While your salespeople, reps, re-sellers and distributors focus on closing sales from the most promising short-term sales opportunities that come from leads, nearly three-quarters of the leads that will convert into sales are neglected.
Why? Because salespeople are generally measured and rewarded for winning short-term sales, not for nurturing longer-term sales opportunities. Yet three out of four sales opportunities come from the longer-term leads. So if your company doesn't have a marketing-driven lead nurturing program in place, it’s missing out on these sales opportunities. And that’s costing your organisation big bucks in lost sales.
To get your share or more of these valuable sales opportunities, your company’s longer-term leads must be nurtured with an ongoing series of marketing communications, each designed to help move prospects forward in their buying cycles.
When designing your B2B lead-nurturing program, you’ll need answers to these questions:
- How do we best deliver sales-winning messages to the people who will influence or make buying decisions about our kinds of products or services?
- What should we communicate to address their specific issues and reduce the perceived risk of buying our company’s products or services?
- What can we offer that will cause prospects to move forward in their buying process, and identify themselves when they are ready for follow-up by sales?
- What media should we use to deliver those messages and offers?
- What frequency is most appropriate?
- How do we stay with them throughout their buying process, keeping them moving forward from inquiry to consideration to purchase?
Here’s how to nurture your prospects and build a sales-winning relationship with them.
Use your answers to the questions above to develop an integrated series of ongoing communications, by email, postal mail and phone, designed to keep pace with the prospects’ need for the information required to make decisions about your kinds of products or services.
Be sure to include multiple offers, each designed to appeal to prospects at different stages of their buying process. For example:
- Prospective customers that are early in their buying processes will be more receptive to offers for free information in the form of how-to guides, white papers or email newsletters.
- As prospects move further along in their buying processes, appropriate offers may include those that require a higher level of interest or commitment on the part of the prospect. These include webinar invitations, demonstrations, checklists and other decision-making tools.
- As prospects approach being ready to buy, they will be more receptive to offers such as longer in-depth seminars, needs assessments, or meeting with and getting a proposal or quotation from a salesperson.
Next, keep in touch with your prospects via a series of ongoing communications and offers throughout your prospective customers’ buying processes, until they are ready to engage with your salespeople.
Lead nurturing effectively triples the number of qualified, sales-ready leads you’ll generate.
In addition to finding the three out of four sales opportunities that come from longer-term leads, you’ll be pleased to find that sales revenue is higher from those who are included in the lead-nurturing program compared to those who are not.
Yes, some believe that lead nurturing is just a new feel-good name for a marketing activity that requires funding. But the truth is, if you use well-crafted communications designed to keep in touch with and inform prospects as they move through their consideration and buying processes - not just focusing your company’s efforts on the short-term sales opportunities - you can pick up the three out of four sales that others are leaving on the table. And that makes you and your lead-nurturing program big winners.