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“Well ofcourse you should strike while a lead is hot…isn’t that way too obvious a statement to make?”, you might be thinking. However in practice, it isn’t always followed by companies even those equipped with state-of-the-art lead nurturing technology. Leads which display a sudden spike in activity levels and can be scored higher are ones that are calling out to be contacted and followed up with personally by sales. If leads that have been nurtured to the point they have reached a level where they are “ready” and then allowed to sit idle for a longer period without being engaged by sales, the effect of the nurturing process will wear off after some time and that lead will “cool” down and eventually go to the bottom of the nurturing cycle where it probably started.
If you look at the main objectives of lead nurtring
The Sugarland Express the movie :
- The first is to help keep your business fresh in a prospects mind so they think of you when they have a requirement you can fulfil
- The second is to identify when a prospect or lead is ready to be engaged based on how actively they are looking at your products or solutions
If you go by the first objective, a lead has your business on the top of their minds when they are actively looking at your emails, when they are frequently visiting your website, when they are downloading more content on your offerings. Lead nurturing technology helps you see when these activities pick up and since thats teh time when your business is on their minds, that is the time to strike From Hell divx . Calling a lead who is going through what you have to offer or has very recently been through your content makes connecting far easier and more effective and the timing is right. “Ahhh I was just going through your website and looking at….” is the kind of response you can expect to hear at the time as opposed to “And who are you and what do you do?”.
Going by the second objective which is identification of leads that are sales ready, a “sales ready” state would be reached when a lead has responded actively to your content consistently enough to know that some level of interest has been achieved. A level enough for sales to take over from. The constant messages, content and reachouts are all focussed on driving a lead to this state and when a lead has reached this level, it’s time to act
. Every hour after a lead has been identified as ready is an hour when the effect of all the messages till this point is wearing off and delaying beyond a point would result in the lead being cold again.
So if you have a nurturing program in place and have the technology to track lead activity and identify ready leads, make the most of it and strike while the lead is hot.
Microsoft Outlook is a great inside sales tool in itself which is why so many sales professionals will swear by it and will tell you it’s the center of all their computer based reach out activity. Some rely it on to be their contact manager. It has a very functional address book to store and retrieve contact information but I would think its slightly lacking as a full fedged contact management application like Highrise for example. “It’s has everything we need to send emails to prospects before we call them!” some would argue and I won’t disagree that it won’t do the job. I just think there are other options out there which could do the job better and give you a selling edge.
The Haunted World of El Superbeasto release
There is belief or understanding among sales professionals that lead nurturing technology
is a drip marketing software to generate qualified leads which will be passed to them (sales). It’s technology for marketers to help them with what they do. It’s true….but its not in an absolute sense. The truth is some features of lead nurturing are more helpful for marketers but some lead nurturing technology features can also be priceless to sales. For example, the kind of insights and lead activity tracking lead nurturing software provides marketers to guage which leads are more actively showing interest and more likely to be qualified can be a huge boon for sales teams to guage interest levels and contact leads accordingly. If sales people are able to view what a lead has been clicking on, what website pages they have been reading and what their interest level looks like, it enables them to go into a call that much more prepared. Needless to say, the better prepared, the more in control of a call they can be and the better the productivity and results.
This is the same line of thought that the Nurture
product development team kept in mind while developing Nurture for Salesforce which takes these features of lead nurturing and arms sales teams using Salesforce.com with the same level of insight which would help them track every email sent out beyond just a read receipt notification. Similarly with lite versions of lead nurturing technology as we’ve released in Nurture Express, there are some very cost effective and accessible lead nurturing solutions which can just as easily be used by sales to help close more customer than by marketing to generate leads. So if you’re still relying on Outlook to keep in touch with leads or send out multiple emails, you may want to explore what else is out there. While some things may just do the job, others may be able to do it better. Give them a try.
They just got better. Theres a lot of buzz at the Nurture camp this week as we get ready to officially throw open “Nurture for Salesforce” which has been in the works for some time. The new flavor of Nurture keeps in tune with Nurture Pro download rounders divx
and the other versions of the lead nurturing solution
in being very simple and easy to use while completely adapting itself to sales people rather than marketers.
Nurture for Salesforce has been developed as an appexchange application which can easily be added to any existing Salesforce.com account and setup very quickly. The application will help sales persons using SFDC
to send out “trackable” emails from within the leads or contacts page of their Salesforce accounts and give them a clear insight into the what happens after the email is sent out which is usually a blindspot for most. It creates an activity stream for each lead which displays email opens, clicks, link clicks, landing page visits and other activity within Salesforce to help inside sales and sales gain clear visibility into the activity before connecting with their leads.
Activity tracking has been one of the most useful features in lead nurturing technology and goes a long way in going into sales call better informed and having a clear idea of what content the lead has shown interest in. However this kind of insight was found lacking while sending emails straight from Salesforce accounts where sales teams usually contact prospects and leads from as the development team at Nurture noticed. Its the sales team which could really make the most of being able to track the interest levels and interest areas of a lead and use this to their advantage while calling or meeting them and since most of them are comfortable within the Salesforce.com application environment, creating this activty tracking feature without having to leave the Salesforce CRM application seemed like the ideal solution rather than having to refer to a seperate application.
While Nurture for Salesforce has not been listed in Salesforce appexchange as yet and is still awaiting an officla release date, it’s ready for any early birds who would like to check out a demo or add some punch to their SFDC email sending capabilities. Simply fill in the “Getting Started” form at the bottom of the page or get in touch with us!
It’s a good sign when a prospect who has received an email from your company opens it. It’s a better sign when they open and read an email multiple times and it’s an even better sign when someone clicks through and actively reviews content on your web site. Thats when you know you have a lead thats absorbing the content you’ve developed on your site and that lead is being nurtured. When it comes to being able to track lead web activity on your website, there is more to lead nurturing software than the direct benefits of being able to know what the customer has been clicking and showing interest in.
With the whole evolution of online marketing, websites have become more than just an online brochure with information on your business. They are sources of rich content which helps prospects understand your offering better and help them decide whether you can help them fix a pain point. Websites have gone from being stand alone pages of information to an integrated part of the sales and marketing process and as important as it is to know what content your potential customers are reading to understand their interest level, it’s just as important to know what they are reading to know whether you are providing them the right content and learn what you can improve on.
Using the web activity tracking features that lead nurturing software offers, it’s not to difficult to vizualize the browsing patterns of leads on the company website. For example if a lead goes from your email to a landing page on your website, selects the product or offering which interests them, reviews information on that product, downloads content related to it and proceeds to a request form or tries to connect with the company, it displays a good website flow which is working towards building interest in being contacted by the company. On the other hand if the lead goes to the homepage, clicks random links very quickly and leaves the site quickly, it means the website is not able to keep them engaged and needs to be worked on.
Web activity tracking is a great indicator of what needs to be added to the website, what needs to be changed, what needs to be provided to make the website as much a part of the lead nurturing process as the software application being used. After all till all the elements work in synch, adjustments need to be made to reach that goal of generating a steady flow of qualified leads.
I don’t literally mean “dead people” although it would be a great advance in technology if lead nurturing could do that. I mean bringing dead leads back into the sales pipeline using lead nurturing. A lot of companies gather leads over long periods of time through various channels and somewhere along the line, they get marked “cold” or “dead” in the CRM and never to be seen again. These dead leads can still be very valuable but they need a little nurturing.
Steve Woods of Eloqua shares a fantastic example of how VFA put together a lead nurturing program to breathe new life into a set of old “dead” leads they had gathered over time in the post VFA: Nurturing to Re-Engage Dead Leads
. The insightful case study explains just how they managed to do this and is a must read for anyone who knows of a database somewhere in their company that has been lying untouched since everyone thought it had no potential. The end results of the campaign as quoted from the original post:
The campaign succeeded in bringing back a tremendous number of leads from the “dead”. Over 120 highly qualified leads were passed to sales, and over $1.6M in pipeline was created. In a typical example, a lead may have been disqualified at a much earlier date, but given changes in the prospect’s organization, they were now ready to purchase and a sales opportunity was discovered. Only through nurturing and observing the buyers’ digital body language were these opportunities rediscovered.
To think a $1.6 million pipeline was created from leads that were presumably no longer worth pursuing, makes you wonder how much untapped revenue can be set free if companies everywhere would digg up some dead leads and nurture them the way VFA did. That is something to think about right?
And the Marketing Sherpa email marketing award for Best Automated Series – Auto Responder goes to (long pause) Sony Corporation & Datran Media! If you look into the campaign which Datatran made a superb case study
out of , you’ll find a well crafted and equally well distributed campaign which consisted of 3 automated welcome email messages to a group new Sony Rewards Loyalty Program each sent a few days apart to engage them while educating them about the program. In contrast they also carried out a simple single welcome email sendout and the results were impressive. There are a number of different things you can take home from this great case study and lots that can be learnt but here are two points that stand out and can be useful in setting up automated email or lead nurturing campaigns too.
Great Copy
Well designed content and a great copy that encourages action in the form of click throughs goes a long way in the sucess of a campaign. Have a look at one of the sample emails that was auto triggered by a new customer registered for the program and definitely click the image to see the flow of the messages on the Datatran website:
Sony & Datatran Welcome Auto Responder Email
Customer Engagement Strategy coumadin
The second point that stands out is the customer engagement approach used by sending the emails on day 1, day 4 and day 7 to prompt action and get the customers attention and educate them on the benefits. This is the same strategy offered by lead nurturing technology which allows a programmed send out of emails and then subsequent follow up email messages activated on triggers which maximize the number of opens and click throughs. The effect of the customer engagement strategy for Sony? Well the results are quite stunning. Compared to the group that received a single welcome message, the multiple touch messages group had 157% more click throughs and 627% more clicks in general to the site.
Simply put. Customer or prospect engagement through email can be a powerful strategy!
A common question for those who are out looking to set up their own lead nurturing program for the first time is “how do I plan a campaign?”. Having a lead nurturing software application or the technology in place is just the first step. To get a nurturing program from planning stages to execution can be challenging the first time around and there are no fixed definte formulas which if followed will guarantee you a fixed response rate. Whats best for your business may not be as effective in someone elses and vice versa. Experimenting and making changes along the way will help tune your program and squeeze out better results and every scenario is different.
There are however, three factors to that simply have to be looked into while planning your nurturing program: content, scheduling and a lead scoring system. First up is deciding on content.
Content
The saying ‘content is king’ holds true for nurturing programs too and it’s best never to underestimate the importance of high quality, effective content that can impact the users decision making process and convince them to act on the information they consumed. There is a vaierty of options you can review to make your selection. Here are some of them:
- Articles
- Case Studies
- Press Releases
- Whitepapers
- E-Newsletters
- Research Findings
- Polls / Surveys
- Brochures & Collateral
- Emails
- Invites
Schedule
Scheduling or planning out the timelines between the content send-outs is another crucial step where you need to ask yourself a number of questions to find what works the best. How often to you want to reach out to your prospects with the content you’ve designed? How often is too often? How little is too little to the point they dont remember you till the next time they receive something? Again, there are no hard and fast rules but here is a great example of a nurturing campaign schedule from Brian Carrol of In Touch:
Sample of Nurturing Plan Schedule
- Day 1 Introductory phone call and follow-up email
- Day 28 E-newsletter with voicemail alert that it’s there
- Day 42 Email recent customer success story, in related industry if possible
- Day 60 Personal invitation from sales person to forthcoming seminar
- Day 80 Mail case study and personalized letter of transmittal
- Day 100 Email recent article of interest on Internet
- Day 120 Email “touching base” note
- Day 140 Mail follow-up letter with free report
- Day 160 Prospect calls you: now a qualified
Lead Scoring
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The last area to come to a consensus on is lead scoring or deciding how much weightage in points would be assigned to a prospect based on the response to the content. For example a lead gets 20 points for clicking on a link in the introductory email but gets 60 points for accepting an webinar invite and signing up. A webinar registrant is almost definitely more qualified than a link click through. How much more qualified and how much more the weightage assigned to this response is a decision you will have to make . Here is a sample of the lead scoring rules page on Nurture :
Once the program gets rolling its possible to make tweaks and changes to improve on it but every program needs to start somewhere and decisions have to be made. Let us know about any sample nurturing plans you’ve developed and what went into planning it.
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