Good marketing in today’s internet saturated business environment can easily get far more leads than your sales team can adequately process to a transaction. Nevertheless your sales people constantly complain that the leads are worthless.
Sorry to tell you this…but the salespeople are right.
Most of the leads you generate are junk if you don’t have a lead nurturing system in place. Sales professionals will have better sales results if they dump as many leads as possible into marketing automation systems you set up for them.
Dumping the “Bad” Sales Leads
The goal is to rapidly qualify the small number of leads that are ready for a sales conversation. The quicker your sales team dumps them, the more effective your sales efforts will be.
Today’s buyer is different than a few short years ago. They are empowered by the huge volume of information they can get on the web without your help. They are likely to respond to your marketing long before they are ready to buy. This stage of the buying process is all about exploration. They are hungry for information only. No super-sales technique has any power over them at this stage of their journey to a purchase.
Marketing Automation
Combining the power of CRM software with an integrated email marketing platform is the way to harness the power of the brave new digital world of sales.
In a Forbes article Kern Lewis broke down the process of nurturing leads into 12 steps. Step one is acquiring the quality leads from SEO, SEM, lead vendors and other sources. He emphasizes that quality is much more important than quantity.
The article spells out the other steps from automated response, giving value in your email marketing, deepening the relationships and tracking results. It is clear that Lewis knows the value of a CRM dashboard for tracking and responding to what you learn from the data.
Nurturing Theories
Lead nurturing operates under the principal of meeting your sales leads where they are. In other words, if a prospect is still in the exploratory stage, emails that beat up the reader with sales language are going to fail. What works with the buyer who is simply exploring is information.
Your company can provide useful information to the prospect – or you can leave it up to competitors or less knowledgeable people to give them the information they crave. As the email reader becomes accustomed to trusting the information you share, the relationship deepens and your emails can continue to lead them down the buyer process.
Buyers go through a “life-cycle” that leads them from being an information-hungry free loader to the stage of wanting human interaction. When the prospective buyer is ready to have a sales conversation they will be happy to hear from your salespeople.
All relationships are valuable. The relationships between the internet-empowered buyer and your sales department benefits from spending time to set up your CRM and email marketing programs. Countless companies are feeding their bottom line in this way.