According to Hubspot, 53% of marketers say that at least half of their entire budget is dedicated to lead generation, but more than 90% of the leads they generate never result in sales.
The takeaway: marketers tend to pay far more attention to lead generation than to actually moving those leads through the sales funnel itself, which leads to classic lead nurturing mistakes that you’ll want to avoid.
Consider these statistics on why lead nurturing is so important:
According to Forrester, marketers who have effective lead nurturing strategies see a 20% increase in sales compared to those that don’t
Businesses that “excel” at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost
Less than 36% of marketers actively nurture their sales leads
This just goes to show the effective power that lead nurturing can have on your business!
Why the Disconnect?
Given the clear advantages of a smart, carefully researched lead nurturing program, one can only speculate as to why so many marketing teams fail to develop one. In some cases, it’s a lack of alignment between marketing and sales teams, with marketers assuming that once they’ve generated leads, it’s the job of sales reps to close the deal. In other cases, it’s not understanding best practices for effective lead nurturing.
Whatever the reason, marketers need to develop effective lead nurturing strategies if they want to help sales, and help the companies for which they work grow. That means avoiding the most common lead nurturing mistakes, including the following 4.
Responding Too Slowly
Imagine going to a car dealership and telling the dealer you’ve picked out the car you want and are ready to sign on the dotted line. Imagine the dealer telling you he’ll get back to you within 2 business days and walking away. As absurd as this scenario seems, it’s actually common when it comes to lead nurturing. According to a recent lead response study, the average response time for new leads was 42 hours, and only 16% of companies responded within 24 hours.
That’s a costly mistake because the odds of a lead entering the sales process are 21 times greater if that lead is contacted within 5 minutes compared to 30 minutes. The faster you contact your new leads, the greater the chances of those leads eventually making purchases.
Sending Generic Content
Leads have different needs, different problems, and different pain points. Leads are not monlithic. If you ignore these differences, you’re substantially reducing your odds of making sales.
For example, if you’re a realtor, you wouldn’t want to send million-dollar listings to prospects who make less than $50,000 a year. If you sell appliances, you wouldn’t want to send content about refrigerators to leads who are only interested in dishwashers.
One of the best ways to develop targeted content is by creating unique buyer personas (fictionalized representations of key market segments based on similar demographic and psychographic characteristics). Sending targeted (rather than generic) content to your leads will increase sales opportunities by 20% and help avoid lead nurturing mistakes.
Not Making Enough—or the Right Types of—Contacts
The number of “touches” needed to close a sale will be different for different businesses. On average, however, leads receive 10 such contacts from the time they enter the sales funnel until they make a purchase. Nevertheless, about 50% of marketers include less than 5 touches in their lead nurturing programs.
In addition to sending enough touches, it’s important that your contacts are structured to effectively move leads through the buyer’s journey. For example, early contacts should provide more general information about your business, products and services. As leads move closer to a sale, you should provide more detailed, specific content (for example, information about product details, warranties, return policy, shipping, etc.).
Not Personalizing Content
The more your touches convince leads that you know who they are, the more effective those touches will be. For example, a recent study from Experian found that personalized emails generate on average 6 times as much revenue as those which are not personalized.
Personalization means more than simply inserting the lead’s name into an email. The email should also address their specific concerns, needs or recent actions. For example, if a lead downloads content on your website, you should immediately send them an email reflecting this action—and providing them guidance for next steps. Of course, this degree of personalized responsiveness is most effective when you have reliable CRM software and marketing automation in place.
Conclusion
Effective lead nurturing is one of the best ways to build trust in your business and increase sales—but it’s not the only one.
To maximize results, you need a comprehensive digital strategy that effectively targets, connects and converts while avoiding lead nurturing mistakes.
To learn more about the ways CRM, marketing automation and lead generation services will help you drive more sales and grow your business, watch our recent webinar – Too Many Leads?
Are you nervous about how to on-board them and teach them the processes that lead to success?
Has your company’s past sales training process consisted mainly of a few days of product training and a list of potential customers and a pat on the back?
Have you decided it’s time to change your process for hiring sales people and launching them toward success?
First, you’re not alone. It seems that in many companies, the last thing to be boiled down to a process that can be repeated, managed and scaled up is the “art of selling”.
To build your new sales team successfully, it’s important to start with the end clearly in mind.
Put Yourself in the Mind of Your Newly Hired Salesperson
A new salesperson needs and probably even expects a few things that many companies fail to deliver, and this can cause them to stumble early in their ramp up process:
This is typically tough for businesses to do the first time. It’s not necessary to change the process that’s in place now, only to document what it is and begin a journey of ensuring that it’s followed consistently and measured. That way sales people can be managed based upon their execution of the process, not just their sales results. To create a sales process that works best, it’s helpful to think about your typical customer’s process for making a purchase of this type. How do they move through the stages of the process of making a purchase?
Awareness – the customer first becomes aware of an opportunity, need or problem.
Action – the customer decides to do something about it.
Research – the customer absorbs information about causes of the problem, and possible options/solutions., etc. Here they are primarily accumulating enough knowledge to confirm that they have a clear understanding of the problem or opportunity and the range of possible options/solutions.
Engagement – the customer starts to take action with one or more solution provider – filling out a form on the site, calling sales, contacting support, downloading a report, etc. Here they are beginning to consider specific solutions – options, pricing, terms, etc.
Purchase – the customer at least thinks they know what they want to buy, may attempt to negotiate and may or may not actually make the purchase.
Create a Management Dashboard for Newly Hiring Sales People
There are a few things that just have to be measured for all sales people. Having it in place when hiring new sales people is essential. Here are a few: Quota Attainment, Leads Generated, Qualified Prospects, Proposals, Sales Forecast, Calls Made. See our reccent post for more information on Essential Sales Management Dashboards.
Hiring Sales People that will Make Prospecting Calls
New sales people need to fill their funnel with new opportunities as quickly as possible and that’s going to involve getting on the phone and connecting with as many potential customers as possible. They’ve got to be motivated to burn up the phone line early on! This mainly depends on clearly setting expectations prior to hiring sales people, the measuring their performance and providing lots of feedback and lots of praise when they meet their goals for prospecting. This is the most stressful part of the job for most sales people, so getting sales motivation for prospecting calls down is the one thing you can’t focus too much attention on.
Lead Nurturing is a Force Multiplier for New Sales People
Young sales people just understand the importance of automating and reaching out to potential customers innately. They’re working hard every day to reach out to new prospects and of course, most they just leave voicemails for and a lot just don’t have the time or interest at the moment. But, if they’re calling the right target prospects, its mostly a matter of timing. Sales people don’t have the time to make 100 calls a day AND send follow emails to each one and remember to call them again in a few days and send another email, etc. Creating an automated process to keep in touch with leads via emails and remind the salesperson when it’s time to make another call lets them focus on making the calls and building relationships with the hot prospects and gives sales people the feeling that each attempted call has the potential to come back to them in the future as a hot prospect. Here are a few Lead Nurturing suggestions that can be implemented without too much resource or time required.
Before you start hiring sales people, be sure you have a plan to address all of these areas. Ideally, you’ll have specific plans in each of these crucial sales management areas prior to even beginning the process of hiring sales people.
The best sales people have worked in organizations that have all of this in spades. They need to see that you have these sales processes and measurement frameworks in place or they’re not going to be interested in joining your team.
Do you have a lead nurturing plan? Are you leaving that up to your salespeople to manage?
Every sales manager knows that sales people very commonly have a tough time managing to follow up consistently with active customers and leads. If you’re expecting them to also keep in touch with cold leads, you’re asking them to invest a lot of time in doing what they perceive as a “low return” job in a completely manual and inefficient way.
Marketing Sherpa says that companies that have Lead Nurturing programs in place achieve a 45% higher ROI on their marketing and advertising investments. That’s in addition to the fact that salespeople are relieved of the duty and can focus more energy on active prospects.
There are two main hurdles most businesses face when considering lead nurturing:
Choosing and Implementing the Technology
Creating the Content
Lead Nurturing Technology
If you’ve already got a CRM solution in place, then there is probably a lead nurturing add-on or partner that will integrate with the CRM. That’s probably a good place to start. Remember to keep it simple. The biggest mistake companies make when implementing sales and marketing automation technology is getting excited about cool capabilities without having a clear idea of how they’ll get used or add business value.
You can end up choosing technology that’s too complex and too expensive and then never really get the basic job done, nurturing your leads.
Creating Lead Nurturing Content
Again, the Keep It Simple principle applies. If you talk with a marketing firm, they’ll quickly have you believing that you need 3 different case studies based on exhaustive on-site interviews with customers, on-site photo shoots, video and a glossy brochure. If you’ve got the budget for that, it might make sense, but don’t assume it will be the rocket fuel for your lead nurturing campaign.
The fact is that until you send out your first email or first campaign, you have no way of knowing what is going to work. Little things like the subject line of your email can undermine an entire campaign.
Engage with more new prospects using Lead Nurturing
For leads at the top of the funnel, create campaigns that will attract new leads to your brand and engage the leads that are interacting with your website, events, etc. for the first time. Make them want to talk to a salesperson. One of Carroll’s suggestions is to repurpose existing content, both your own and content created by others.
Enable Sales by Nurturing Leads
For leads that have moved to the middle of the funnel, create campaigns that help salespeople do their job. Help them get connected with customers with automated emails that request an appointment and let the customer schedule a time themselves using tools like Calendly, etc. Create content that helps the salesperson educate the prospect and set your brand apart.
Lead Nurturing Helps Close More Opportunities
This is where many salespeople are adamant that they want to be in total control of what the customer is seeing. Salespeople don’t have the time to stay in touch with the 5 or 10 people that are involved in a decision for the customer. Make it easy for the salesperson to add all the influencers to campaigns while they focus their love on the primary decision maker.
The benefits of combining CRM and marketing automation are tremendous and very profitable. In fact, one of the primary reasons businesses decide to implement their first CRM solution is to get their customer and prospect list organized to enable email marketing and other outreach.
More informed customers make larger purchases. 14.5% increase in sales productivity!
Greater focus on the best leads through lead scoring and lead nurturing.
Measurement and visibility into customer behavior.
Achilles heel of combining CRM and Marketing Automation
Frank’s article also hints at the challenges of combining CRM and Marketing Automation… “Activating bi-directional synchronization…. will keep both marketing and sales teams updated on recent customer activity.”
First, doesn’t “activating bi-directional synchronization” just sound like a picnic?! For small and even medium sized businesses, there just isn’t anyone on staff that has the time to figure that out and maintain it.
Second, marketing and sales teams are separate and notoriously divergent in their priorities and approaches. In many businesses there is minimal communication between the teams and often outright antipathy. This is not an environment where it’s like that marketing messages sent my the marketing automation system are going to be well tuned with the sales messages being delivered by salespeople. Without tight coordination, automating the marketing piece can by detrimental to sales success.
The most common scenario that develops is the following…
A surprisingly large amount of time and money is spent to set up the synchronization or integration between the two systems but, due to technical limitations and practical considerations, leads move through the funnel like this:
Lead lists are loaded into the marketing automation system where they receive on-going messages.
Once they’ve achieved the requisite “score”, they are passed over the sales and the CRM.
At that time, the marketing messages stop. The sales team does their thing with the lead and periodically, marketing mines the CRM for leads that didn’t purchase and are not being actively pursued by sales.
These leads go back onto a marketing message drip.
This approach is time consuming to maintain and is not at all likely to deliver results like those described above.
If the marketing messages succeeded in engaging the customer, then turning them off when the salesperson takes over is highly likely to let their interest wane quickly.
When a prospect tells a sales rep that they’ve decided not to proceed, its within the next few days or weeks that the right marketing message could win them back. If it takes 2 or 3 weeks for marketing to pick them back up again in the marketing automation system, it’s too late.
What if CRM and Marketing Automation were all one solution? What if you there was no “synchronization” required?
For any business, this leads to the ability to deeply personalize the experience of every customer all the way through the funnel. When the salesperson learns that the customer has strong interest in a specific product line, the marketing messages they receive provide education about the benefits and strengths of that product or service. As soon as the status of the prospect changes from hot to warm or cold or a cold lead calls in to reconnect with sales, the marketing messages instantly change.
In addition, no one on the team needs to manage the movement of leads from one system to another. Things are in sync all the time and there are no issues like duplication, etc.
In a business that’s small enough to have a limited marketing and sales support staff, combination of CRM and Marketing Automation into one simple solution is the difference between fast, meaningful return on your investment in marketing automation and having one more under utilized piece of technology in your “stack”.
Email marketing is not one thing. There’s a lot that goes into it. The most effective emails are those that are created with a very specific purpose and a very targeted audience in mind. Small and medium sized businesses often miss the mark with email marketing. Of course, so do the big guys. The causes are common, easy to identify and fix!
That’s good news because the return from very simple email marketing campaigns can be tremendous! Most sales organizations have accumulated a sizable list over the years and a well-designed campaign can often generate 15% to 25% increase in sales quickly!
A well-designed email marketing campaign can often generate 15% to 25% increase in sales quickly!
Running the numbers
Average email marketing campaigns get a 1-2% click rate. “Clicks” are people that both open and read the email AND click on a link or call to action in the email. Imagine a salesperson talks to 100 leads a month. In one year, that’s 1200 leads. If you have 10 salespeople, that’s 12,000 leads in a year. If your email to that list gets a 2% click rate, that’s 240 (12,000 x .02) “new” or newly engaged leads.
So, if you send only 1 email a month, then that’s a 24% increase in leads for each salesperson!
Average campaign click rate
1-2%
Salesperson 100 calls a month
1,200 lost leads in one year
10 Salespeople 100 calls a month
12,000 lost leads in one year
2% Click rate on 12,000 leads
240 engaged leads
1 Email sent per month
24% Increase in leads per salesperson
Seems like a no-brainer right?
Common pitfalls that undermine success are poor targeting, vague or absent call to action and talking about yourself, rather than the customer.
Often the lack of clarity about responsibilities and expected results is the fundamental flaw. In a smaller business, there may be a one person “marketing department” with limited email marketing experience and limited time to focus on it due to other responsibilities. So, the effort may fall to the sales team. And believe, salespeople are the last ones you want writing your emails! More on that later.
In a larger organization, the same flaws surface for different reasons. The salespeople may see opportunities they’d like to exploit with email marketing but, getting support out of the often bureaucratic marketing department can result in delays and distortions of the intent of the campaign.
Often the lack of clarity about responsibilities and expected results is the fundamental flaw.
Best Practices
In general, if the intent of email marketing is to drive sales or sales leads for the sales team, then the sales team needs to be involved in defining the objectives.
However, salespeople are most commonly guilty of writing “salesy” or “pitchy” emails. We need a marketing hat involved for the creation of the content.
We’re also going to need someone to get the list we send to straightened out. The list should be segmented and different messages sent to each segment. Again, this is not something the sales team is typically good at.
We’re also going to need someone to get the list we send to straightened out. The list should be segmented and different messages sent to each segment. Again, this is not something the sales team is typically good at.
Salespeople are commonly guilty of writing “salesy” or “pitchy” emails.
1st: Your List: Targeting Your Audience
The general concept is to offer recipients something that will be of value to them, without expecting them to do anything for you. That’s how you earn their trust and over time, the right to ask them for something. Email marketing is best done with this approach because if you just “sell” your products or services, you’ll quickly turn off most recipients and no one will be reading any of your emails anymore.
So, getting your list as finely segmented as possible is worth the effort. The more targeted your message to a specific audience, the more effective it will be.
Pull together all the lists you can.
Current leads that are actively in the purchase process
Existing Clients
Past Clients
You may need to pull together lists from your accounting system, operations, your website, trade shows, etc. and your salespeople’s contacts in Outlook, etc. If you’re doing this in a spreadsheet, be sure and add a couple of columns to identify where each contact came from or how you met them and what their current status is with your company.
If you’re using a CRM or other software for this, hopefully some of this is a bit easier. Either way, when you load the list into your email marketing system, you’ll be able to create separate lists based on all of these criteria and send different messages to each “segment”.
The tricky part is that you’ll need to maintain this list as an on-going effort
Obviously, when one of your leads turns into a client, you want them to go on a different list or into a different “segment”. That means you’ll need to have a regular process of updating the lists with new leads and changes to those already on the lists. This probably sounds like more work than it’s worth but, it’s not. Once you get a process in place, it should only take a couple of hours a month. If you’re lucky, you’re using a CRM and Marketing Automation solution where all that is automated!
One key to keeping the maintenance of your list manageable is to remember that no list is perfect. After all, you’re just sending them emails. With email marketing, there’s little cost to it and as we touched on earlier, you’re only hoping for 20% or so to even open them. So, there’s a point of diminishing returns in cleaning up your list. Just be sure you don’t have the same email address listed more than once and your actual clients are identified so you’re not treating them like you don’t even know them.
The general concept is to offer recipients something that will be of value to them, without expecting them to do anything for you.
2nd: Creating the Campaign
In email marketing, the idea to keep in mind is “Give to Get”. Give recipients something of value to them and earn the right first to keep sending them emails and secondly, the right to eventually ask for something yourself.
For the “dyed in the wool salespeople” out there, the fringe benefit of this approach is that this type of email marketing campaign is a great way to “diagnose” the customer’s needs. Those who click to read a specific article or watch a video are telling you what they’re interested in. That can be a great way to target prospects with specific offers, in additional emails or with sales calls. More on that later!
A simple approach to creating your emails is this:
List the Pains
Identify the “Pain” of each audience or “segment” in your list. Write down 3 or 4 pains (problems or challenges they suffer from) that this audience will have if they are going to be interested in your product or service. If you’re not sure how to do this, stop reading now and go here .
Finding Content
Find content that would be helpful to someone suffering from each pain. The content can be an article, a video, a blog post, a report or white-paper, etc. It should be free. Don’t ask them to complete a form on your site (you already have their email) or put any other barriers to benefiting from the content in the process. Remember, this is a gift!
Don’t get worried that you’re going to have to spend the next 3 weekends writing or spend thousands on a writer. In fact, avoid investing lots of time or money in creating content at all costs at this stage. If this is your first attempt, you have to look at it as an experiment. There are a lot of variables and many of them will need some adjustment. The idea initially is to get something out there so you can measure what works and what doesn’t and then make changes.
If this is your first attempt, you have to look at it as an experiment.
In fact, you don’t actually need your own content at all. If you have helpful articles or reports now that’s great! Things like “5 Ways to Reduce Your Costs for XXXX” or “3 Ways to Know if You Have YYYY” or even “How to Fix ZZZ” are all perfect. But, if you don’t already have good content, then use someone else’s!
A note on video: Email recipients will click on a video twice as often as other types of links (articles, downloads, etc.). So, use video if you can!
Go to Youtube and type into the search bar “How to fix <insert one of your pains>”. See if you can find a video that you can link to. Often you’ll find news reports or trade association videos that are perfect! Remember, the idea here is not get to them to your site. It’s just to give them something helpful and learn that they have an interest in that subject. Of course, you can perform similar searches on various sites and find government and educational institution reports, etc. Just be sure you don’t link to something that promotes your competitor!
For the “dyed in the wool” salespeople out there, the fringe benefit of this approach is that this type of email marketing campaign is a great way to “diagnose” the customer’s needs.
3rd: Writing the Email
In email marketing, the first thing to remember in creating the actual emails is that less is more. Think about how you navigate through your inbox. If you don’t recognize who sent you the email (the from field) then you look at the subject line. Likewise, if the subject line doesn’t sound interesting, you delete it without even reading the email. Moreover, if you do open it up and find 2 pages of text, DELETE!
What’s the point here? Keep it short! Also, don’t feel like you have to design a bunch of beautiful graphics.
So, the subject line is key. If it doesn’t get attention, nothing else matters.
Focus on the pain
Is <insert your pain> costing you money/hurting your business/frustrating you?
Fed up with <insert pain> solutions that don’t work?
“Are you suffering from <insert pain>?
3 Ways to Fix <insert pain>
Follow the same formula to create the body of the email
Firstname, Is <insert pain> costing you money/hurting your business/frustrating you? If so, you’ll want to out this short video “Simple Ways to Fix <insert pain>”.
Then link to the content. That’s it!
Expectations
Remember, you’re going to get 10-20% of your list to open the email and 1-2% to click. Working on making that list bigger is worth the effort.
The emails above are great for “cold leads”, or leads that aren’t already engaged in a buying process. If you’re emailing leads that are already talking to your sales team or have reached out to you for information, then they’ve essentially told you to sell them your solution. The emails should still err on the side of “give to get” but, you can offer things like a comparison of your solution with brand name competitors or an ROI analysis or just a description of your different packages with a subject like “4 Great Ways to Fix <insert pain>”.
If you’re nurturing leads that have come in through your website, be aggressive. When people request info on your website, they’re most often doing the same exact thing on your competitor’s site so you’ve got to beat them to the punch.
NOTE: These types of emails also work well for lead generation campaigns.
Remember, you’re going to get 10-20% of your list to open the email and 1-2% to click
How to Respond – Making the Sale
If you’re selling business insurance and you send an email with the subject “3 Ways You’re Business is at Risk” that links to a video on CNBC about essential kinds of business insurance. A recipient opens the email and clicks on the video to watch it, which is a strong indicator that they’re raising their hand and saying “I am concerned that my business is at risk.” That probably makes that person someone your sales team wants to talk to.
If you can organize things so that a salesperson can call recipients that click on your emails within a couple of hours, then it is FAR better to call them instead of sending another email.
It turns cold calling into very warm calling! The script goes something like this:
“Hi Bob! This is Mike with Insurance International. I noticed you watched that video on essential business insurance. What did you think of that? What type of insurance does your business have?”
You can start the call with a level of familiarity and get right to what you already know matters to the customer. Salespeople know, the hardest thing about a cold call is getting the customers interest initially. This takes that out of the equation!
If you can’t call them within 3 or 4 hours, don’t bother
However, if you can’t call them within 3 or 4 hours, don’t bother. They won’t remember it. Think about how many emails you get every day. Do you remember on Wednesday, the links you clicked on Tuesday?
Again, an integrated CRM and Email Marketing solution can make this kind of quick calling easy. If it’s not realistic for you, then try switching those that click 1 or 2 of your initial content emails to a different campaign that treats them more like a new lead, providing some info about your company and how you solve the problems they’ve shown interest in and possibly requesting an appointment.
Have a follow up email ready for your sales team to send if they talk to the prospect or leave a voicemail. Normally, in the conversation or message they’re going to talk about things they’d like the prospect to see so, the email can link to those items and just get the conversation started.
It’s also worthwhile to call the people on your list that “bounce”. If they’ve left the company, you can find out who their replacement is and put them on your list.
However, if you can’t call them within 3 or 4 hours, don’t bother. They won’t remember it. Think about how many emails you get every day. Do you remember on Wednesday, the links you clicked on Tuesday?
4th: Email Marketing Campaign Management
Once you’ve got your first email marketing campaign going, compare the open rates for each subject line. Which ones are getting people’s attention? Focus your efforts on more content and emails in the same area. Don’t get stuck trying to make a subject or piece of content work that just isn’t. A lot of this is going to be counter-intuitive. Let the measurements tell you what to do next.
For the emails that get good opens, now look at the click rate. If you’re getting 10% or more opens and you’re not getting at least 1% click rate, then try moving the “call to action” (the link or video) higher up in the email so they see it more easily or try rewording the call to action itself. If that doesn’t work, then find new content.
Keep tweaking and adjusting. It may take you 2 or 3 iterations before you start to feel like you’re getting things dialed in.
Once you start seeing over 1% click rates consistently, then it’s time to start thinking about devoting some time to creating your own content and investing in a bigger list.
Your spending a lot of time and money generating leads and only a small percentage turn into customers initially.
79% of new leads are not ready to purchase yet. Can you stay in touch with them for weeks, months or even years as they go through their own buying process?
Lead Nurturing consistently yields 15 to 25% increase in sales. Yet, fewer than 15% of businesses are nurturing leads today.
Why not? Most are unsure of how to create effective lead nurturing messages and aren’t comfortable with the often complex technology required to automate the process.
There’s a lot out there about the Buyer Engagement Cycle or the Buying Cycle. For B2B sales teams, it’s important to break the process down into finer detail than most marketing folks typically do.
A crucial aspect of this cycle is of course, the “after the sale” components. B2B organizations must ensure someone is focused on leading customers all the way through to advocacy.
However, in the inbound marketing, automated, fractured attention world that B2B salespeople deal with today, there is important nuance in the first few steps.
The phases the B2B sales team is typically responsible for are:
Awareness
Education
Engagement
Comparison
Decision
Awareness is not the customer becoming aware of the brand but, the customer becoming aware of a problem, challenge or opportunity.
A customer may know about your company but, they may not know that you have a better way of doing things today than they are doing them now. This is where the concept of “Pain”, common in many sales training programs, is helpful.
You might be very happy with your shoes. But, all of the sudden, when you put your feet up and a friend points out that you have a hole wearing in the sole, now you can’t stop thinking about it. You’ve become aware!
In business scenarios, the customer may notice a problem in their operation but, often, they are blissfully unaware of any problems until along comes the B2B salesperson, who points out how inefficient their current setup is.
Whether it’s the customer who initiates the process, your marketing or your sales team, the mistake too many businesses make is to jump immediately into a typical sales process.
It’s helpful to imagine someone stepping on the scale for the first time in several months and realizing they’ve put on considerable weight. They’re going to be surprised, maybe shocked, maybe confused (How did that happen?!)… But, most of us don’t immediately start calling gyms to shop for memberships.
We may even go into a denial phase and be offended when a salesperson tries to solve a problem we can’t yet admit we have!
If our goal is to build long lasting relationships of trust with the customer, then rather than trying to drag them forward toward our goals, it’s best to earn their trust with patience and appropriate information or help.
Marketing and sales departments are both guilty of this “rush” to close. An ad may stir the thought in the customer that a change is warranted but, a landing page offering 20% off to sign up now is not likely to work.
Having just made a customer “aware” of a need or problem, a salesperson should ask questions and validate this new information:
“How does that feel?” “How is that hurting your processes?” “Is your team aware of this?” “This must be surprising…” “You’re not alone… Can I tell you about a customer that came to the same realization recently?”
And marketing can accomplish the same thing by offering content: “5 Ways XXX is costing you money”, “Are you at risk due to XXX?”
Then carefully test the water to determine when the customer is ready to consider making a change:
The salesperson asks: “If you’d like, I could share with you some simple tips for improving the situation before you make any serious changes.”
Marketing offers: “3 Simple Ways to Improve XXX”
When the customer is interested in learning about improving the solution, the door has begun to open. However, it’s important to proceed cautiously. You’ve awakened the previously unaware and motivated them to act but, your competitors are only a Google search away. If you’re approach is too pushy or just jumps too far forward in the process before they’re ready, you’ll lose their attention.
The salesperson is best served by asking for permission: “When you’re ready, I can share with you some options for making a significant improvement.” Marketing offers content: “3 Ways to Reduce Failures by 25% or more”.
Most B2B marketers are doing good to create a educational, content based campaigns. Due to the complexities of managing campaigns, normally the campaign ends up with a few content pieces and then every third or fourth email asks for something like a purchase. With this approach, customers who have done nothing to indicate they’re interested are being asked to take action, make a purchase, etc. Someone who may have read an article on your blog that opened their eyes to a potential problem is being told they need to fix it now. They’re not ready for that. Don’t go from Awareness to Decision. Just help them go from Awareness to Education and then when they’re ready, take them to the next step.
Break down the buying cycle for your customers and create campaigns that take things one step at a time. Here are some tips on the tone to take:
Awareness – keep offering more content that deepens and broadens awareness and ask, “Would you like to learn about possible solutions?”
Education – keep showing me how solving the problems has improved life. And, offer calls to action like “Have questions?”, or even better, ask the questions you want to hear customers that are learning about options asking! “How do I fix….”
Engagement – break down the buying questions and create content that asks them and then answers.
Comparison – this one’s easier… side by side comparisons of your features with your competitors, your different packages with each other and in depth cost analysis compared with competitors and your other options.
Decision – create urgency. What’s the cost of delaying, waiting, maintaining old equipment, etc.
Can you put a “Sign up now” buttons in your emails or on your landing pages? Yes! Just don’t make that the whole point of the email or ad! Focus on content that’s appropriate for the buyer at the stage they are currently in and if they’re ready to buy, they’ll let you know.
I bet you didn’t know you’re already in the email marketing business, big time!
How many people on your staff are sending emails to clients?
How many of those emails are directly impacting the client’s relationship with your company and your revenue?
Of course, sales teams are the greatest example of this! Every time they end a conversation with a prospect, what do they say? “Great! I’ll send you an email with a link to this or that.”
Should you make that a bit more automatic for them? Would that ensure the quality of what your potential customers are seeing? You bet!
But, what about all the leads they give up on? Is anyone staying in front of them? What about customers?
the car you want and are ready to sign on the dotted line. Imagine the dealer telling you he’ll get back to you within 2 business days and walking away. As absurd as this scenario seems, it’s actually common when it comes to lead nurturing. According to a recent lead response study, the average response time for new leads was 42 hours, and only 16% of companies responded within 24 hours.
customers and a pat on the back?
believing that you need 3 different case studies based on exhaustive on-site interviews with customers, on-site photo shoots, video and a glossy brochure. If you’ve got the budget for that, it might make sense, but don’t assume it will be the rocket fuel for your 
approaches. In many businesses there is minimal communication between the teams and often outright antipathy. This is not an environment where it’s like that marketing messages sent my the marketing automation system are going to be well tuned with the sales messages being delivered by salespeople. Without tight coordination, automating the marketing piece can by detrimental to sales success.
