Challenge
Historically, it is difficult for a manufacturer to engage with their customer's customer in a distribution-based sales channel. That could include architects, engineers, contractors, installers, or facility managers. Not to mention the need to engage and train the most critical set of customers – distributors.
Common practice is to use a meeting, event, and hospitality management platform to schedule live training and webinars. This is adequate to schedule events but insufficient to integrate into a digital marketing strategy where leads must be collected, categorized, and tracked. Customers needed a better solution to handle their scheduling and lead monitoring, which is where BlueVolt comes in.
Solution
Lead generation is about establishing a position of industry leadership by educating users through high-value content. BlueVolt’s reporting capabilities and API features, along with Microsoft Power BI, enable you to understand the audience in depth, turning high-value training into leads that translate into incremental solution sales.
To implement the solution, use social media and marketing automation to attract users into the digital ecosystem. Then the training offerings, which are built into the channel-focused learning solution from BlueVolt, are leveraged as an essential call to action for users.
The customer journey begins with a campaign that offers training. Online learning is just a piece of the puzzle, and the training platform is just a piece of the process. Training is usually offered in the form of a webinar. Taking advantage of the power of BlueVolt to manage instructor-led training (ILT) as well as eLearning courses, training courses are scheduled and managed through the platform. The registration process involves creating an account and using BlueVolt’s custom fields to collect demographic information, like job roles, user interests, etc.
Here's how BlueVolt's solution supports your customer's journey:
As seen here, qualified leads come from quality technical training. That’s what BlueVolt delivers, and that fact is clear when you look at the ten most active courses from a sample pump manufacturer:
- History and Use of Centrifugal Pumps
- Centrifugal Pump Theory
- How to Read a Pump Curve
- Bladder Tanks and Booster Systems
- Pump Hydraulics
- Pump System Curves and Control Curves
- Power Quality and Pumps…Is your power killing your pumps?
- Pump Selection Basics
- Parallel Pump Control
- Water Utilities and Regulations for Drinking Water for Pump Applications
These courses aren’t just about products. They are about maximizing the technical competency of everyone in the fluid-handling industry.
From viewing the success of training courses like these, you can seamlessly transition from training statistics to marketing metrics. BlueVolt’s integrated reporting and API capabilities simplify analytics analysis. A marketing qualified lead (MQL), for instance, can be identified through webinar attendance and online course completions. Post-webinar and end-of-course surveys help to turn those leads into sales-qualified leads (SQLs), which are handed off to distribution and sales teams in the appropriate region for follow-up. The resulting sales can be traced back to the training that initiated the process.
Your teams can also use BlueVolt analytics to verify key information about your leads. Here, one customer learned that 44% of course takers are engineering decision-makers (consulting, application, plumbing & others). They customized their follow-up to reach, train, and convert into customers.
Result
Since training to specifically target early-phase decision-makers and leads, a partnership with BlueVolt helps to increase reach and target key customers. After all, major buying decisions are not left to installers, technicians, and counter-salespeople. Instead, commercial fluid-handling product choices are often made in the architecture, design, and engineering phases of a project, which occur as part of the project concept development phase. Through a relationship with BlueVolt, you are in a better position to reach core customers and promote product and technical courses as part of your training and marketing strategy.
About BlueVolt
Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Portland, OR BlueVolt is a pioneer in the eLearning industry. BlueVolt’s solutions help a wide range of organizations increase sales, build brand awareness, and enhance employee knowledge. Along with its learning management system and channel learning and readiness (CLR) SaaS platform, the company offers a range of client-focused services, including course and curriculum development, strategic support, business intelligence, and unique channel-training innovations.
