E-book: Trasnform Leads into Customers w/ NextGen Lead Nurturing

1 TRANSFORM LEADS INTO CUSTOMERS WITH NEXT GENERATION LEAD NURTURING

TRANSFORM LEADS INTO CUSTOMERS WITH NEXT GENERATION LEAD NURTURING


TABLE OF CONTENTSPart I: The Cost of Ineffective Lead Nurturing ....................................................................................................... 3

Part II: The Five Flavors of Lead Nurturing .............................................................................................................. 7

Part III: Marketers, Start Your Engines ..................................................................................................................... 11

Part IV: Content is King, Segmentation is Boss ....................................................................................................... 17

Part V: Best Practices for Lead Follow Up ................................................................................................................ 14

ABOUT MARKETBRIDGE ......................................................................................................................................... 28

TRANSFORM LEADS INTO CUSTOMERS WITH NEXT GENERATION LEAD NURTURING


PART IThe Cost of Ineffective Lead Nurturing

1. Is My Lead Generation Program Stuck in a Rut?

Many marketers use outsourced call centers or telesales people year after year to help them qualify leads. While these resources are effective, their costs need to be audited and carefully managed. A few years ago, it may have taken three calls to reach a prospect. Now it may take up to eight calls to reach the same person. You can either keep your telesales budget the same as last year and get fewer results or significantly increase your budget to reach the same number of prospects you did last year. And let’s face it: these days, prospects want to increase online engagement time and reduce sales talk time. It is going to be even harder to reach those prospects via phone this year. Depending on your commitment to outsourced telesales, we could be talking about millions of dollars. Worse yet, many companies have gone temporarily blind to lead qualification and are handing leads that are not “sales ready” directly to Sales. If this describes you, it may be time to focus on new ways of qualifying and managing leads more effectively.

In today’s digital age, lead nurturing is the name of the game. If you’re not running an effective and efficient leading nurturing program, you could be leaving millions of dollars on the table. Organizations who aren’t leveraging lead nurturing best practices are finding themselves stuck maintaining the status quo. And as the buyer’s journey continues to evolve in the digital age, the status quo just won’t cut it.

To understand what you might be missing without effective lead nurturing, ask yourself these four questions.


PART 1: The Cost of Ineffective Lead Nurturing

2. Is My Funnel Blocked?

It happens to the best of us. Most marketers have an appetite for demand generation and have no problem stuffing names into the top of the funnel. In fact, many of us spend significant time and money feeding the top of our funnel through email, webinar, direct mail, trade show, social media, web, advertising, and other programs. But those top-of-the-funnel names are not converting into sale-ready leads as quickly or as often as we’d like. Depending on your lead volume, you could have millions—or tens or hundreds of millions—of dollars’ worth of leads stuck in the middle of the funnel. These are people who showed some level of interest at some time but were not sales ready. Most companies either hand off these leads directly to Sales or try to run drip nurturing campaigns that do not use predictive analytics or personalized digital content. In either case, the disappointing results don’t do Marketing, Sales, or Executive Management any good. Imagine converting 5%, 10%, or even 15% of these leads into new sales opportunities. What would the incremental impact be on your revenue?

3. Are My Marketing & Sales Teams Aligned?

As we mentioned, too many organizations have gone blind to lead qualification, so leads that are not “sales ready” are pouring out of the funnel to Sales at a sickening pace. Eventually Sales disengages and stops accepting and following up on the leads. Sales doesn’t trust the leads—or Marketing—and focus their time generating and qualifying their own leads. Marketing becomes frustrated as it feels that it is spending a significant amount of time and money providing Sales with leads that are not being followed up. All of those leads end up in limbo, a huge waste of resources and potential revenue.



4. Do I Understand My Target Audience’s Behavior?

Overwhelming research across a broad range of industries indicates that most prospects conduct at least 60% of the buying process online. Yet many marketers are not as in touch with their prospects as they could be, choosing non-digital channels for most of their prospect engagement and lead qualification. Remember the outsourced telesales team? Think how you would go about a major purchase. Chances are you would visit webpages, download fact sheets or documents, read what others had to say about the product, look at a demo—all before you would want to speak to anyone.

50%

(Source: Gleanster Research)

of leads are qualified but not yet ready to buy.



So, how did you do? If you answered "Yes" to any of the four questions, digital lead nurturing could be the answer. To be effective, lead nurturing must be driven by accurate, predictive data and personalized with relevant content. The setup of a successful lead nurturing program can be cumbersome. It requires segmentation, personas, buyer journey mapping, and a reporting structure—in addition to rich content. But it’s worth the work, whether you do it in house or outsource to experts in digital marketing and sales. Few programs will give you more return on your investment this year.

Read on to learn more about the five types of lead nurturing programs and why establishing your organization’s own program should be one of your top priorities this year.

50%

(Source: Forrester Research)

Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales at 33% lower cost.

33%


PART IIThe Five Flavors of Lead Nurturing

Most marketers roll out lead nurturing primary for new customer acquisition. This makes sense, as most leads are not sales ready and need a little marketing TLC. Why pass a high volume of leads to Sales that will not convert to opportunities today? That is not to say that most of these leads won’t buy, they are just not buying today. Instead of abandoning these leads, savvy marketers “nurture” them and get 20%, 25%, or 30% of those leads to engage and become qualified opportunities over time— and see significant incremental revenue. Unfortunately, that’s where lead nurturing ends for most marketers. Today, however, lead nurturing programs have evolved, taking on different shapes and styles. If you are not leveraging all of them, you could be missing out on millions in potential revenue.

(Source: MarketingSherpa)

of B2B organizations identify 'converting qualified leads into paying customers' as a top funnel priority.

57%


PART 2: The Five Flavors of Lead Nurturing

The 5 Types of Lead Nurturing Programs

1. New Customer Acquisition

If you do not currently have a lead nurturing program, this is where you should start. Don’t think of lead nurturing just in terms of email. Think of it as an omni-channel journey where you are pushing out relevant content of all styles to specific personas at a specific stage in the buying cycle. You’ll find that this approach will help drive higher quality leads down the pipeline and build awareness and recognition in the marketplace.

2. New Product Launch/Update

Marketers often use this opportunity to publish a press release, leverage social media, and send out an email. However, a new product launch is also a great time to roll out a lead nurturing campaign that engages and educates various audiences with different messages. According to Marketing Donut, “63% of people requesting information on your company today will not purchase for at least three months—20% will take more than 12 months to buy.” Using a well-designed lead nurturing program will accelerate the purchase decision for many.



3. Existing Customer Upsell/Cross-sell

Too many marketers focus all their time on acquiring new customers and overlook existing customers. For many companies, over 75% of revenue comes from existing customers. What makes this kind of lead nurturing approach particularly interesting is that you can leverage purchase history as well as buying preferences and behaviors to help you segment audiences and identify your upsell/cross-sell opportunities. In your organization, these types of campaigns may not come from Marketing, but from Customer Success, Customer Service, or Account Management. The groups may not be familiar with the mechanics of lead nurturing, so the initiative may require Marketing to work with other teams to kick off the program. No matter where they come from, these campaigns will make your customers feel valued and help improve loyalty.

4. Dormant Customer Re-engagement

No matter how strong your marketing is, you are going to have a certain percentage of dormant customers and prospects. Lead nurturing programs that target dormant customers can help, but they must be data-driven so you can accurately segment your audiences. Research shows that the investment of your time is worth it. Many companies who have launched this type of nurturing program have seen up to 35% of their dormant customers and prospects re-engage and even become active advocates for their products, services, or brands. You have already made the investment in acquiring these names—and many of them had expressed a good amount of interest in your company at some time. Aren’t they are worth reaching out to one more time?



5. Competitive Win-Back

The vendor-customer relationship can be hard to explain and understand. Sometimes you just don’t know what happened at a specific stage in a given buyer’s journey. What you can know is that whatever the trigger was that caused a customer to choose your competitor over you can also work against your competitor. Often it is just a matter of time. With this type of lead nurturing program you need to make sure that you are showcasing very clear value propositions and competitive advantages, such as pricing, benefits, support, and training. Because you have nothing to lose, the tone for these campaigns are often a bit bolder.

If your organization already has a formal lead management process and is leveraging marketing automation, don’t forget about Lead Recycling. Sometimes, no matter how well Marketing qualifies a lead, once it is handed over to Sales, it is not accepted. Perhaps budget has changed. Other times a timeline has been altered. Who knows? If that lead is “recycled,” it will go back to Marketing to be nurtured again. But it should be placed in a new, different lead nurturing program from those leads that are going down the lead management funnel for the first time. Since lead nurturing is all about timing and getting the right message to a specific prospect or customer when they are ready to buy, lead recycling programs can be fairly successful.

Ready to bust out of your marketing status quo? Read on for today’s best practices in digital lead nurturing.

(Source: SilverPop/DemandGen Report)

Lead nurturing emails get 4-10 times the response rate compared

to standalone email blasts.


PART IIIContent is King, Segmentation is Boss

A recent Ascend2 study asked 375 marketing, sales and business professionals about the tactics they use to generate demand [1]. Both content marketing and email marketing came out on top as the most effective lead generation and lead nurturing tactics. Even though marketers continue to focus on content marketing, according to the study nearly half (48%) ranked content marketing as the most difficult to execute. In fact, in the 2015 B2B content marketing benchmarks released by the Content Marketing Institute [2], only 35% of marketers indicated that they have a documented content strategy.

Why is it so hard?

Because content strategy requires lots of pre-planning and organization before the process even starts, including content mapping and persona development. Marketers are required to work with multiple internal partners to develop a strategy and finally assemble a team for content creation. Every single step is time-consuming and requires personnel and budget resources that are not always available.

The thought of creating multiple pieces of content may be daunting [3], but remember, more is not necessarily better. Oftentimes, one piece of good content can be dissected, used and reused throughout the lead nurture journey. The most important aspect of content strategy is to make sure efforts are synchronized across all communication channels. This is essential to ensure the same message is carried all the way through your campaign and your customers can easily find relevant information, no matter where they look.


Who

Develop different personas based on both firmographic and behavior data, in order to understand different customer pain points. Studies have shown 89% of prospects prefer content specific to their industry, whereas 49% prefer content targeted to their job function.[4]

What

Conduct a content audit to identify what materials are currently available on different channels. Analyze content gaps by mapping available content against each persona along the lead nurture journey.

When

Gather at least one stakeholder from each department that manages or generates content and form a content editorial board [5]. The editorial board should meet quarterly to determine key themes, initiatives and the content calendar.

How

Fill in the gaps by identifying content themes based on common denominators between customer pain points, product expertise/value proposition, and upcoming product updates. For example, think about the pain points a new feature or functionality can address and use this as a basis for your campaign theme. Content themes should be user-centric and highlight solutions.

Where

Determine content format and channels of distribution within the context of the holistic marketing plan, in order to maximize the utility of the content piece. For instance, if someone from your organization is scheduled to present a content theme at an upcoming conference, extract memorable quotes from the speech to create social media posts. At the same time, create a complementary e-book to be leveraged as a lead nurture asset, and develop an Executive Summary to be handed out at future events.

PART III: Content is King, Segmentation is Boss

whowhatwhenhowwhere

How can this process be simplified for lead nurturing? A great starting point is to think about content strategy through the lens of Who, What, When, How, Where.


Another method to help streamline the content strategy and planning process is to incorporate the Agile method. Agile software development method utilizes smaller, cross-functional teams and is rooted in adaptive planning, evolutionary development, continuous improvement and encourages rapid and flexible response to change [6]. The Agile method has been adapted across various business functions, far beyond just software development, including content development. By implementing the Agile method, even small teams with few resources can be made flexible enough to tackle content creation efficiently.

Finally, depending on your organization’s flexibility, it may be worthwhile to consider outsourcing some of your content needs once the themes and the channels have been identified. Outsourcing can alleviate resource limitations while allowing your team to work alongside partners from whom they can learn content creation by example.


(Source: Pardot/Salesforce.com)

of B2B customers prefer to receive content unique to their stage in the buying process

76%


Segmentation: Getting the Right Content to the Right Audience

Having the right content is key to successfully implementing any marketing communication campaign, but how do you decide what content to use to support your lead nurture campaigns? That’s where segmentation comes into play.

Marketing organizations not only have to generate interest and demand in a highly competitive marketplace, but must qualifying leads to pass on to Sales. According to SiriusDecisions, of the 20% of leads that sales reps follow-up on, 70% are disqualified; 80% of these disqualified leads will then go on to buy from you or a competitor in the next 24 months. If you want to be the organization that remains top of mind when leads are ready to buy, nurturing is critical and segmentation is the foundation.

According to a study from MarketingSherpa, segmented emails get 50% more clicks than their untargeted counterparts. Segmentation allows you to tailor your content and communications to your audiences’ unique wants and needs and also helps target your learnings based on audience types. Many organizations shy away from developing a proper segmentation model because they have the misconception that segmentation is complicated. However, simple really is better.


(Source: MarketingSerpa)

Segmented emails get 50% more clicks than their

untargeted counterparts50%


What is segmentation?

Every organization’s needs vary and your customers will have significant differences across verticals, job titles, geographies and lead stages that must be considered before developing a lead nurture campaign. Segmentation, by definition, clearly categorizes groups of customers with similar needs, pain points and characteristics. Geographic, demographic, psychographic and behavioral data are all commonly used to define segments and support the development of content strategies.

More than half of B2B buyers spent more time researching purchase decisions than they did a year prior, according to Demand Gen Report’s 2014 B2B Buyer Behavior Survey. By defining segments and understanding your target audience(s), you’ll be better positioned to anticipate content needs and align your communications and channels to deliver more targeted conversations and accelerate the buying process. It’s important to keep your segments clearly defined and aligned to your business objectives.


(Source: DMA "National Client Email Report")

Email marketers estimate 30% of email revenue derives from targeting to specific segments.

30%


Start with these three steps:

Step One: Define Target Customer(s)Begin your segmentation journey by defining your marketing objective and then organizing your prospects/customers into complimentary groups. For example, consider stage of buying journey, buying behavior, learning and engagement preferences or channels. Placing your prospects/customers into different groups based on their preferences and key characteristics helps you tailor your message to their needs.

Step Two: Build Buyer Personas & Buyer Scenarios

Next, you’ll need to create detailed profiles—aka buyer personas—for each of your target segments to categorize unique needs and business drivers. Buyer personas should include descriptive characteristics with both qualitative and quantitative information on what a segment really looks like. To further enhance audience understanding, take your personas to the next level with buyer scenarios that describe potential events or triggers a prospective buyer is likely to experience when engaging with your organization. This deeper understanding will help inform your lead nurture content and messaging strategy.

Utilizing buyer personas and buyer scenarios in your nurture campaigns can results in 2x the open rate and 5x the click thru rate because you have a comprehensive understanding of your target segments’ issues, challenges and business drivers that influence the purchasing decision.

Step Three: Map Content

As a final step, use your segmentation and historical nurture performance to assign relevant and compelling content and messaging for each identified segment. Then use your content map to determine the optimal execution tactics and cadence for lead nurture communications.

Segmentation is the foundation of lead nurturing and as an organization you want to build a relationship throughout their journey not just at the time of purchase. So remember, the next time you start brainstorming ways to optimize your lead nurture activities, take a step back and ensure you are leveraging the power of segmentation. Organizations who have identified the importance of engaging with customers and prospects with the right content at the right time are reaping the benefits of segmentation and delivering value in each interaction across the buyer’s journey.

Now that you’ve learned how to use content and segmentation to drive lead nurture success, read on for the nine best practices in lead follow up.



PART IVMarketers, Start Your Engines

Most marketers roll out lead nurturing primary for new customer acquisition. This makes sense, as most leads are not sales ready and need a little marketing TLC. Why pass a high volume of leads to Sales that will not convert to opportunities today? That is not to say that most of these leads won’t buy, they are just not buying today. Instead of abandoning these leads, savvy marketers “nurture” them and get 20%, 25%, or 30% of those leads to engage and become qualified opportunities over time—and see significant incremental revenue. Unfortunately, that’s where lead nurturing ends for most marketers. Today, however, lead nurturing programs have evolved, taking on different shapes and styles. If you are not leveraging all of them, you could be missing out on millions in potential revenue.

Launching a nurture campaign is worth the investment of time, but it isn’t easy. The best approach is to run a pilot nurture campaign that we will define as a “nurture engine” with specific components. The pilot approach will allow you to try it, test it and broaden it. Every successful nurture campaign begins with the shopper’s journey. First you need to reach your audience, then engage them, convert them, and finally, expand the relationship. The nurture engine focuses primarily on the “engage” stage of the shopper’s journey, where our efforts will initiate, educate, differentiate, and accelerate leads.

The nurture engine positions you to initiate new prospects with general messaging and educate them based on their specific value proposition and needs. Nurturing prospects with targeted messaging allows you to differentiate your company and also accelerates the buyer’s journey, moving them from prospect to customer more efficiently.


The ultimate goal of the nurture engine is to drive higher conversion rates, and this simple five-step process will help in achieving that goal:

Step One: Assess and Visualize

Look at the “big picture” and ask yourself whom you want to target. Are you looking for net new prospects, to cross sell/upsell existing customers, or even re-engage past customers? Create buyer scenarios that detail personal information, buying behaviors, and other essential information. Stakeholder interviews and focus groups are valuable in finding out the current state of marketing and engagement efforts—what’s working and what can be improved. Now that your audience is segmented, pick one or more audience segments to focus on.

PART IV: Marketers, Start Your Engines


Step Two: Pilot Design

Now that you have a thorough understanding of the prospect base, you can create an implementation plan. You’ll need to develop tailored messaging for each audience. Messaging frameworks that highlight individual value propositions, pain points, and buying behaviors will assist in building a meaningful relationship with prospects by offering them engaging content. Next, define the communication strategy with audience-specific messaging and a communications calendar to execute against. In this phase we’re focused only on the messaging and design of the campaign, not the actual tactics or channels.

Step Three: Campaign Design

With your segmented messaging and implementation plan in place, you can begin to prepare best-in-class customer communications to provide your audiences with targeted content for amplified engagement. Next, determine the channel mix that resonates best with your audiences and the tactics that you will use in those channels. Develop effective and engaging copy and content for campaign assets such as emails, landing pages, etc. An effective way to ensure optimal creative and copy is to develop them against industry best practices. Prepare any additional campaign materials based on uncovered pilot opportunities, such as the need for a newsletter or existing customer content. Lastly, develop a testing strategy that you can use to test the effectiveness of both channels and tactics used in the nurture engine in the next phase.



Step Four: Execution and Measurement

In this phase, leverage your implementation plan and communications calendar to ensure timely and flawless execution of the pilot program. Deliver the customer communications and measure performance relative to the tactic and/or channel mix. It’s helpful to develop a scorecard or dashboard to summarize campaign results and provide strategic guidance on success drivers, industry trends, and potential future opportunities. Metrics will help you assess how your campaign elements are performing and how well you’ve allocated your funds—after all, the goal is to increase ROI. Finally, develop detailed documentation of processes and procedures functional to the program’s success.

Step Five: Optimization

The optimization phase permits the opportunity to take key learnings from the nurture engine and make recommendations to improve the program before the broader roll out. Use pilot learnings to refresh content, creative, and make broader campaign recommendations. Apply learnings to iterative campaign waves to ensure success and a high return on investment. Lastly, based on critical areas identified for program success, research and recommend components and processes that can be leveraged in future campaigns.

A strong nurture engine is the perfect kick-starter to a strong nurture campaign. Once the nurture engine is in place and your team is behind it, implementing an integrated campaign will garner even more significant and lasting business growth.

Want to make sure your nurture engine is a success? Read more to find out why effective content and segmentation can make all the difference.



PART VBest Practices for Lead Follow Up

We’ve outlined the essential components needed to be successful at lead nurturing. Now let’s put it all together.

Leads are an integral part of any sales force strategy. Without leads the process stumbles, relying on only chance and fortune. It’s difficult for a sales staff to know, however, which leads will convert successfully into customers and clients. This implies that it can be tempting to not follow up on a lead. Sometimes “quality” leads can fizzle out and “suspect” leads can turn into big business. Nurturing leads is a great way to take control of your sales force, relying on expertise instead of luck.

The best practices for lead follow up begin with a strategy. Maximizing the efficiency of the interaction and the potential of the transaction is at the core of this strategy. Your lead’s time is valuable. If roadblocks can be identified earlier in the process, it will save everyone time and money. That said, there’s no such thing as the ideal lead, and all leads will need to be coached through the process to some degree. The trick is to get a quick handle on what your lead needs in order to successfully convert. If you can provide that need, it’s likely to be a successful experience. And determining this earlier in the process will make the entire interaction more efficient, more cost-effective and more successful for every party involved.

The more you know about leads, the better you can anticipate their needs. This helps make the entire interaction more efficient. In other words, the more data you have, the greater your chances for closing the deal and converting the lead. You’ll improve best practices for lead follow up and your bottom line.


The 9 Best Practices for Lead Follow Up

1. Use Big Data to Learn About Your Lead

In today’s world, big data is more valuable than gold. There are, of course, legitimate privacy concerns that go along with it, but when those concerns are managed responsibly, big data can tell you a lot about your leads.

If this data is harvested and analyzed properly, it can help you identify leads that are likely to convert and help you concentrate resources in a productive, efficient way. It can also maximize the productivity of interactions with leads, saving everyone time and money in the process.

A system for keeping track of big data is essential for developing your lead. Often, these systems can be tailored to keep track of the most important data. For example, most online lead generators allow you to track the origin of leads. Whether your lead found you through a Google organic search or through direct traffic will tell you something about how much research your lead has done. Additionally, you can often track what online content your lead has downloaded, which means you can assess how far along your lead is in the lead conversion process.

PART V: Best Practices for Lead Follow Up

(Source: MarketingSherpa)

of B2B organizations identify 'converting qualified leads into paying customers' as a top funnel priority.

57%


2. Properly Select Your Metrics

Because data can be difficult to interpret, it’s important to select metrics before you begin interpreting it. Ask yourself the following questions: What makes for a good lead? What makes for a lead that still needs to be developed? Where should the resources go? How do we know which data to look at?

The answers to those questions will largely depend upon the service or product you are selling. Some products and services require leads to do a substantial amount of research to be ready for the next steps. And data can help tremendously in those situations. It will help determine which leads are ready to take the next step in the lead development process. When building your lead nurturing program, consider tracking these five key metrics:

• Click-Through Rates: High click-through rates mean high quality scores. High quality scores mean your organization is able to improve its advertising positions for a lower cost. Start monitoring your click-through rates, and begin the quest to save advertising dollars.

• Conversion Rates: Reaching potential leads through SEO tactics has been seen as a black art for marketing and sales professionals. It seems impossible to master Google’s ever-evolving search engine algorithms and quantify success through predictive marketing schemes. What will never change however, are the valuable insights conversion rates can provide to your business.

• Time-to-Customer Conversion: Time is money. In B2B, if it is taking your organization longer than 18 days to convert an opportunity to a deal, your sales team should consider taking another approach. Keep in mind that online community-based tools such as websites and social media are ranked to have an above average conversion rate

• Cost of Customer Acquisition: If you are spending more acquiring a customer than the amount that customer will net the company in return, that customer clearly isn’t worth your company’s value. Take the leap and begin to treat the cost of each customer as if it was coming out of your own wallet.

• Customer Lifetime Value: Arguably the most influential metric of all because it not only shows marketers how much a customer is worth, but how much money they should invest in acquiring new customers.



3. Respond Quickly to Leads

Most of your leads will come from the Internet, which moves at the speed of light. Even if most of your leads don’t come from online today, they likely will in the near future. Because information moves so rapidly in today’s digital world, your leads have short attention spans and high expectations.

For example, if you make a purchase on Amazon, an email confirmation of the purchase is sent within seconds. It’s a simple, automated process, but it solidifies the relationship. And, more importantly, it’s the speed consumers expect.

This implies that letting days go by before contacting leads is wasted time. Not only are you providing a window for the competition to set in, you’re also disappointing the customer’s expectations. Waiting just five minutes can reduce the likelihood of the lead to convert by up to a factor of 10. That means for every minute you wait, you’re losing customers.

4. Manage the Initial Contact

The initial contact can be difficult to manage, but it must be done so thoughtfully. If initial contact comes in the form of a white paper, for example, following up with a phone call asking “What did you think of that white paper?” within 60 seconds would be a mistake. Obviously, someone can’t read an entire white paper in under a minute. But automating an email delivery—one with a contact name and phone number—is a great way to confirm to the lead that he or she has entered the lead process.



5. Use Email Lead Nurturing

Email lead nurturing is simple. Using emails, you can confirm, follow up, and engage with leads. Automated processes make email lead nurturing simple. Remember that communication is key to nurturing leads through what can often be a long process. Beginning that communication immediately sets the tone for all future interactions. Using email is an easy way to communicate with the lead right away.

6. Engage When Your Lead Is Ready to Talk

If your lead contacts you with a question, research conducted by the Harvard Business Review suggests that responding within an hour gives you seven times better a chance at a meaningful interaction than if you respond one hour later. The cardinal rule of lead nurturing is to engage with your lead when your lead is ready to talk. Everybody, leads included, have moods and mindsets. If they’ve built themselves up to talk about your product, you’re missing an opportunity by not being there when they’re ready.

It’s worth noting that keeping great lead data can enable various team members to efficiently interact with leads. Ensuring that a team member is always available is a great way to form a seamless path of immediate communication. Leads are more likely to covert when you’re readily available. And they’re less likely to find reasons to seek out your competition.




7. Invest in Excellent CRM Resources

We’ve already established that data and communications are both key to developing your leads. Those tasks seem pretty straightforward, but they can also be complex and time consuming. Managing those tasks efficiently is why many businesses invest in Customer Relationship Management platforms, or CRM.

CRM is a broad term. It’s either provided by software or people but, regardless of the provider, it enables effectively managed interactions with and data from leads.

Perhaps the most common CRM software available is a service called SalesForce, which allows you to use technology to achieve lead follow up best practices. This CRM is scalable, which makes it a perfect fit for businesses both large and small. It’s capable of handling everything from email marketing to competitor tracking to sales collaboration.

Essentially, SalesForce can help you keep in contact with leads by giving your team access to great information, which SalesForce can be set up to selectively gather. Of course, SalesForce is not the only option. There’s a myriad of software out there, including NetSuite, OnContact, and SalesNexus. All of them offer software with support.

8. Consider Help from the Outside

Sometimes it’s more efficient to let someone else connect the dots for you. There are plenty of resources available that combine marketing efforts (essentially, lead generation) with lead nurturing. Sometimes an outside eye can help accomplish this combination in a way that insiders simply can’t fathom.

The size and scope of what each business hopes to accomplish will determine the degree of support necessary. Customer Relationship Management can be a fulltime occupation, one that you simply don’t have the time or expertise to effectively manage on your own. If that’s the case, a software solution such as SalesForce will, on its own, do little to put a dent into return on investment. You won’t have the time to use the software to its full potential. The solution, then, is to partner with experts in that field. Your CRM network with established practices will set you up for success for years to come.



9. Give it Away for Free

Creating great content, such as white papers, e-books, and social media posts, is a vital component of lead nurturing. Content is designed to educate your potential leads and encourage them to realize their need for your products or services.

A lead that comes to you—an inbound lead—is far more likely to convert into a customer than almost any other type of lead.

Providing valuable content at the beginning of the relationship is only the start of the nurturing process. Lead follow-up best practices suggest that you continue to provide access to helpful, engaging content. Education is incredibly valuable. When you offer it for free, you make the lead more likely to return. And the more a lead returns, the more chances you have to convert the lead and continue growing your business. You can automate this process with a lead follow up email, which drastically improves your efficiency.


ABOUT MARKETBRIDGE

For over fifteen years Marketbridge has been helping customers drive sales and marketing productivity through four customer lifecycle solutions: demand creation, lead nurturing, sales acceleration and customer retention. These solutions combine the art of content personalization with the science of data and analytics, to drive higher quality leads, ready-to-buy customers and shorter sales cycles. From buyer segmentation to lead nurturing programs to digital sales tools, our unique “connecting sales and marketing” approach delivers significant revenue growth and cost savings to our customers.

Corporate Website:www.market-bridge.com

MarketBridge Community:www.the-digital-bridge.com

Phone:1-888-GO-TO-MKT

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San Francisco, CA601 Montgomery St., Suite 650San Francisco, CA 94111

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