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Have you asked the sales people in your company what they really think about your leads?
In most companies we meet, less than 1 in 10 leads are sales ready. If this is the case for you and you simply give all your leads to sales, the sales people are spending their time annoying those leads and making them less likely to buy. And most of the effort you spend producing those leads is wasted.
A good lead nurturing program remedies this. It amplifies your marketing efforts. It also makes your sales people to love you because you will be able to help them sell to their existing contacts.
Read more to learn how.
Nurturing Best Practice 1: Increase impact by aligning messaging to buyer’s journey
In general, a lead will move through three stages in their buyer's journey: Awareness, Consideration and Decision.
Hubspot’s Buyer’s Journey
If you have a long sales cycle, it is likely that the majority of your leads will be in the Awareness stage. If you operate in a large market, there are likely more potential customers who have not actively engaged and progressed through the buying cycle, than those who have.
For you, this means two things.
First, most of your messaging in nurturing should not be about your product. It should be about how they can frame and name their challenges (Awareness stage) or about which types of solutions fit which types of circumstances (Consideration stage). If you help your leads frame their challenges in terms of your language, you will have an edge.
Second, you need to be able to capture the leads that have reached the decision stage so that you can close the deal. (How you do that is described in best practice 3 below.)
Nurturing Best Practice 2: Rapidly grow your list by connecting with sales
If you are not collecting leads from salespeople as well as from your marketing processes, you might be missing a big opportunity.
Your sales people are talking to potential customers every day. Most of them won’t be ready to buy, but many will be interested in receiving more information and potentially getting in touch in the future.
But sending such information and staying on top of potential future contacts is very time consuming for a sales person. That time could be spent finding new prospects instead.
So why not create special marketing campaigns that take care of these prospects automatically?
The Unified Business Model for Sales and Marketing Alignment shows how that process can look:
This is how it works in practice:
In your CRM, there is a dropdown containing a couple of personalized follow up campaigns for sales people. You pick one, and then you can move on. You don't have to think about this prospect again. Instead, you can focus on calling new ones.
Your marketing system then starts sending a drip campaign containing the information the prospect asked for, and from time to time being asked if they would like to follow up with a phone call. The mails look like they are sent directly from the sales person, and the reply-to adress goes to the sales person.
If the prospect clicks a link in one of the emails, the sales person is notified and can follow up with a phone call.
If a prospect doesn't click any links after the follow-up series, it should be added to the Nurturing Leads bucket and receive the generic newsletters. Because you will be using regular Conversion Campaigns to your Nurturing Leads bucket, they will re-convert into leads in due time. Which brings us to our third and final best practice, below.
Nurturing Best Practice 3: Re-convert sales-ready leads into buyers
The full lead nurturing model looks like this:
Note that in this model, there is a specific role responsible for lead nurturing: The Email Broadcaster. This can either be a dedicated person or someone who also has other responsibilities.
Every time your Campaign Manager from your Inbound Marketing Process creates a conversion campaign, the Email Broadcaster will send out a targeted conversion message to your lead nurturing list. The ones who have progressed through the buyer’s journey and are ready to speak to a sales person will re-convert. This way, you ensure that sales ready leads are re-captured into the sales process.
In this blog post, we have shown you how you can fill your nurturing bucket with leads from both sales and marketing, communicate with them in a targeted way to help them progress in the buyer’s journey, and recapture them into the sales process when they are ready.
Because you will fill your bucket with a large number of leads from both sales and marketing, your Nurturing process will be a highly valuable source of new opportunities. And since it helps your sales people automate the lead follow-up, they will love you for it.
We have now gone through all the processes in this complete guide to how to align sales and marketing blog series. In the next blog post, we will connect all the processes together by looking at which KPIs you should measure in each sales and marketing process to predict and optimize your integrated sales and marketing machine.
