Lead Nurturing

Lead Nurturing

For long-lead sales cycles of expensive purchases for consumers and businesses, lead nurturing is how marketing and sales work together to give prospects the information they need at the right time to accelerate the purchase decision process.  To reduce the cost of sales, it's  important to think through:

• What does a salesperson need to do?
• What can be done to help a prospect through non-personal selling (aka marketing)?

The purpose of lead nurturing is to keep your prospects engaged and moving through the purchasing funnel to accelerate purchase.  It's also a key way to reduce cost of sales by using marketing messages (content marketing with eBooks and articles and infographics) and 1:1 relationship marketing through email and direct mail marketing. 

Think of lead nurturing like drip irrigation of a garden of seeds to help them grow. 

Lead Nurturing

Create your lead nurturing plan.  This is creating a contact plan for prospects in different situations. Outline a detailed plan that shepherds prospects down the path to conversion in a consistent, logical fashion to educate a prospect.  You also want to agree on lead scoring to know what's a hot, warm and cold lead and what the plan is for each. 

Vary what you send and offer.  Don’t just keep sending emails. Think more broadly than that.  Use printed newsletters, personal notes, eBooks, infographics, white papers, invitations to webinars and live seminars. Create a series of messages where each step has a clear goal to move prospects along to the next stage.

Personalize your messages.  Use a personalized approach, addressing prospects by their name and their business name or type of business whenever possible. That's the foundation.  Then try to tailor your messaging more to be more relevant and persuasive.

Respond immediately so leads don't go from hot to cold.  Most lead conversions go to the business that responds first.

Nurture the “not ready to buy yet" prospects by understanding and providing the information they way want at each stage of their buying process.  Give the prospect choices and control about how much information they may want and how they want that (video, articles, eBooks, podcasts, webinars, infographics, etc.)

Track prospect behavior and respond to their activity.  Look for marketing automation tools that can help you automatically track and respond to each prospect in an appropriate and relevant way when a prospect opens an email, fills out a form, clicks on a link for an eBook or performs another action.

Lead Nurturing for Small Business

 

1.  Understand your prospects' education-to-purchase process
What key information do they need at each stage?  Who are their credible go-to sources?  How do they prefer to get information (in person, online, webinars, podcasts, email, direct mail, reports, white papers, seminars, events...)

• This can be done through Market Research techniques like Online Surveys, Focus Groups, 1:1 interviews and Mystery Shopping.
• Helping Customers at All Stages of Their Purchase Process outlines nine typical stages people go through when making a purchase. 

 

2.  Determine how you will differentiate suspects, prospects and qualified leads

• How to Determine Your Most Profitable Customers (so you can find more people like them)
• How to Generate Qualified Leads
  

 

TIP:  Many businesses and non-profit organizations chase all leads/donors. Top salespeople don't do this. They ask questions and gather information to determine "who is most likely to buy," who are "hot leads" (will buy soon), who are people who may "possibly buy" and who are people who are "tire kickers." Many times marketing departments send "leads" over to salespeople and those "leads" aren't acted on because the sales people either don't trust that marketing has done anything to qualify the leads.  In small companies with small budgets and not enough time in the day to do everything, it's especially important to determine how you will classify people who may be interested in your product/service/company. The articles listed above will help you to do this.