportunity for further up-sell/cross-selling. There are varying statistics out there, but let us not forget – it’s cheaper to retain customers than to go out and get new ones.