Effective Lead Nurturing Best Practices – Raw Lead to Being Sales Ready

Lead Nurturing is a discipline that helps businesses maintain a healthy relationship with their customer, delivering content of relevant value to them so that they remain consistently engaged, thus helping convert prospective leads into sales ready customers. Almost 95% of the prospects visiting your website today are there for research, most of them may not buy at all, but as many as 70% of them will eventually buy maybe from you or your competitors. Lead nurturing helps you to track these leads and move them down your funnel, so that when they are ready to buy they purchase your solution.

Lead nurturing software allows leads to be tracked and content delivery to be automated through various marketing channels and helps convert prospective leads into sales-ready customers. It also addresses the challenge that marketing and sales teams face in establishing a strong bond with their customers. The biggest advantage of lead nurturing is that, it builds the brand and product preferences moving them gently along the path of becoming a customer, long before they are ready to buy.  

Here are a few effective lead nurturing best practices that needs to be followed at each phase of the sales cycle to ensure a successful sales conversion.

1.    Understand the Needs of the Customer and Map out a Strategy – You need to clearly map out your typical buyers buying cycle with an interesting and attractive introduction. It is the basis of any good lead nurturing campaign.  Plan out the kinds of content that you want your leads to receive, keeping in mind their interests. The kinds of content that can be sent include white papers/articles, case studies, data sheets, videos, podcasts, webinars, links to specific industry news/resources and interviews with experts/executives.

2.    Personalize Your communication – Start building relationship by personalizing emails. Send relevant content based on the interest in the prospect. Provide information they want rather than filling their inbox with information that is irrelevant to their need. You have a much higher chance of keeping your prospect in the fold if you provide information they want.

3.       Build and Reinforce Brand/Product – Brand building is absolutely necessary today. If you are a known brand, lead generation will work better. With information in abundance online buyers are not dearth of information and choice. Web 2.0 has changed the brand building scenario. If the prospect has shown interest in your product, it is up to you to keep his attention with timely messages. Share white papers, videos or demos about your brand or product. Develop case studies and share success stories with clients. In this way you will be able to create an image about your brand.

4·         Create a Thought Leadership –By engaging prospects early, you build awareness and increase your chances that the prospect will respond to future demand generation efforts.  Develop a schedule for sending out information to the prospect. This helps you keep track of where you are in the lead nurturing funnel.

5.       Strengthen Relationship – Once the brand is built, you need to strengthen it and maintain that interest further. You now need to send a controlled communication to influence the prospect’s buying decision. This helps your prospects learn more about you and your background and helps build the foundations of a healthy relationship.  Use whitepapers, eBooks, demos, case studies and let loose yourself in the social media. Remember the first eight seconds are very important to get their attention, so be precise to the point, short forms and definitely no external navigation.    

6.   Close the Deal – Once the prospect is ready, it is time to pass them on to the sales team to close the deal.

Marketing is a dynamic job and you need to be malleable, ready to automate building and managing lead generation and lead nurturing best practices.  By nurturing your prospects database, it is easy to identify your most qualified leads that are sales ready. The ones who are not, regular follow up and regular consistent nurturing can help them move up in the pipeline.

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Creating a Marketing Revolution with Lead Generation Software

Lead generation always takes precedence for marketers despite the fact that businesses have to deal with limited resources and time constraints. To connect with customers, a large part of today’s businesses are using a number of contemporary methods and techniques. Marketing teams are under tremendous pressure to come up with strategies to generate effective and qualified leads. And this can be successfully achieved only when there is collaboration and harmony with between the sales and the marketing teams. Lead generation needs to be all about quality and not quantity, and many companies have revamped their lead generating tactics.

For companies to be successful, lead generation needs to be the focus of business. Effective planning and maintaining a consistent marketing automation tool effort are the two biggest challenges of any promotion, and by adopting the right lead generation plan with helpful tools, there can be a significant difference.  If you do not have a workable lead generation system, then your attempts at lead generation can get difficult. It is therefore necessary to have a complete set of sales lead generation tools at your fingertips to reach your sales prospects.

Making the best of a lead generation software
Having the right lead generation software can be a game changer for any business. Lead Generation Software can add new dimensions without affecting your existing sales. It is a  powerful tool that captures the names and contact information of your prospects from online directories. It is an effective technique that can dramatically lower your lead costs. As it is automated, it facilitates a database of your own out of the generated business contacts and is one of the many lead generation techniques that can help in increasing your traffic and advertising. Lead generation software can manage any kind of leads and do wonders with your lead generation efforts. As lead generation software helps in sorting out the leads, it also helps in distributing them to the sales department. Installing leads generation software is an effective option as they identify your target customer and make all the right decisions for you. Software as a service will help you acquire your customers’ confidence.

With the right system, you can make the most of your lead generation software. With qualified lead generation leveraging efficiencies, marketers can determine their ideal prospects and create the perfect formula for generating leads to drive that population and control your ROI destiny with lead generation software.

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Bridging the Sales-Marketing Gap

Every company which has marketing and sales departments has at some point witnessed the famous – sales and marketing fight and blame game – more commonly known as the sales and marketing misalignment.

One of the most significant reasons for the sales and marketing divide is the difference in objectives and their measurement of success in closing the sales deal. In a B2B set up these differences are more glaring as compared to a B2C company.

In B2C, both marketing and sales are measured by the sales and market share the company enjoys for its products. In such a scenario, marketing invariably assumes the role of assisting sales and propelling the company’s revenue share in the marketplace.

However, in most B2B companies, the primary objective of marketing is to generate quality business leads and of sales to convert these into closed deals. Both these departments are also measured based on the number of leads generated and the number of sales closed, respectively.

In reality the role of marketing in a B2B company is relationship building and that of sales to use this relationship and help prospects make a rational buying decision based on business value offered by the company’s solutions.

Irrespective of how companies want to position their marketing and sales objectives, the truth is marketing and sales are two sides of the same coin.

Selling starts the very minute the company goes out into the world and talks about its offering. Companies spend on marketing activities because they want to attract people who can buy their offerings. So what really differentiates marketing from sales is the point of their entry in the relationship building process.

Hence it is essential for companies to create a common ground or process for marketing and sales teams to work together in the in-between stages of qualifying and nurturing Leads.

Define Lead Profile

Defining a good Lead is the first step in this direction. It starts by putting down a definite list of attributes and a score for each attribute; this process helps in scoring the Leads and qualifying them. These pre-defined Lead attributes should be arrived at after doing ample research on how the Leads in the company’s Lead funnel behaved in the past, this requires an in-depth study of both Leads closed and opportunities lost. Also, this should be an ongoing process, where the Lead behavior is watched and the common definition accordingly developed over a period of time.

Automate Processes

Use of technology like marketing automation solutions can help in easing and automating the process of scoring and qualifying leads if the primary source of Lead generation is Internet.

Just this one process can go a long way in bridging the sales-marketing divide, at least in settling the blame game.

Setting up such a process not only helps in bringing clarity to the end objectives of both, but also equates the success metric. The Lead definition becomes the base measurement value for both the departments. Marketing is measured not on the basis of Leads generated but on the basis of qualified Leads generated in accordance with the common definition. Sales get measured on how many of these qualified Leads it managed to close.

Marketing automation solutions allow sales and marketing to have a common free-flowing communication channel through a common “Lead view”, even if they fail to fit the pre-defined criteria.

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