Effective Lead Nurturing: An Integrated Approach
If you’re trying to grow your sales you’ll already know that you need to focus on leads first. Without a steady flow of leads coming into your organisation, you’re not going to have much success making any sales. However, it’s not as simple as just getting hundreds of leads into the top of your sales funnel and having them pop out the bottom as paying customers. Once you do get a lead, there’s usually a nurturing stage that takes place and this can be a challenge for many organisations.
This is especially true of B2B marketing where leads generally need to be nurtured more extensively than in B2C marketing. While most marketers are concerned with attracting new leads, 85% of the marketers surveyed in a recent GreenHat report found lead nurturing challenging, but in spite of the challenges, over 97% said lead nurturing was a priority for them in 2017.
Many of the challenges of effective lead nurturing seem to come from a lack of integration between sales and marketing with only 44% of marketers reporting that sales had followed up their leads in a satisfactory way. This meant that leads may be gathered but without the right follow up, they just aren’t converting into paying customers.
This can be an issue for marketers. If marketing is spending a certain amount of time and money on acquiring new leads that aren’t resulting in sales this can reflect negatively and lead to valuable resources being wasted.
For many organisations the problem is not that leads aren’t being followed up, it’s that there is no system for tracking the number of leads being acted on by sales so many marketers simply have no idea what happens to their leads once they’re handed over to sales. The marketers surveyed ranked lead generation and lead nurturing both as equally significant but 37% were unsure how much it costs to generate a marketing lead.
B2B organisations are especially vulnerable to the consequences of a lack of communication between sales and marketing. This is because of the nature of the sales cycle, which is typically longer and requires input from both sales and marketing to be effective. Without close communication and alignment, it’s unlikely that either sales or marketing will be able to achieve their objectives.
Because customer experience is so important, it’s crucial that Sales and Marketing teams are on the same page and they co-operate to provide an enhanced customer experience for both their prospective and current customers.
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https://www.nextmarketing.com.au/2017/08/effective-lead-nurturing-an-integrated-approach/
Jo Macdermott is a well known thought leader when it comes to all things Marketing. Jo is the Founder of Next Marketing, a well established Marketing Agency based in Melbourne. Jo is looking to connect with Marketing Managers, Entrepreneurs (in funded start ups) and Small and Medium Sized Businesses (with a marketing budget). Need some marketing help? With a commercial bent? Get in touch with Jo here