Merely being a blip on your customer's radar isn't enough. Building meaningful relationships is what really moves the needle.
But meaningful relationships are not built from a template; they require a thoughtful approach, time, and dedication. This is what makes lead nurturing challenging but rewarding.
Lead nurturing puts your potential customers in the center and ensures that your sales team revolves around your customers' needs, not just your sales targets.
Sales and marketing teams often rely on lead intelligence software to find the most promising sales opportunities and nurture them with the right efforts. The software uses internal and external data to optimize the lead management process, leading to a surge in conversion rates, heightened productivity, and an overall elevation of customer satisfaction.
Lead nurturing is the process of developing and maintaining relationships with potential customers or prospects. It involves educating buyers about how your products and services address their pain points to move them down the sales funnel.
When it comes to winning over potential customers, there are different techniques, like personalizing outreach communications and lead scoring, to make sure that you connect with leads in the most effective way.
In other words, there are many things that you need to take into account to manage and nurture your leads. That’s why in this article, we summarized the most important steps for creating a robust lead nurturing strategy and also included five effective ways to make the most of it.
Lead management is divided into several stages. There is lead generation, lead qualification, lead tracking, and lead nurturing.
Each of these stages means different things:
The image below illustrates how these lead management stages are interconnected.
Source: OnePageCRM
If you’re successful at lead generation, you can get a lot of high-quality leads. But the number of leads alone is a vanity metric. To grow your business, you need to convert leads into paying customers. And this is where lead nurturing acts as a crucial weapon in your arsenal.
Lead nurturing helps you make the most of your prospect data, grow revenues faster, build a brand reputation, and better understand customers by fostering strong relationships.
Sometimes companies focus too much on lead generation and don’t spend enough time on nurturing relationships with generated leads. If you find yourself in a situation where you have a lot of idle contacts in your database, it’s time to re-think your approach to managing data.
A good lead nurturing process will improve your chances of converting promising leads and growing your customer base.
The sales cycle can be very long: today, customers have access to a lot of information, and the sales funnel is no longer a straight journey. Your leads will likely compare and test several products and services before making a final decision. And you need to keep in mind this non-linear behavior.
By having a good lead nurturing process, you can make sure that you’re always in front of your potential customers while they are still exploring different options in the market.
During the lead nurturing process, you are in constant touch with potential customers. This helps you collect a lot of information on your leads.
By the time they convert into customers, you already know them quite well. That’s why you’re better prepared to contact them about a new pricing plan or a new add-on: you know what they need and what they might be interested in.
While lead nurturing is a powerful tool, its implementation requires thorough preparation. You need to create a strategy to plan your lead nurturing activities in advance and to align sales and marketing teams.
Creating a lead nurturing strategy is not always straightforward. There’s no one-size-fits-all plan that works for every company in every situation. However, there are some lead nurturing best practices that you can use to refine your processes and make sure that you are on the right track.
"History is the only true teacher," as the famous quote goes. It might not be entirely accurate, but we can learn a lot from the past.
If you’ve been in business for a few years already, you probably have processes in place. Some of them might be working well, others might need a bit of tweaking - or maybe a few of these processes are long outdated. Sometimes you need to take a step back and evaluate what’s been working and what needs improvement.
It’s not an easy exercise if you’ve worked in the company for many months or years. You’re already used to the way things are done and might be reluctant to challenge the status quo. That’s why it can be easier to ask a new hire to evaluate your current processes, or you can do research on lead nurturing activities in other industries to refresh your perspective.
To make sure that you’re not missing anything important, write down your lead nurturing strategy. Don’t try to memorize everything; having a written document, even if it’s a simple Google document, will help you stay focused and see the whole picture.
Everyone in sales and marketing knows that in order to be successful, companies need to understand their audience.
But how can you get to know your leads? It’s much easier to schedule an interview with a customer rather than a lead.
There are several things you can do:
Effective lead nurturing requires cross-channel communication. Since leads are still in the consideration stage, you need to help them make a decision. Everyone is different, so make sure that you offer different communication channels: live webinars, demos, chats, emails, and more.
Besides, your social media profiles should look professional. Your online reputation and presence can make or break your lead nurturing strategy.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t publish memes or fun team events. On the contrary, your social media needs to reflect that you’re open to communication, easy to reach, and ready to help.
Make sure that your contact information is up-to-date. It’s frustrating to call a phone number that is long out of service.
What gets measured gets analyzed.
Before launching a lead nurturing program, you need to decide what you want to achieve. Lewis Carroll once wrote: "If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there".
Think about your goals and objectives - yes, these are different things. While your goal can be very general, objectives need to be specific; for example, how many leads you want to generate and how many of them you want to convert.
Measuring the effectiveness of your lead nurturing strategy can help you improve your processes and increase conversion rates.
A successful lead nurturing strategy can help you stay in touch with your leads throughout different stages. Since your strategy is an overarching plan, it should also consist of specific steps that your company needs to take to nurture leads more effectively.
After all, lead nurturing is not about simply promoting your services but about providing value to your potential customers. Here are five techniques that can help you build a robust lead nurturing process.
Source: OnePageCRM
Lead nurturing is a team exercise. Both marketing and sales should be involved at different stages of your lead’s journey. And to avoid confusion, you need clear responsibilities for both teams.
Usually, marketing responsibilities in lead nurturing include the following:
Sales responsibilities in lead nurturing are as follows:
“Walk in your customer's shoes” is one of the most common pieces of advice given to sales and marketing professionals. That’s why before scheduling a call with a prospect or lead, you need to set some time aside to thoroughly research their business and the industry in which they operate.
During the call, you need to listen to your potential customers and ask questions. It should feel like a conversation, not a sales pitch. If you understand how you can serve your potential customers better, you’ll be more likely to close a deal.
It’s also important to be attentive to details during your lead interactions. For example, you can take notes even if it’s a minor detail, like if a lead mentioned that they have two kids or that they are going on vacation to Paris next week. Next time, when you have a conversation with this lead, you’ll be able to start on a more personal note.
Every organization, even a large one, has limited resources. That’s why you need to prioritize where you spend your time and focus. This is where lead scoring comes in.
Lead scoring is one of the benefits of marketing automation that helps you identify the leads that have a high chance of converting. It's a process of ranking prospects in order to determine how ready they are to make a purchase.
You can score your leads based on their demographic data, behavior, or engagement metrics. These are all different lead scoring models. Depending on what data you have and the quality of this data, you can choose one model or combine several of them.
Lead scoring helps with prioritization. Not every lead needs your immediate attention. For example, when you gate content like e-books or webinars, many people might register with fake email addresses. And this doesn’t mean that you need to follow up with every fake address you get.
Lead scoring helps you keep organized and understand what leads you need to focus on first.
The good news: Follow-ups work.
The bad news: There’s no magic number of follow-ups that will get your lead to respond.
The majority of businesses and sales professionals follow up at least once. But it might take up to six or eight follow-ups until you get a response.
There are several things that you can do to improve your follow-up routine:
Poor reporting can adversely affect your analysis and, consequently, lead nurturing efforts. When you measure results, look not only at numbers but also at what they can tell you:
Reporting should go hand in hand with analysis. But it doesn’t end there. You also need to document your lead nurturing journey. This will help you optimize your process in the future and see what worked and what didn’t.
Lead nurturing has many benefits for your business. But before starting any lead nurturing activities, you need to analyze your previous performance, define your lead profiles, and set metrics.
And it doesn’t end there. Creating a lead nurturing strategy is just the beginning.
To make the most of it, you need to keep your sales and marketing teams aligned, provide value to your leads, and keep in touch with potential customers throughout different stages of their buyer journey.
By building a robust lead nurturing process, you can make sure that you are making the most of your prospect data and building long-term work relationships.
Don't let all that customer data go to waste. Learn how to cross-sell and upsell effectively.
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