Part three of four
This is the third installment in a four part series dedicated to lead generation and lead nurturing process. No business can be successful with new client development without a strong understanding of this phase in the sales cycle. You can read the initial installment which can be found here.
Here are a few areas to discover critical functionality indicators inside a lead nurturing marketing campaign:
- Engagement: Identify the email open and click-through rates. This data is a great starting point for your tracking efforts.
- Lead acceleration: Are leads moving according to expectation through the lead funnel?
- How does the time it takes to convert from lead to converting to a sell-ready state? Are leads attentive to your firm’s content strategy? Between nurturing campaign stages, how long does it take to move nurtured prospects into the sales cycle?
- Outcome metrics: What are the conversion rates? From initial contact (suspect) to lead, from lead to sales opportunity? How many leads begin the process? How many of them convert successfully through the entire process (closing rate)? What is your company average transaction amount (sales revenue average)? What is the entire length of the sales cycle in terms of time?
Once you establish a baseline with these and other key indicators, you can look for trouble spots in your nurturing campaign, experiment with solutions and consider your next steps.
Going Forward From the Beginning
A fundamental lead nurturing strategy, utilizing a small amount of potential buyer user profiles, a restricted procedure flow, and some performance metrics, is an excellent place to begin. Like prospect scoring, on the other hand, direct nurturing is actually a stratagem that’s by no means concluded; there’s always room to fine-tune, improve and
expand your efforts.
In addition to incorporating improved and updated user profiles, fresh touch – points, content variety and communication avenues with your established activities, there are other tips on how to take advantage of lead nurturing, including:
- Brand Loyalty and Customer Retention: Utilize valid and current lead nurturing practices to produce more intense interactions with your current leads AND clients – including cross-sell and up sell possibilities influenced by engaging content.
- Relationship Building: Implement lead nurturing process to allow clients to get to know your firm better, provides you an opportunity to strengthen the relationship, and develop a bond so that you firm is “Top-Of-Mind,” and that your competitors become a distant memory. Assist and follow up with your customers concerning their newly purchased goods and services; supply them with help-desk support options, suggestions, provide consumer online groups for community information and facts, and various solutions.
- Remarketing: Re-evaluate each failed conversion to develop “come-back” strategies to take another pass for possible conversion. Sometimes, simple annoyances caused the prospect to fall out of the lead funnel.
This image displays another look at the sales funnel, and the lead nurturing process. The middle of the funnel is a critical area on which to focus, but as noted previously, doesn’t try to force your lead to a buying decision. There should be well focused energy in providing all of the information to a particular lead in this position, so that the buying decision formulates with you and the relationship you are building with them.
Lead Rating – How Lead Rating and Prospect Nurturing Interact
I would like you to understand the way in which prospect rating can help to increase your current marketing and sales campaigns. An essential prospect ranking principle – the warm lead – is additionally essential for any lead nurturing strategy.
“Warm qualified” prospects demonstrate an obvious affinity for your product or service and solutions, however, they typically do not score as significant as would the oh-so evident “sales-ready purchaser.” Identifying a warm lead using your own rating method is normally a question of time and experience. The efficacy of your system will be determined by various psychographic and demographic ranking considerations of your “ideal” prospect, coupled with your firm’s practical experience going through a number of prospective buyers. Once you discover what your business’ lead scoring ceiling (the culmination of the factors compared to your ideal consumer), it’s not as difficult to be able to systemize the entire process of navigation directly to the sales staff. These folks, who are on the direct firing line of dealing with the prospective customer, must fully understand what makes the ideal time to work with the prospect. By the use of metrics (the rating system) and the prospect, they should know what stage of the buying process in which they find them. If sales intervenes too soon, there is a degree of probability that the prospect may back away, become frustrated, or seek further study with your competitors.
Timing is everything.
