December 19, 2017
Lead Follow Up Software
Alex Kracov is the Head of Marketing at Lattice, a performance management platform for growing companies like Birchbox, Cruise, Glossier, Gitlab and New York Public Radio. Prior to starting at Lattice, Alex worked with Blue State Digital coordinating their work with Google.
Lattice had a growth problem. It wasn’t your typical, “I need more leads, how can I get more customers?” growth problem either.
In fact, it was the opposite. We were seeing lots of new leads come in the door, and 90% of these were inbound. And while growth like this is usually a great thing, a large influx of new leads means it’s easy for people to fall through the cracks if you’re doing everything manually.
We needed a way to sort, assign, and learn about new leads automatically. That’s where Autopilot has totally changed the way we approach interacting with potential users. After launching in May of 2016, Lattice has already grown to 400+ customers. Most of our growth happened after we started making customer journeys on Autopilot.
I want to outline in detail the three customer journeys Lattice has used in Autopilot on the path to acquiring 400+ customers:
- Dynamic Variables: How we sort and assign new leads
- Email Follow Up: How we email leads at scale to schedule a demo
- Attribution: How we track the success of different marketing campaigns
Our core customer journey revolves around lead follow up. We want to create a personalized experience that scales with our growth. Additionally, attribution is key for us because by tracking where our leads come from, we’re able to measure which marketing campaigns are having the most impact. But before we get into the nuts and bolts of how our different journeys work, let me walk you through Lattice’s lead capture approach so that our journeys have appropriate context.
Lattice’s lead capture process
When someone comes to Lattice’s website, we want to drive them to request a demo and interact with our sales team. For this reason, our main journey is built around answering the question, “what happens after someone requests a demo?”, or to put it in marketer speak, “what happens after we capture a lead?”
Our go-to capture method is to have potential leads fill out a form to request a demo. We built a simple form, but what you don’t see here is that we utilize UTM tags too. Practically, UTM tags are the messy looking things you see at the end of a web address, but they’re also insanely useful. You can check out more about how UTM parameters work here, because it’s really helpful stuff to know.
We want to know where leads are coming from so we can know what marketing efforts are working. UTM tags allow us to do this, and help with our attribution journey too, which I’ll get to in a minute.
Company size is the information we’re most interested in from a potential lead. Based on their number of employees, we’ll route the user to different sales reps. These different company sizes are what make up territories for the sales team.
After clicking next, the prospect immediately sees a Calendly page to streamline the process of scheduling a demo. Each of our reps has a Calendly page, so based on the different territories (depending on their company size), the prospect is routed to where they need to be.
The main goal for us is to get a demo scheduled as easily and quickly as possible. But anyone who has been around the SaaS space knows that it’s not a given that a user is going to click everything they need to click and book a meeting off the bat.
This is the point in the lead follow up process where all the Autopilot magic kicks in. Once the form is submitted, three different journeys get activated and prevent us from drowning in more information than could possibly be sorted manually. I’ll walk through each one by showing the actual journey we use at Lattice along with real communication examples so you can get an idea of how it all works.
Customer journey #1: Dynamic variables (sorting and assigning new leads)
The big idea behind this journey is that we want to send personalized emails in order to schedule a demo with the appropriate sales rep. We want users to feel like our sales team is watching new leads sign up in real-time and sending personal emails immediately inviting the user to sign up for a demo. We also want to make sure that leads are getting sent to the right sales rep based on company size.
Once the journey is triggered (after the form is submitted), the user passes through different fields based on the criteria we set (company size).
The leads receives a personal email invitation to a demo, and links to the sales rep’s Calendly page that corresponds to their company size.
This journey allows us to ensure that users are funneled to the appropriate sales rep, at scale, without compromising efficiency OR the personal touch that we want to achieve.
Customer journey #2: Email follow up
This is our main journey, and it’s how all of our email follow up happens. Think of this is as the 30,000 ft view of our email follow up process. You’re looking at the journey that makes our follow up work, and what’s cool about a journey like this is that we’ve been able to make adjustments as our sales team grow. Let me walk you through how it works:
On the front end, we have different smart segment triggers that are tied to the company size on the form the lead filled out. Based on that, the lead gets assigned to different sales reps through Salesforce where the rep gets a notification that there’s a new lead.
From there a few different things happen. The orange and teal shapes below are sending out internal notifications, an internal email to the actual sales rep and a message in our Slack channel. I’ll provide examples of what this looks like soon. And the green shape is the “Is On List or Segment: Booked Meeting” condition check. We use a Calendly and Autopilot integration via Zapier to check if the contact has actually booked a meeting with us or not.
This is what our internal notifications look like on our Slack channel and when a sales rep gets emailed about a new lead. In Slack we have an entire channel devoted to inbound leads that’s constantly updating as new leads come in.
Here’s the internal email notification.
Our sales team goes back and forth between these two sources to stay on top of new leads.
After that we put the lead on a two week email journey, and then at the end we put them on our marketing/nurture list, again, examples below. When we’re sending out follow up emails we take a friendly, personal approach so that we’re cultivating a relationship. If we don’t hear back initially we try to remind the lead that we’re contacting them because they signed up and we just want to make sure that we follow up (click to view in hi-res).
As the journey progresses we get a little more “salesy” in our language. We’ve been trying to get in touch, we don’t want to drop the ball, that sort of thing (click to view in hi-res).
The last one we send sounds the most like a sales email, and it gets a pretty good response rate because we give them easy options to let us know where they’re at (click to view in hi-res).
We also have some conditional parameters that eject a user from the journey, like if they’re already a customer and they accidentally signed up again.
Customer journey #3: Campaign attribution
The third major journey that Lattice uses happens on the backend, after a lead has signed up. It’s important that we to know where a lead comes from so that we can know what’s working and what’s not in our marketing strategy. This is called campaign attribution.
Once a lead enters a list in Autopilot, we have a contact record from the UTM source contact and that person gets attributed to the relevant Salesforce campaign. If it says Facebook? That’s the campaign it’ll get linked to. LinkedIn? Same thing. Everything we do has a Salesforce campaign tied to it, and our UTM tags let us sort out leads depending on what campaign brought them there.
What’s amazing here, is that once this lead information is in the Salesforce campaign, we can actually track the success of our marketing effort. In the example below, we can actually know that 500 people signed up based on our Facebook campaign and requested a demo.
We can take this data and then see in Salesforce how much pipeline, how many deals or how much revenue was created off of that campaign so we can see where we need to invest more in future marketing efforts.
Our next journeys: Product action & lead nurture emails
While our main customer journeys at Lattice revolve around lead assignment, follow up, and campaign attribution, something that we’re starting to do a lot more of is creating journeys based on product action. An early test case is the example below. This is a screenshot of our free trial version of Lattice after a user has taken a tour of the product. At the end, we offer two different choices: Talk To Seth (talk to someone on our sales team, linking to their Calendly page), or “Clear Data” and start exploring Lattice on your own.
Based off of what the user chooses, we send them different emails. With the Segment integration we can pull that information into Autopilot. This means that when a user clicks “Clear Data”, for example, we can send them an email with tips and tricks on how to use the product:
We also use Autopilot for different marketing nurture emails. This will eventually be built out in a more automated way, but for now the way that it works is that every two weeks we send an email to our marketing nurture list with new content we put out. We send our latest podcasts, ebooks and webinars detailing what’s happening in the people & operations world to add value as we continue to develop a relationship with the potential clients on this email list.
No one’s falling through the cracks
What puts this in perspective for me is thinking about the alternative. If we had manually tried to route and assign all of our inbound leads at Lattice, there’s no way that we would get to everyone. People would fall through the cracks and we would lose business as a result.
Ultimately, this is about efficiency, it’s about making sense of growth and scaling our marketing efforts so that we’re creating a great experience for potential customers.
By creating a framework for assigning leads, automating follow-up (without losing a personal touch) and constantly gaining feedback about our marketing efforts through campaign attribution Autopilot has helped us find a way to scale our efforts as Lattice grows.
Watch Alex share his journey with Autopilot, and go into detail about Lattice’s B2B follow up journey:
