Turn leads black hole into gold
As a marketer in a B-to-B marketing environment you have run numerous events, direct mailers, seminars with leads that were deemed good and you pass them to sales. However, a few weeks down the road, that just seem to fall through and nobody knows what has happened to these leads. One thing for sure if no one in your organization or channel partners are in touch with these leads your competitors surely are. Surveys indicate that as high as 50% of all leads result in a sale—eventually. Don’t let your competitor get the business!
Look at it this way, you have invested your precious marketing dollars in getting them into your event, educated them on your solution and now armed with this knowledge they are now wiser in seeking the best there is out there. Many marketers fall into the trap of passing leads blindly to sales expecting some magic to happen where leads simply turn into hot spanking revenue and sales managers are now your best friends. It seldom happens, if ever. More often than not sales are wondering what marketing is doing passing them leads that are useless. Is there a happy ending in this sad and frustrating drama that is playing repeatedly in many companies today?
The answer is yes and it’s found in lead nurturing. Lead Nurturing provides regular and meaningful contact that brings prospectus a better understanding of your products and services. The tactics may include eMarketing which is usually a newsletter and/or simply a nicely done email inviting them to explore your solutions in your website or webcast. The other effective method is to use telemarketing to further qualify attendees to an event, with further needs define the qualified lead sales may be more effective in closing. Lead nurturing provides a planned multi-touch program that will enable marketers with better vision of ROI and more importantly making changes or fine tuning as each campaign progresses. Many companies are now starting to understand the value of lead nurturing and can no longer afford to ignore qualified leads simply because they are not ready to buy.
Consider what goes through a potential customer’s mind as he or she makes a buying decision: How will this solution help my company? Is there another solution out there that’s better? Will this solution really work? Can we afford this?
Lead nurturing conversations can provide easier answers to these questions. Eventually, you will have built trust and facilitated better comfort levels for the brand and solution.