NURTURE NOT NATURE

As a long-term sales leader within the B2B industry I regularly speak with other marketers and sales professionals, and a common topic of late is how to implement a good nurture strategy.

Forrester Research found that companies excelling at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads, at a 33% lower cost.

Forrester Research found that companies excelling at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads, at a 33% lower cost.

So, what is lead nurturing:

In simple terms lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with potential prospects at whichever stage of the sales funnel they engage with your business and can often get overlooked by sales professionals.

Lead nurturing is often referred to as a marketing function due to it requiring a little more finesse to engage with and move potential prospects through the buying journey.

How Can it Help:

• Introduces prospects to your company
• Gains your audience's trust
• Makes you a thought leader
• Reduces customer acquisition costs
• Increases sales

Sales people essentially want leads that are sales ready and ready to buy, but it doesn't always work like that. Especially if you're selling high-ticket items like the global roll-out of digital asset management services to an enterprise level retailer.

Types of Nurture Campaigns:

• Educational - typically top of funnel thought-leadership pieces focusing on a specific industry challenge.
• Product/Service - a little lower down the funnel and often promoting a businesses products and services, and how they benefit key audiences.
• Promotional - typically aimed at driving leads to the bottom of the funnel through offers and deals
• Event Management - middle of funnel pre-and-post registration to webinars or roundtables
• Re-engagement - typically middle, to lower down the funnel email campaigns to re-invigorate sleeping prospects, or those still in the considering phase.
• Authoritative - bottom of funnel pieces of content such as buyers guides that are used to build confidence in a product or service with a prospect prior to them making a decision.

Some prospects may spend months shifting between stages before finally deciding on choosing your company's services or products, and key to encouraging their decision is understanding both their buying behaviour and challenges.

This requires and in depth, and up-to-date knowledge of your target audience, their industry and the ability to keep track of where they sit in the funnel!

Post Pandemic Sales Funnel:

The pre-pandemic sales funnel was top heavy for sure, but in a post pandemic world with the majority of businesses looking to streamline processes, there's even more of a focus put on researching the right vendor, product and partner.

Combine this with the limited opportunities you have to get in front of prospects due to lockdown, and you're looking at more clamour in the awareness phase, and prospects spending a lot more time in the consideration (interest/decision) phase.

Best Practise

If you don't already have a nurture programme underway then launching one could feel like a daunting task, but don't worry it's not as tough as you might think.

Key to running successful nurture programmes is a deep understanding of your prospect's respective industry and the challenges they face

A good place to start would be to map your activities against where they sit in the sales funnel and score your prospects accordingly. The aim of this is to identify the qualification of prospects as they move down the funnel in-line with your programme.

Your company's matrix and lead scoring will be customized based on the actions you want them to take. This could include watching a webinar, viewing a pricing page, or downloading product data sheets are all potential lead-scoring activities.

Top of Funnel - 1-10 (Awareness)

This could involve a combination of brand awareness activities such as SEO, PPC, display advertising, press releases or articles in the trade press. If you know your prospect has engaged with one or more of these channels they get scored accordingly.

Customers that haven't engaged with your company within a twelve-month period should also be included in this phase and treated as a new prospect, although the propensity for them to convert is higher.

Middle of Funnel - 11-30 (Interest)

At this point you want to provide your prospect with more information about your products and services, personalized to their industry or business if possible. This could take the form of eBooks, whitepapers or webinars that look to help solve a specific challenge.

Middle of Funnel - 31-40 (Consideration)

As mentioned earlier on in this article buyers are spending more time in the consideration phase, so reengagement is key to ensure, not only top of mind awareness, but also your capabilities in solving your prospect's issues. This is where sales and marketing need to work together to really understand the buyer persona, and the trick is to do it elegantly and without spamming.

Examples here could be further thought-leadership, invitations to roundtables, case studies and testimonials or referrals through third parties or existing clients.

Bottom of Funnel - 41-50 (Decision)

This phase could include buyer’s guides but is typically where the salesperson steps in to offer a brief introduction to the business, overview of services, and builds confidence in your company's ability to deliver on whatever challenge the prospect brings to the table.

All the hard work your team has put in prior to this moment could be lost on the basis of an ill-equipped salesperson, but if you have a friendly, affable, knowledgeable sales professional this should be the final stage before a proposal.

What tends to happen in the 33% of sales not closed on that first, second or third sales call is that around 20% go back into the funnel and return three months later while 13% never respond.

However, we all know that it is not that easy and my friend Dave (currently) has a 67% close rate, which is indicative of a number of factors. What tends to happen in the 33% of sales not closed on that first, second or third sales call is that around 20% go back into the funnel and return three months later while 13% never respond.

In Conclusion

Nurture funnels are an under-valued and under-utilized way of moving prospects through the buyer journey, that require sales and marketing to be aligned. There are a multitude of automation tools to help at every stage of the customer journey to keep prospects engaged and sellers on top of their programmes.

Key to running successful nurture programmes is a deep understanding of your prospect's respective industry and the challenges they face, moreover is the ability to generate quality thought-leadership content that aims to educate as well as sell, rather than just sell!

Like any successful marketing or sales strategy, you need to layout key objectives and KPIs from day one, and a scoring matrix relative to your company to help track prospects through the nurture programme and the sales funnel.?

https://www.greigdowling.com/