Customers become
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 lead 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 lead 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 Lead Nurturing Process
The trick with any lead management system is to maximize the efficiency
(technology) and not lose the impact of a natural customer experience.
This balance optimizes your return.
Lead 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 lead 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 analytics 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.
About
the AuthorBill
Rice is the Founder and CEO of Kaleidico, a privately
held lead management software firm focused on making
Internet marketing and sales simpler and more
productive. Products include: icoSales, a sales
management solution and icoMatch, a lead distribution
platform.
Prior to founding
Kaleidico, Bill has been a serial entrepreneur as an
executive at Quicken Loans leading the National Home
Equity division as well as multiple sales groups,
helped start-up and ultimately sell DeepGreen Bank to
Lightyear Capital, was a part of the Motorola spin-out
Iridium, held several other early leadership positions
with TASC (federal/government consulting firm) and
also served in the US Air Force. Bill is one of the
Founding Advisory Board Members for SmartHippo.com, a
vertical search engine for financial services, and is
currently serving in this position.
Bill earned his MBA at
the University of Phoenix and holds an undergraduate
degree in Political Science from the United States Air
Force Academy.
Bill has been a much
sought after speaker at such events as Leads2007,
LeadsCon, the Ohio MBA conference, as well as the
Online Lead Quality Summit. Bill frequently provides
insight on his very popular sales blog,
BetterCloser.com and lead market analysis at
LeadMarketwatch.com. Inquiries into scheduling
engagements can be made at sales at http://kaleidico.com
Bill
Rice is the Founder and CEO of Kaleidico, a privately
held lead management software firm focused on making
Internet marketing and sales simpler and more
productive. Products include: icoSales, a sales
management solution and icoMatch, a lead distribution
platform.
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