Do You Nurture Leads, Or Do You Just ‘Follow Up’?

Brian Carroll recently made an interesting post on his B2B Lead Generation Blog that draws an important distinction between nurturing leads and merely “following up” with periodic, are-you-ready-to-buy-yet? calls.

My company’s focus is on improving the profitability of our clients’ online sales channels, but I’m becoming increasingly aware of the need to ensure that lead gen efforts are tightly integrated into the sales process as a whole.

Front-end lead generation activities tend to receive a lot of the marketing “glory” and can be a source of great leverage (especially online, where you can test, track and optimise everything in real time), but it’s just as important to pay attention to what happens after the lead has been generated.

“Lead Nurturing” vs “Following Up”

The more complex (read: expensive) your product or service, the more lead nurturing has to be done, especially in a B2B environment.

Nurturing needs to go beyond your CRM-system reminding you to make an are-you-ready-to-buy-yet call. While followup calls are better than nothing, complex sales processes demand more subtle solutions.

How To Nurture Leads More Effectively

1) Timely response

The best time to convert a lead into a sale is as soon as possible (assuming that a lead has been properly qualified). In more complex sales situations or when dealing with large organisations, sales cannot necessarily be closed in days, but quick response times (e.g 4-hours) to initial calls and subsequent followup enquiries create an excellent impression and are unlikely to be matched by competitors.

Timely response is even more powerful for cheaper and/or less complex products, where “convenience” forms a larger part of the purchase decision.

2) Regular, value-added communication

Keeping in touch with prospects on a regular basis with relevant, value-added information is critical. This may include newsletters, white papers, technical updates, audio interviews or video presentations, invitations to events and so on. The key is to stay on message with high-quality information that is offered as a service to prospects.

3) Strategic conversion process

Your methodology for converting prospects into clients is another key levearage point. The 80/20 principle tells us that certain steps in your conversion process will produce a far greater effect than others.

One client was who was selling six and seven figure software systems for an international software company in a past career made the very interesting discovery that ALL new clients had at some point attended a 2-hour evening workshop. Getting bums on seats in those seminars thus became the focus of lead generation activities, yielding exponential results.

What step or steps of your conversion process are responsible for most of your completed sales? What could you add to boost your conversion rates and speed up your sales cycle? What could you take out without any loss of results?

4) Multi-modal contact

If leads are of sufficient value, experiment with varying your contact methods. Go beyond a monthly newsletter to include phone calls, hard mailings, webinars and face-to-face events.

Although newsletter lists and autoresponders provide huge automation benefits, they do have limitations - not the least of which is the sheer volume of emails that are competing for your prospects’ inboxes and mental bandwidth.

There is just one word you need to keep in mind: VALUE. Most DM communications that I critique are professional-looking but ultimately self-serving. By focusing on providing value your communications will be enthusiastically received.

5) Appeal to different VAK Learning Styles

Different people process information in different ways according to their VAK (Visual, Auditory, Kinaesthetic) profiles.

Some people are “visual” - they learn best by seeing.

Others are “auditory” - they learn best by hearing.

Others are “kinaesthetic” - they learn best by doing.

Varying your communications to appeal to different learning styles is another way to increase the overall effectiveness of your lead generation activities.

Use diagrams, charts, powerpoints and video to appeal to Visual types.

Use audio programs, video (with audio) and live presentations to appeal to Auditory types.

Use interactive webinars, surveys and live workshops to appeal to Kinaesthetic types.

In the past, my own lead nurturing activities have been mainly print-based (specifically, wordy newsletters and articles). While these have produced good results, there’s no excuse in this day and age not to offer other delivery formats including audio and video, which is what I’m doing now.

Where to start

In a sense, “lead nurturing” covers a good proportion of the entire sales and marketing process. If you know you could be nurturing leads a lot more effectively, but are not quite sure where to start, here are some ideas:

1) Do you have a functional CRM system that integrates your sales and marketing efforts?

Without this, you can’t begin to nurture leads effectively. We use and work with Salesforce.com which offers a range of pay-per-seat solutions to suit all sizes of organisation. Many other industrial-strength CRM systems will do the same thing.

2) Have you instituted “closed loop tracking”?

That is, are you able to track your marketing progress right from the lead through to the sale and lifetime value of each client? Depending on the size of your organisation, this can either be relatively easy to set up or a major IT project, but the value that this provides is enormous - it allows you to concentrate on the lead generation activities that lead to the greatest number of sales conversions.

3) Do you have a organisation-wide lead definition that everyone in sales and marketing understands and uses?

Unqualified leads frustrate salespeople and waste your time, money and energy. Defining exactly what a qualified lead looks like is a great first step toward knowing exactly whom you should be nurturing.

4) Have you identified where your leverage points are?

If you know the key drivers for qualifying and closing sales (e.g. a seminar, an onsite demonstration, a product trial), you can focus your marketing efforts on driving these high-yield activities.

5) Do you have all your prospects’ contact details?

Do you know all your prospects’ email addresses and physical addresses? If you don’t, start a database-cleaning exercise (e.g. handled by well-trained telemarketers). By making some kind of offer at the same time as cleaning the database, you can turn this into a self-liquidating exercise or even turn a profit.

6) Do you have a documented lead nurturing system?

Even if your sales nurturing system is one 6-monthly followup call, that’s a starting point. Which one or two things could you do to add the most value to the customer experience?

Here are some suggestions:

• Send a white paper in print or electronic form.
• Send or stream a video of a relevant presentation by your CEO or other executive.
• Conduct an industry survey and report back on the results.
• Hold an event or seminar.

7) If you do have a documented followup system, are your salespeople following it? Compliance with a documented followup system is just as important of having the system in the first place. Many CRM systems have “compliance” functions built-in, but ultimately having a system that works effectively is the surest way to get salespeople to stick to the system.

Will Swayne from Marketing Results specialises in lead generation and online sales funnel optimisation. He can be contacted via this contact page.

Related Articles

• No Related Post