Lead Nurturing: More than Birthday Cards By Bill Rice
Customers become sales leads in your pipeline for a variety of reasons. Not all of them are ready to buy. This does not make them any less valuable, just on a different sales cycle. Lead nurturing can help you capture and convert more of your pipeline--providing you a less volatile and higher yielding marketing and sales ROI. Let Your Funnel Flow Up and Down We spend our whole sales career looking at and analyzing sales funnels. We are conditioned to the typical--a lot coming in and only a little coming out. This mental picture locks us into a negative paradigm. Our assumption and behavior becomes one of accepting fallout. But, nothing (short of Do Not Call legislation) should prevent us from putting those no's and non-responsives back into the top of the funnel, nurturing them down a new sales path. This is sales nurturing. Customers are constantly giving us hints as to where they should be in the sales process. How you manage these indicators are worth several percentage points plus or minus to your sales batting average. You have to think of your sales pipeline as a two-way street. This simple switch will maximize your deals and conversion. Nurturing is More than Birthday Cards and Emails Somewhere along the way someone told you a birthday card closes deals and forever birthday cards (now e-cards) equals sales nurturing. We have confused mindless database triggers, on data like birthdays and anniversaries, as relationships. Lead nurturing is optimized relationship building. As such, it should be focused on the two principles of business relationships: value and trust. Creating a Customer Nurturing Process The trick with any sales management system is to maximize the efficiency (technology) and not lose the impact of a natural customer experience. This balance optimizes your return. Sales nurturing can be broken down into three large categories of contact triggers:
Static Triggers: These are the most common and typical data driven (birthdays, anniversaries, elapsed time periods)
Dynamic Triggers: These are actions that are invoked by movements and interactions with the prospect within the sales pipeline. They require discrete status tracking. Customer Triggers: These are the most commonly neglected. They are direct cues from the customer and require sophisticated notation or tagging system.
Your contact management software or process must be capable of automating obvious workflows, like email check-ups and special occasion reminders. It should also be capable of alerting you to potential opportunities (i.e., rate alerts, lease expiration, average time to next transaction). In some cases, your analysis will reveal effective patterns, which you should be able to simply program into alerts. Customers also tend to provide clues to when they may be willing, qualified, or able to buy. These notes need to be taken and considered by the nurturing workflow. Lead Nurturing-the Secret Sales Weapon Top producers understand the productive effect of working the whole pipeline, both the fast and the slow track. Lead nurturing can be a great tool for building a less volatile and higher producing pipeline. Refill your funnel with your own daily fall-out.