Lead Nurturing certainly is a hot topic these days. The business case for it is undeniable (which my next post on Lead Nurturing will cover). As evidenced, LeadGenesys clients are typically seeing a 15 to 45% lift in revenue as a result of effective lead nurturing. The key word here is “effective.”
While lead nurturing has tremendous upside potential for boosting revenue, if it’s not done correctly, it can potentially deter revenue or at least increase sales cycles.
Case in point. We recently purchased some software from a company that happened to be using a lead nurturing solution from a competing lead management company. This company is now a LeadGenesys client so we’ll protect the innocent and not name names. This was our sales cycle experience:
Day 1: Signed up for blog.
Downloaded whitepaper
Day 5: Requested live demo
Day 8: Viewed live demo.
Day 9: Signed up for free trial.
Day 28: Purchased subscription to software.
Pretty straight forward right? Well here’s the nurturing cycle we experienced.
Day 1: Received a call from sales rep attempting to close. Way too early. We asked if the rep had insight into our website activity. He did – but it was reported on a different tab in Salesforce.com that he rarely viewed.
Day 2: Received automated follow-up email asking if we’d like to chat with a sales rep. We already did – yesterday.
Day 6: Received an automated follow-up email with an invitation to schedule a live demo. We already did – yesterday.
Day 8: Received another automated follow-up email with an invitation to schedule a live demo. Apparently because we didn’t respond to the first invitation. The demo had already been scheduled for that day.
Day 9: Received a demo follow-up email with invitation to a free trail – after we had already indicated interest in a free trail during the demo. We did not respond to that email.
Day 13: Received another demo follow-up email with invitation to a free trail – 4 days into our trial.
At this point I think you get the picture.
The lead was shared with sales too early and a sequence of messages was triggered without regard to the prospect’s actions. Effective lead nurturing requires an intelligent solution capable of reacting to a wide variety of hand raising activities.
Blend Lead Nurturing with Triggered Alerts
When you are setting up nurturing rules, you can attempt to anticipate the timeframes of all types of hand raising activities, and then write a myriad of “if...then” statements. Doing this for each and every campaign is time consuming and not realistic for time strapped B2B marketers – especially when an integrated marketing mix is applied to long sales cycles. A smarter approach is to start by keeping message sequences relatively short and to apply triggered alerts driven by criteria set by the sales team. One of the few things worse than delivering a lead to sales too early, is continuing to automatically nurture a lead that is already being managed by sales.
Collaborate with the Sales Team
Sales’ acceptance of the lead and/or feedback on the leads should impact the lead score and grade. As you collect more feedback, you can refine your nurturing schemas and triggered alerts. Just make sure your solution has a feedback mechanism in place to help with this.
Don't Over-Think It
So when starting out, keep it simple. Even if the marketing automation solution you are using or considering does not have a highly advanced rule set, you can still effectively deliver sales-ready leads as long as you don’t over-think initial nurturing sequences, and leverage a robust set of triggered alerts based on both hand raising activity and lead scores / grades.
