5 Steps to Improving Your Lead Nurturing Strategy
Optimizing your lead nurturing strategy is critical for any successful business whether you are selling a product or a service, or both. If you run a business, you know how tough it can be to nurture deals in your sales pipeline when people are not quite ready to buy.
Members of your sales team can find this to be overwhelming.
We often work with businesses that have invested in an inbound strategy to generate meetings. They frequently find themselves stalled out and not knowing how to progress those deals to a contract.
The questions we most often hear from our clients are:
How often should we reach out?
What type of content should we use?
How can we avoid annoying them?
During a transformation from a referral-driven business to onboarding a new sales team, this problem hits hard.
The founder feels like they don't have time for all the follow-up.
They feel like they are not running the process well.
They can feel like they are failing, and this can force them to make quick decisions.
The most frequent founder's reaction is “I need to hire an expert to do this". They go and hire a person to close their deals who is way overqualified. Sometimes this doesn't work out leaving them back at square one.
Moving from a referral-driven business to adding a new business team is necessary if the business is to achieve its potential, and be exit ready.
When your business is ready to make the switch to growth mode and engage with a new business team - these are the 5 steps we recommend that you go through:
Take time to review your best customers, what they ordered, and what value they got from being a customer.
Set guidelines about how to identify when one of your potential (or existing) customers is at the right stage to buy.
Create talk tracks for when a customer is in the right place or the wrong place to buy, and enable your team to use them.
Make sure your team feels supported. Not every conversation will progress to the pipeline.
Leverage the facts gathered in discovery calls to develop nurturing content.
A solid lead nurturing strategy for potential new clients includes using facts gained in discovery to continue the momentum of your new business process.
One huge killer of productivity is not saying NOT NOW to businesses, so teams end up overwhelmed.
Keeping your pipeline focused on deals that are a great fit makes lead nurturing much easier.
We have seen sales teams with hundreds of “deals” in the pipeline but they were actually only actively working a handful of deals.
Often we find that the poor use of CRMs by sales teams causes huge issues and wasted time.
In a high-growth business, if most of your prospecting conversations progress to the pipeline - that's a red flag!
It's essential to recognize that not every business that could become a client is ready to sign.
Managing prospective clients who are ready to buy requires a solid lead nurturing strategy.
Once we help clients to clean up their process, lead nurturing becomes much easier to manage.
Typical results for our clients include a significantly higher meeting-to-deal conversion rate, faster sales cycle, and higher average order value.
If your follow-up list is overwhelming, we can help you put a system in place which will help you to get the results you’re looking for much faster.
Follow the 5 step lead nurturing strategy above, and if you want some help - reach out and let's discuss your needs.