How Email Drip Campaigns Can Elevate Your Brand

Email marketing is an incredibly powerful way to connect with dental clinicians and increase your brand awareness. Over 3.9 billion people use email worldwide – more than 50% of the global population. That means that companies who aren’t using email effectively are missing out on an enormous potential to engage with their customers, scale their business, and increase revenue.

Most brands are familiar with the concept of an email newsletter to keep their subscribers informed. However, newsletters lack the ability to stay at the forefront of your subscribers’ minds and drive up engagement numbers.  

That’s because newsletters are focused on engaging with your entire email list at once. On the other hand, an email drip campaign can be designed to target specific types of customers. For example, if someone signs up to learn more about your dental lab product – you can initiate a targeted email drip campaign to introduce them to your business and get them excited to engage.

Email drip campaigns for dental labs present a great opportunity to engage with your customers, generate new leads, and ultimately convert more sales. Let’s dive into the details so you can see how impactful these campaigns can be for your brand’s success.  

What Is an Email Drip Campaign?

An email drip campaign is an automated set of emails that initiates when a user performs a certain action. All of the emails in a drip campaign are written beforehand, so once the user’s action is performed, the email campaign gets sent automatically.  

What sets email drip campaigns apart from typical email campaigns is that they can be highly targeted for customers at different stages of your sales funnel. For example, you can have one drip campaign for customers who leave items in their cart at checkout and another for people who’ve signed up for your blog.

This specific targeting is what makes email drip campaign engagement so high. In fact, companies that use targeted email marketing have seen up to a 760% increase in revenue.

Here’s a brief example of how an email drip campaign can be structured to entice customers to upgrade to a premium service after they’ve started a one-week free trial.

• Email 1 (sent on signup)
  The user will get an email as soon as they sign up to welcome them to the free trial.  
• Email 2 (sent 2 days later) 
  An informative email that tells the customer how to maximize their free trial.
• Email 3 (sent 4 days later)
  Introduce the key differences between the paid service and the free trial. The email should focus on the benefits of going premium and offer the option to upgrade.
• Email 4 (sent 7 days later)
  Alert the customer that their free trial is ending later in the day and make a strong pitch for the premium, paid service.

Email drip campaigns can be built right into the fabric of your business. That means that once a customer takes an action (like signing up for a free trial) the email drip campaign gets sent out automatically, according to a predefined schedule. But the real beauty of these campaigns is their flexibility to be implemented in a host of different ways (which we’ll get into below).  

Here’s an example of a drip campaign flow.

Marketing Benefits of Email Drip Campaigns

The short answer is this: the more often people engage with your site, the more likely they are to convert into paying customers.

Effective email drip campaigns allow people to build a better relationship with your brand while keeping your brand in their awareness. It’s easy for people to visit a website, sign up for a free eBook, and then forget about a brand completely. You have to stay in contact if you want to convert anyone from an interested lead to a paying customer.  

As mentioned above, email drip campaigns are a great marketing tool because they’re highly targeted for specific people, at a specific stage in your sales funnel. This is great for building trust because it allows you to provide more relevant, personalized content in your messaging.  

Personalized emails connect with people better and statistically increase engagement rates across the board. 82% of marketers have reported an increase in open rates through email personalization. And increased open rates mean more opportunities to sell someone on taking a specific action.  

When you implement them properly, email drip campaigns are an excellent way to consistently grow your brand. Once they’re set up, you can automate the entire process so your campaigns get sent out automatically without sacrificing a ton of overhead.  

The Best Ways to Use an Email Drip Campaign

The only way to maximize the benefits of an email drip campaign is to be extremely clear about a couple of things:

1. Which customers you’re targeting

2. Your goal for the campaign

Remember that each campaign is designed to connect with a specific group of people, for a specific purpose. The following list is not definitive by any means, but these are some of the best ways to run email drip campaigns. 

Lead Nurturing

As you know, not everyone who engages with your brand is going to make a purchase right away. The goal of lead nurturing is two-fold: guide potential customers toward making a purchase and develop strong relationships with them through your brand. Companies that neglect to run lead nurturing campaigns are selling themselves short.

The stats are clear: companies that don’t perform lead nurturing end up losing 80% of their leads – meanwhile, companies that implement a lead nurturing strategy generate 50% more sales while spending 33% less.  

Customer acquisition is a process. It’s rare that someone will visit your site for the first time and make a purchase that same day. In fact, a report by Marketo found that 50% of leads aren’t ready to buy the first time they engage with a brand. An email drip campaign is one of the best ways to nurture your leads, build trust in your brand, and ultimately, convert more paying customers.  

Welcome New Customers

Whenever you acquire a new email address — whether it’s from a newsletter signup, a product purchase, or an eBook release — it’s a great time to engage and keep your brand in their sights.

An email drip campaign provides much more value and engagement potential than a simple “thank you” email. That’s because an email drip campaign keeps the value coming over a longer period. It ensures that your new customers don’t quickly forget about their purchase with you and move on. In the long-run, retailers that send out an email drip campaign after a customer’s first purchase make 13% more revenue than those that just send one.  

Re-engagement Campaigns

These are for your long-time customers who haven’t interacted with your brand in a while. The goal here is to re-engage with your customers and win back their interest in your brand.

You can use these to showcase new products, discounts, or offers and entice people to revisit your site. Sometimes all it takes to get someone to come back is to send out a simple ‘We miss you!’ email.  

Abandoned Cart 

If you run an eCommerce brand, it’s bound to happen: a customer clicks buy, starts filling out their information, but doesn’t complete the purchase. In fact, the Baymard Institute found that 67.35% of online shopping carts are abandoned. That’s a lot of missed opportunities… 

Image source can use an email drip campaign to entice those customers to come back and complete their purchase. The campaign can be initiated automatically as soon as a customer leaves your site with an item in their shopping cart.  

Educational Campaigns

An educational email drip campaign is focused on providing actionable insights and value to your customers. They’re a great way for brands to increase their credibility amongst their customers and stand out from the competition.

For example, a fitness center could offer their customers the option to join a free six-pack abs course. Over a series of emails, the customer will be introduced to real ab workouts and tips they can use to improve their physique.

Although these campaigns aren’t directly focused on making a sale, they’re great for building rapport with people who’ve already shown interest. You’ll increase rapport, increase your brand’s reputation, and build the trust that people need to actually make a purchase down the line.  

For more information about dental lab email marketing campaifgns, call 888-715-9099. or visit DentalLabSupport.com

Happy Birthday Internet!

It's the 50th anniversary of the internet's predecessor. Where's the utopia we were promised?

The birth of what would usher in the internet began with a whimper rather than a bang.

On 29 October 1969, programmer Charles Kline attempted to transmit the message "login" from a computer at UCLA to one at Stanford, some 350 miles away.

The message was to be transmitted over a network funded by the US Department of Defense. The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or APRPANET, was a project that would network computers together to share information. The machines at UCLA and Stanford were the first on the network, but would be joined by computers at UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah by the end of 1969.

But on 29 October, ARPANET began its life with the attempt to send that simple "login" message. In a poetic foreshadowing of the frustrations that its technological successor would cause, Kline was only able to get the letters "lo" out before the system crashed.

But those two letters marked a turning point for human culture. Within 25 years, the internet would be mainstream. Within 40 years, it would have fundamentally transformed every facet of human interaction.

A tarnished utopia

In the early days of the internet's foray into mainstream culture, the landscape abounded with utopians who predicted that the online world would usher in a new age of openness, understanding, prosperity and peace. Twenty-five years after most of these predictions, it's fair to say they were largely off-base.

Even the techno-prophets themselves have had to concede that the internet utopia they envisioned hasn't come to pass. One of them, author Rick Webb, went so far as to pen a 2017 Medium piece apologizing for his role in promoting the utopian vision of the internet.

"I don’t think anyone saw coming that we’d have to actually be explaining to American children why racism and fascism are bad in the 21st century. Our digital prophets certainly left that bit out," Webb wrote.

But even in the midst of his regret, Webb acknowledges the parts of his utopian vision that actually have come true.

"A lonely transgender person in rural America who may have felt completely isolated before can now find a community of support. One could argue that the internet has hastened political progress, and helped topple oppressive regimes. This is all true," he wrote.

While the internet has no doubt given a voice and a platform to those opposing equality and peace, it's also fulfilled those old prophesies of creating a world without borders, of changing commerce, of connecting humanity. If the internet is deeply flawed, it's because it's a reflection of the humans who populate it. A platform can't usher in utopia. It can only give us the tools to do it ourselves.

And the tools it's given us are incredibly powerful. Fifty years ago, the thought of someone living in the American Midwest having a window into the life of someone living in Spain, in Pakistan, in Sri Lanka, in Australia, was unfathomable. Now we have the power to connect with people anywhere in the world in an instant. Yes, it's a power that's been used to spread hate and discord. But it's still a power that can continue to transform the world for the better, if we embrace the better parts of ourselves.

The internet has already transformed the way humans communicate. Now, we're in the midst of a new transformation: a transformation of the way humans work.

The future of work

For much of human history, the structure of work has remained the same. It's always been about the exchange of labor for compensation, but the way it's been carried out has been constrained for both parties. For workers, it's meant adhering to a specific schedule at a specific location. For employers, it's meant paying both for productive and unproductive hours, and being limited to the talent pool in a specific geographical area.

The same way the internet destroyed the constraints on human communication, it's now destroying the constraints on work.

Freelance marketplaces remove the constraints both for employers and employees. A worker can now exchange their productivity for compensation while dictating their own schedule. An employer can now hire for specific jobs at specific times, and only pay for the productivity they need.

And removing the constraints of geography may be the most revolutionary change the internet is bringing to work.

Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy once said, "the smartest people in the world don't all work for us. Most them work someone else." Taking this a step further, it's likely that, if you're a business owner, not only do the smartest people in the world not work for you, they don't even work in proximity to you or each other.

No matter what field you're in, it's unlikely that the top talent for any role you're looking to fill all live in your immediate vicinity. Instead, they're spread out across the globe. The transformation that the internet is bringing to work is that you're no longer bound to hiring from the talent pool in your geographic area. Now, instead of being limited to the most talented software engineer in Cleveland, Ohio, you can choose to work with the most talented software engineer in the world, no matter where they are.

Moreover, you can work with them for a specific project, for the specific period of time you need their skills. As an employer, you get the freedom to hire only the best and pay only for the amount of work actually done. As a worker, they get to determine their own schedule, their own location and choose only the projects they want to do.

This fundamental change to work is gathering pace. The recently released Intuit 2020 Report found that 80% of major corporations plan to shift more towards a freelance workforce.

It's not just major corporations that are embracing the internet workplace revolution. Freelance marketplaces mean starting a business is now within the grasp of more people. The Intuit Report claims that entrepreneurs no longer need large amounts of capital to start a business, as more efficient systems and cheaper manufacturing lower the barriers to entry. Relying on a freelance workforce removes another huge barrier startup founders face. Not only can they find talent quickly and less expensively, they can source the best talent for any project, from anywhere in the world.

This revolution would have been unthinkable if not for that simple, two-letter message sent 50 years ago today. When Charles Kline sent that message, it's doubtful he could have foreseen the ramifications of a fully networked society, both the good and bad. In the same way, the utopians of the 1990s didn't foresee all the pain and anger that open, transparent communication could bring.

But for the optimists among us, there's reason to hope. The story of how the internet changes society is far from over. We're still at the cusp of a massive shift in the way people work and get work done. And if we embrace it for the freedom it offers both to workers and employers, utopia could still be horizon.

Multi-touch Direct Mail Campaigns To Get A Better Response

I often hear from dental lab industry marketers that they want to “test direct mail marketing” and my first response is to recommend multi-touch direct mail campaigns.

What surprises me is how often marketers that are new to direct mail are thinking they’ll send out a single touch of say, 500 pieces to evaluate “whether direct mail works” for them. If it works, great. If not, they’ll plan to move on to something else.

That’s a shame because like so many aspects of business, especially with dental laboratories it often takes more than one send to generate the desired response.

And drawing broad conclusions such as “direct mail doesn’t work” from just one mailing results in plenty of missed opportunities.

Experienced direct mailers understand the need to use multiple touches to maximize the impact of a campaign, and are planning to implement a consistent testing strategy across each touch.

They know direct mail “works”. It’s a matter of finding the right audience, offer and creative.

You’d Fire A Salesperson That Gives Up After One Touch

Think about it this way: If you’re a salesperson, would you make one phone call, leave a message, and if you don’t get a call back just give up on that prospect?

Of course not. You’d probably try to contact that prospect a few more times because it often takes more than one attempt to make a sale. It’s always been that way and always will be.

Multi-touch marketing is at the core of the way modern business is conducted. Direct mail works the same way.

You don’t often see pattern of “single touch” in other forms of media. Whether running traditional offline ads in magazines or on TV or engaging with prospects online, do you run just one ad and call it a day?

No way!

Think about how long ads on a topic you’ve researched online follow you around — on Facebook, websites, and apps you use — for days, if not weeks.

So why should direct mail be any different?

It’s not, and you don’t need to take my word for it. According to Mike Schultz, President of the RAIN Group, says it can take an “average of 8 touches to get an initial meeting (or other conversion) with a new prospect” and in some cases it can take more.

Multi-touch marketing: Communicate with hot prospects again and again


I guess one silver lining is that because so many organizations give up way too soon, you can benefit from your competitor’s mistakes!

When you consider how direct mail pairs excellently with other forms of media — both online and offline — an integrated campaign can deliver results far more impressive than with one type of media alone.

In fact, many DentalLabSupport.com clients use direct mail in conjunction with their email campaigns. I consistently hear from our clients that there’s a combined lift when both are used.

Properly timed, email supports direct marketing campaigns and direct mail boosts email response rates. Consider these research findings:

According to a 2019 USPS white paper, The Future of Direct Mail Is Here and It’s Dynamic, 60 percent of marketers surveyed said that combining digital and direct mail increased ROI — with 68 percent reporting increased website visits.

A Target Marketing “Media Usage Survey” described a controlled study in which a print-only campaign produced a 6 percent response rate while the same campaign distributed through both print and email lifted that response rate by more than 25 percent — to 7.6 percent.

A DentalLabSupport Marketing survey reported that more than half of all small businesses use three or more marketing channels.

And with today’s automated tools, marketers can more quickly take action based on how prospects respond online — whether visiting a website, clicking a link in an email, or interacting through social media — using that information to retarget prospects with personalized direct mail that can be sent instantly to a printer/mailer for processing.

Multi-touch direct mail for the full buyer’s journey


How can you best use this integration of multiple communication channels?

One way is through pre-defined workflows designed to meet specific goals such as building awareness, generating leads, nurturing leads, promoting events, and more. But even using direct mail alone delivers better results when you don’t give up too soon.

Here’s a sample email/direct mail campaign designed to reactivate cold or dead leads. Which do you think has a better chance of energizing an old lead – a single direct mail or this multi-touch marketing campaign?




Whether you combine other channels or not, it’s important to understand that a successful multi-touch direct mail campaign requires more than simply sending out several mailings one after the other. When each is strategically timed to influence prospects along the buying journey, you can enjoy more successful results.

Attribution Makes Direct Mail Click

You see, what makes direct mail an exceptional offline media channel is that you get precise attribution you don’t get with mass media such as print ads or TV.

By using automatically generated, personalized URLs (pURLs), you can track online response (or non-response) across each “mail drop” or touch of a multi-touch direct mail campaign.. By using pURLs as the “bridge” between your mailings and the online experience, you get both the impact and high response of direct mail and the tracking and analytics you expect from digital marketing channels.

An example campaign: How multi-touch mailings multiply results

Here’s an example that shows how multiple mailings might work. Let’s assume that you sell an e-learning solution offering home-based tutoring in a wide variety of skills for students in grades K-12.

You might start a campaign with an initial sequence of three different direct mail packages (which could be sent along with email) each focusing on a different benefit — perhaps based on skills taught, age range, ease of use, etc.




A response to any of the three mailings would trigger another sequence of the multi-touch direct mail based on that specific benefit.

If there’s no response to the first mailing, you send another, and then another. If there’s no response after three mailings, you might give up on that prospect (for now, anyway).

If you do get a response, another sequence designed around the benefit that drove that response begins. These mailings might include a higher commitment offer — for example, a sales call. If there’s no response, that specific sequence might continue for another two or three mailings.

Here’s how these multi-touch marketing sequences look. First, you’d have three initial emails designed to segment prospects into specific follow-up mailing sequences:

Initial flow

No response Response

Offer A1 Offer A2 Responder Flow X

Offer A2 Offer A3 Responder Flow Y

Offer A3 Stop mailing for now Responder Flow Z

Then, each follow-up sequence can be structured in a similar way – but customized to the first offer the prospect found relevant:

Responder Flow X No response Response

Offer X1 Offer X2 Sales call

Offer X2 Offer X3 Sales call

Offer X3 Stop mailing for now Sales call

Responder Flow Y No response Response

Offer Y1 Offer Y2 Sales call

Offer Y2 Offer Y3 Sales call

Offer Y3 Stop mailing for now Sales call

Responder Flow Z No response Response

Offer Z1 Offer Z2 Sales call

Offer Z2 Offer Z3 Sales call

Offer Z3 Stop mailing for now Sales call

You can intersperse email into this flow, allow for special mailings to be sent if a prospect visits your website, a specific web page, or downloads a specific resource. Yes, this seems as if this flow would be complex to set up, but today’s automated direct mail platforms integrate with marketing automation tools to make this exceedingly easy and affordable.

Even just a few years ago, a multi-touch campaign like this would be far too complex and costly to execute. For example, sending a direct mail piece within a few hours of a visit to your website might mean sending only a few mailings per day. The fixed costs of setting up printing and mailing — which are the same whether sending 10 or 10,000 pieces — would have been prohibitive.

So don’t give up – at least not too soon. Because if at first you don’t succeed, that next mailing could be the one that triggers a profitable sale.

Automated segmentation for multi-touch marketing


Better yet, today’s direct mail tools are automated to segment your audience based on their response (or non-response) and send subsequent direct mail pieces with specific creative customized for each segment.


Each part of a multi-touch direct mail campaign can be scheduled to target these precise segments through simple campaign wizards — without the need to manually tabulate responses and build lists for each mailing.

For example, if you send a direct mail postcard and get a response to a specific offer, you may send another direct mail piece, perhaps a thank you letter, a week later with another offer.

If you don’t receive a response, you might send another postcard, perhaps highlighting a different benefit of the same offer.

You can even test various approaches as your campaign continues – so you can gain even more insights into what works and what doesn’t. For more information on best practices for testing, review my latest post here

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LEAD GENERATION SOFTWARE: WHEN TO USE IT AND WHEN TO AVOID IT

LEAD GENERATION SOFTWARE: 

WHEN TO USE IT AND WHEN TO AVOID IT

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When it comes to dental lab lead generation software and platforms, there are two things to keep in mind:

1. If your dental lab's sales pipeline management process is broken, lead generation software won’t fix it on its own
2. However, if your dental lab's sales pipeline management process is well-defined, lead generation software can help you scale it

In other words, once you have all your sales ducks in a row, you can achieve more while doing the same (or less!) with the right toolkit in place.

We’re passionate about lead generation software because it helps salespeople do what they do best: sell.

It empowers reps to lead productive sales conversations and dig deep into their prospect’s pain points instead of getting lost in admin work.

The wrong sales software will slow your sales team down; the ideal one will cut hours of admin work and make them fly through their day with ease.

In this guide, we’re diving into the ins and outs of using lead generation software to help your sales team hit their quota efficiently and consistently.

Why you should use lead generation software

The answer to this question seems pretty obvious, right? Lead generation software lets you automate the search for new prospects.

That’s true, but there’s so much more a lead generation software can do for you beyond that.

Effortlessly prioritize sales workload

When you manually search for leads and take the time to contact them through cold emails and cold calling, it can take a long time before your efforts land on fertile ground.

In other words, you could spend hours on the phone with the wrong people before your first productive conversation of the day, or even the week!

This happens because a list of cold prospects is just that: a list of unqualified, unscored leads whom you know almost nothing about.

How does lead gen software make this happen? Here are a few examples:

• Leads who download lead magnets and become part of your mailing list could reveal their interests in the links they click through on your newsletters
• A person that visited your website five times in the last week and viewed ten or more pages is probably more interested than someone who visited just once
• A lead that filled out your contact form and wrote a long, detailed message is probably more invested than someone who only wrote a few words

This is the type of information your reps can never gather on their own, without the help of software.

The verdict here is an easy one: lead generation software platforms uncover key information about your incoming leads and helps your team work on hot leads first. It creates urgency and helps you not to waste key opportunities.

Route leads to the right sales rep

A great sales team is made out of people who are driven, assertive and confident while staying empathic, humble and honest.

They also set high standards when it comes to the velocity and size of the deals they close, their sales pipeline health, and their close rate.

The best sales team, however, is the one where everyone knows their undeniable strength and uses it to work through sales conversations and challenges. They use this advantage to complement the rest of their team.

Lead routing can help you make the most out of these strengths. Lead routing is the process of distributing new leads between your sales reps.

When you use a lead generation software, leads that come in have to be assigned to sales reps anyway, so why not use it mindfully, based on what your reps are best at?

Here are some examples:

• Some reps may win more deals over the phone, while others succeed over email or in-person
• If you sell based on geography, your reps will probably know certain areas better than others
• Certain reps may close deals easily with small companies, while others may excel at selling to mid-size and large enterprise

If you aren’t yet routing leads based on specific skills, start with something simple and expand over time.

Streamline lead generation from all channels

Finally, a lead software platform shouldn’t be an isolated tool that pumps prospects into your sales pipeline.

It’s supposed to be a tool that streamlines and combines the work your sales team does along with the marketing team’s efforts.

This is why it’s important to ensure your sales and marketing teams are synced up and on the same page when it comes to leads they’re targeting. All software that either team is using should follow suit.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when synchronizing your sales and marketing teams:

• All channels used to collect leads should be integrated with the same CRM software to send leads to
• Key messages around your company and product should be coherent between your website and other channels
• All lead generation forms should ask for crucial information the sales rep needs

In other words, all the touchpoints your lead goes through should be aligned.

The messaging on Facebook ads should match the tone of voice on your website. The lead forms should make it easy for reps to filter high-priority leads and understand where they came from.

Ultimately, this process should, above all, be simple to go through. It shouldn’t add more complexity to your team’s daily schedules; it should make it more straightforward and productive.

LeadBooster can help you filter leads from your website

DentalLabSupport’s new chatbot LeadBooster is fully customizable tool and can be put on any page of your website to ask visitors qualifying questions and route hot leads to the right salesperson.

DentalLabSupport.com LeadBooster can qualify leads based on the criteria you set, then assign quality leads to the most relevant salesperson based on things like location, availability, experience level or expertise.

Once qualified, you can decide how the information should be stored in LabCell CRM, which will automatically create a new contact as well as the associated deal information. You can set the owner of the lead and control who is allowed to see it.

You can even prompt your prospect to arrange a call, meeting or demo within the chat sequence. Leadbooster integrates seamlessly with DentalLabSupport.com Scheduler, allowing the lead to check the relevant salesperson’s availability and set up a time slot that suits.

When you shouldn’t use lead generation software

With all the benefits of using a lead generation software, are there times when you shouldn’t use it?

It generates more leads, but they’re less qualified

Your team is swimming in more leads than ever before, so things must be going great, right?

Not quite. Let’s say each of your reps was generating 25 leads each week manually. They did so by researching your industry and looked for companies similar to your existing clients. After conducting cold calls and emails, they qualified 15 of them and moved them further down the pipeline and worked from there.

The new lead generation software is bringing 70 new leads per week for each of the reps. That’s almost three times as much, so it implies it’s a good thing. However, as your reps start reaching out to their new leads, they find that they still only manage to qualify about 15 of them, but it takes them three times longer to go through them all.

Their increased efforts result in the same or worse results, making them less productive! Lead generation software should make each rep’s time more valuable instead of adding more menial tasks to their plate.

Your sales pipeline is clogged

This can happen as a result of the above scenario, but it’s possible you’ve just never considered cleaning out a messy pipeline and dropping cold or unqualified leads.

What makes a clogged sales pipeline?

• Leads that have been in it for longer than your typical sales cycle
• Leads that have gone cold and become unresponsive
• Unclear sales funnel stages and an inability to sort leads in your lead gen software and/or CRM based on those stages
• Unclear next steps for leads
• Inability to forecast sales for the upcoming month or quarter

If your CRM resembles any of the above signs, using a lead generation software can only create more mess. If you don’t have a process to sort and act on all the new leads that will come in, a lead generation software will be a waste.

If your pipeline needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, do it before you implement a lead generation software and you’ll do yourself and your team a huge favor for a long time to come.

The one lead generation software you can’t be without

Your company’s website is your internet house. You’re the homeowner. Everything else is rented or borrowed space.

Here’s what we mean by that.

For many businesses, social networks like Facebook and Instagram have been instrumental in their initial success. They easily reached thousands of their followers daily. Their posts easily went viral and grew their audience.

Then, Facebook (and later Instagram) introduced an algorithm that changed the way posts are shown on users’ news feeds. Companies that used to easily reach all 5,000 of their followers suddenly only reached 2% of that total!

In other words: platforms you’re using care about themselves first. In Facebook’s case, many companies started relying on Facebook ads to replace the reach and impact they had organically. As a result, Facebook’s US advertising revenue has tripled since 2014.

With that in mind, even paid advertising (on any platform!) is still not something you own as any updates may mean you have to spend more money to get the same results.

You don’t own any of the platforms where you’re ‘renting’ space along with millions of other users. Your website is the place where you have the ultimate say and can fully control the experience a visitor goes through—and turn them into a lead and a customer down the line.

On top of that, it gives you the benefit of collecting and analyzing your website traffic so you can learn about people and companies interested in your products.

Now you might be thinking: ‘My traffic analysis only gives me numbers and percentages, how does this help me?’

The answer? Alongside Leadfeeder, your Google Analytics data is a sales rep’s dream come true.

Leadfeeder is a sales intelligence tool that monitors your website traffic and turns it into quality leads. It gives you the company information, details about their visit, powerful filtering options, and easy lead routing so you can always know the best-suited reps are working on each opportunity.

This is a goldmine because no matter how good your offers and lead magnets are, only a small percentage of your traffic will convert through your website CTAs. The majority will just vanish.

Here’s what makes Leadfeeder the lead generation software so useful:

• Automatic lead scoring. Your hottest, most interested leads (based on their visit history and other details) are placed at the top of your list. This way, your reps can focus on them straight away and drive a productive sales conversation. Talk about sales prioritization!
• Cross-channel campaign power-up. If your marketing team is running an AdWords campaign, your team can capitalize on it even more by filtering leads from it, along with their visit details. Knowing what message and call-to-action took your prospect to the website in the first place provides extra lead background.
• A shortened path to connection. Leadfeeder will show you if you’re connected on LinkedIn with someone who works at a company it identified on your website. This way, you can forget the awkwardness of a cold call and kick conversations off with ease. Read our cold calling scripts article for more tips on how to leverage common connections.

How to roll out new sales software to your team

Whether you’re just implementing a CRM software for the first time or you’re looking to upgrade it with integrations, additional features and power-ups, forming new habits around software can be difficult.

Your team might resist change at first and, even if it removes friction from their daily activities, they may be slow to fully adopt it and use it daily.

Here are our top tips to roll out new software in your sales team.

1. Keep an open line of communication

Your communication with the team might already be open and driven by trust. Whether or not that’s the case, when you come to your team with new software you want them to use, they might not immediately see the purpose of it or your intention behind it.

When it comes to new software for a team of any size, it’s bound to impact everyone’s daily habits and routines.

This means there’s a risk your sales team will think you want to track all of their daily activities and micro-manage them, which can clearly create some friction.

To avoid this kind of jumping to conclusions, announce the new software you want to implement and clearly outline the reasons you believe it will improve the process. For example, you may want to improve the follow-up process of your team, so the new sales software will help with timely reminders and notes.

After you’ve announced this change, make sure each rep can easily ask for clarifications, share their thoughts, and offer suggestions. An open feedback channel is gold.

2. Decide and announce the time and frequency recommended for the new software

Make expectations obvious and reasonable. If you don’t, some of your reps might update it daily, while others may wait for a spare moment every week or two. As a result, you’ll have incorrect data and the software won’t serve its purpose.

These expectations can be as simple as: end of the day, weekly on Friday, or daily before the work-in-progress meeting. The more frequently the tool is used (without creating unnecessary admin work), the more accurate the data in it will be as it reduces the chance for something being forgotten.

3. Establish that using the new sales software isn’t optional

Just like the point above, it’s important to convey to your reps that using the new software isn’t optional or something they can opt out of doing.

Of course, the best way to do this isn’t to be forceful and punish those that aren’t following the usage frequency. Instead, make sure your reps know the advantages they’ll experience from using the software.

For example, if they log their activities such as emails, email lead generation, calls, follow-ups and proposals, they will see how each of those impacted their results at the end of the month—and use it to improve in the following month.

Again, keep an open, ongoing communication loop and identify which parts of their new habits require support or adjustment.

4. Share the information available from the software

After some time using the software has passed, you’ll be able to share new findings and provide deeper insight into your team’s process and results than ever before.

Once you do, make it obvious. Show how the software has increased productivity, reduced the sales cycle, or converted more leads. This will also help you show your sales reps that what they do daily genuinely matters and makes a difference for the entire team, which will lift up your team’s morale, too!

5. Agree on and announce the exact date of new software implementation

As with everything above, be transparent about when the new software will be implemented. If you plan on doing a trial period first, let your team know how long the trial will be.

Announce a clear timeline so that your reps can familiarize themselves with the tool’s features, capabilities and workflows. This will also allow them to seek technical and usability support if they need it—in a timely manner.

Over time, using a sales software should turn into an automated behavior, a habit that doesn’t drain your team’s willpower or energy. It becomes a tool that speeds up and streamlines everything they do on a daily basis.

The time to prioritize your sales opportunities is now

To make lead generation software worth its while, it has to feed into your entire sales process. It won’t make an impact you desire if it’s all you rely on to make your sales team productive and hit targets.

You need a tool that helps your team track leads, manage their pipeline, and take timely action on the hottest leads.

Because if a lead was hot months ago, but you only followed up now, you’re probably late.

A powerful CRM is the ideal way for you and your team to keep track of incoming leads and make meaningful moves to take those leads through each of the pipeline stages.

However, CRMs can make life in a sales team more complicated than it was. They might…

• Add more admin work because they don’t integrate with other key tools you use
• Require a massive time and money investment into training
• Create anxiety because you have to keep inputting tasks and reminders manually (and always worry you’ll forget to do so)

This setup doesn’t help your team. In fact, it probably creates friction and frustration; your team might also resist adopting such software, even if you followed all the steps for rolling it out effectively.

DentalLabSupport is different. It’s built for minimum input and maximum output so that your sales team can focus on doing what they do best.

This means less time spent on admin and more time for productive sales conversations.

How is this possible? Here’s how.

DentalLabSupport does the heavy lifting for you. Because it syncs with your email inbox and calendar, automates alerts and uses templates, it removes the hours your team spends on admin. This also means your reps will get reminders to follow up with hot leads and never let a great sales opportunity again slip away.

DentalLabSupport keeps you organized and in control. When your dental lab lead generation software sends a new lead to your dashboard, your lead tracking better be in place. Track how your team is doing and provide real-time feedback on important deals. DentalLabSupport dashboards are visual (with simple drag-and-drop function to move deals in your pipeline!), intuitive, and fully customizable.

DentalLabSupport is driven by an activity-based dental lab selling philosophy, using activity prompts, reminders, and a simple interface to focus your team on the actions they control instead of stressing about the outcomes they can’t.

Ready to generate leads for your dental lab that turn into closed deals in a heartbeat? Start your 14-day free trial to find out why thousands of sales teams prioritize their sales opportunities with DentalLabSupport.com.

Call 888-715-9099 to supercharge your dental lab.