Nurturing B2B Leads and Measuring Success

#B2B LEAD NURTURING BEST PRACTICES AND GUIDE TO INCREASE YOUR CONVERSION RATE

B2B #leadnurturing is one of the foundational components of a successful sales and marketing funnel. It turns your long sales cycle into an effective method of building relationships with your leads and turning them into long-term customers.

Lead conversion can be one of the most challenging needs in running a business. To optimize your ROI metrics, you need a strategy that efficiently and effectively moves prospects down your funnel. This is accomplished by delivering tailored marketing pieces at the right time—your marketing nurtures leads (aka prospects) and eventually converts them to sales. According to Forrester Research, companies that are successful at nurturing leads generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost.

While lead nurturing is a clear priority for sales and marketing teams, it’s becoming more challenging. In that same report, “56% of respondents said their performance is poor/inadequate or needs improvement, while 84% said lead nurturing was challenging or very challenging.”

This tells us that while it's a primary goal in business, it's growing harder to engage prospects. Businesses face hurdles such as an overwhelming amount of information to communicate, contacts with limited time and high employee turnover. This means businesses like yours need to get creative and formalize strategies for nurturing leads.

What is Lead Nurturing and Why is it Important?

Lead nurturing is the process of developing and reinforcing relationships with prospective buyers at every stage in your #salesfunnel until they either purchase or are no longer a qualified prospect. A successful lead nurturing strategy connects sales with marketing efforts, listens to the needs of prospects and educates those prospects as their relationship with your company grows. According to Marketo, “On average, half of leads in any given system are not yet ready to buy?” This is why lead nurturing is so important—it converts that 50% into customers.

Although the main benefit of lead nurturing is to increase profits by converting more prospects into customers, there are an additional five benefits of lead nurturing:

1. Educates prospects about your company. This education allows you to tell prospective customers about all your company does, who you are and what problems you can solve.
2. Builds trust with your audience. Showing your potential customers you understand their pain points and giving them useful tips gains their trust. It’s not always about making a sale, sometimes providing your audience with tools and information can be just as important for broader business needs.
3. Supports you as a thought leader. The more effective you can be at creating relevant marketing communications and sharing them with prospects at the perfect time, the more you will improve your reputation as a knowledgeable leader in your industry.
4. Builds brand awareness. The more often you get your business in front of leads, the more likely they will remember you, so when they are ready to buy, your company is their number one choice.
5. Improves your sales strategy and skills of your sales team. Often, sales representatives are focused on the prospects right in front of them—the ones ready to buy now. By instilling a lead nurturing program, you show the sales team how to look beyond those hot prospects to see the potential of cooler prospects.

How to Start Nurturing Leads

Most lead nurturing strategies center around developing a meaningful journey through the sales funnel using personalization and timely engagement. The B2B lead nurture process allows your team to explore, engage with and analyze prospective customers’ behaviors from various angles using several different tactics.

Before finalizing a lead nurturing strategy, take a moment to prepare and organize all the information you will need throughout the process. The more organized you are upfront, the more successful you will be.

PREPARATION NEEDED BEFORE BUILDING A LEAD NURTURING PROGRAM

To build a successful lead nurturing strategy, you need to deliver the correct information to your prospects at a time when they need it most. To ensure you do this, some preparation needs to be done up front. Consider establishing and organizing information in three categories:

Research and Segmentation: As we highlighted in a previous article about target audiences, research and segmentation should be a part of every marketing strategy or program—lead nurturing included. Without research and segmentation, it’s impossible to know what will work best for your audience.

The research will help you understand your target audience’s persona and bring attention to the necessary resources to connect with them. Each stage of your funnel requires different types of resources at different frequencies, which, if not done correctly, can cause the prospect to leave your funnel.

Lead segmentation categorizes your prospects into groups based on a variety of factors such as industry, demographics, company size, etc.

Combining research and segmentation allows you to see what content is appropriate for each segment in each stage of the funnel.

Planning: Planning plays a crucial role in every business project if you want to be efficient, effective and get the best results. The same is true here. Answering questions like those below sets you up for creating a strong lead nurturing strategy. Set up a team meeting between sales and marketing, go over these questions and align your team on how they can contribute to this process.

• What are the most common pain points you see among your prospects? How can you solve each pain point?
• What type of content do you need to create or repurpose to increase prospect engagement at each stage of your sales funnel?
• What are your current key performance indicators (KPIs) and what are the goals you want to reach for each KPI? Some examples of KPIs to establish if you want to effectively measure this process, include: email unsubscribe rates; tracking prospect engagements on social media or email reports; tracking sales cycle lengths; costs associated with converting a prospect; and number of prospects entering, leaving and converting within your funnel.
• What automation, marketing and sales tools are at your current disposal? Are there any gaps to fill by investing in a new tool, or is there a tool you are underutilizing? And if you think personalization and automation are more geared to B2C businesses, research shows that that 83% of business customers prefer being treated as individuals rather than numbers, while 75% of buyers now expect companies to anticipate their needs and make relevant suggestions before they initiate sales contact.

Setup Your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tool: If you don’t already have a CRM tool, now would be the time to invest in one because it will make lead nurturing easier. A CRM will help you:

• Track and qualify your prospects
• Segment prospects and add research notes
• Assign the percentage of converting them and adjust that percentage as they move through your sales funnel so you can better visualize future sales

Stages of B2B Lead Nurturing

STAGE 1: SPREADING AWARENESS TO GENERATE PROSPECTS

In this stage, you spread awareness about your business and solutions to prospects by addressing their pain points and aligning them with a solution of yours. You reach potential prospects in this stage by conducting keyword research and deciding what marketing channels you will use—social media, search engines, association websites—to find the prospects. You will then connect with prospects through unique content and thought leadership pieces. Some examples of content pieces to use in this stage are high-level digital advertisements, newsletters, social media posts, whitepapers, keyword-rich blogs and other thought leadership pieces. Consider using a landing page on your website to house all materials relevant to this audience and capture their information into your CRM through contact forms.

STAGE 2: NURTURING PROSPECTS AFTER INITIAL ENGAGEMENT

This stage is critical to your overall lead nurturing program. It caters to your new prospects—delivering specific, personalized content based on what they have already engaged with. Begin building a relationship with them so they keep coming to you as a resource. One way is to segment them in your newsletter list with other similar prospects. You can segment them based on industry, types of pain points they have, how/where you collected their information or even what stage of the funnel they are in.

Stage two is also a great time to implement marketing automation that will save your team’s time. Using your CRM or other marketing tools, you can schedule outreaches and touchpoints based on how or when prospects engage with your content. For example, if using Mailchimp, create automated messages if prospects don’t open emails or click on content within a certain time period. If a prospect does click on content within your emails, schedule a follow-up newsletter or other communication with similar topics.

STAGE 3: NURTURING PROSPECTS AS THEY BEGIN TO FREQUENTLY ENGAGE

Once a prospect begins to engage more with the high-level content outlined above, you can begin sprinkling in more conversion-focused content that warms them up for the sales team to take over. This is the stage where you can start showcasing your credibility through case studies, customer testimonials and clear call-to-actions (CTAs), such as the option for free consultations or quotes.

STAGE 4: NURTURING WARMING PROSPECTS USING A COMBINATION OF MARKETING AND SALES STAFF

Stage four is an excellent time to begin pulling in sales staff to work alongside your marketing efforts. Your sales representatives can begin scheduling meetings and building confidence in your solutions and the growing relationship. In this stage, marketing plays a supporting role, your sales team should direct your marketing team on what the prospect needs to close the sale. This may include creating one-off technical specification documents or material safety data sheets (MSDSs) for the sales team to use to close a sale.

STAGE 5: NURTURING A CONVERTED PROSPECT AND MOVING THEM TO A RETENTION PROGRAM

Once a prospect is converted into a customer, the relationship building and nurturing doesn’t end. It’s a continuing process, but with slightly different goals. Now you can move them to a customer retention program where your sales and marketing teams work in tandem to build a more personal connection and find opportunities to upsell or cross sell your solutions. A strategic customer retention program will also help bring more new prospects into the top of your sales funnel without added lead generation efforts.

Measuring the Lead Nurturing Strategy Success

Once your lead nurturing strategies are up and running, it’s important to track and measure KPIs against the goals you set early in the process. Find areas for improvement. If you aren’t meeting the marks, adjust your processes as necessary.

Beyond the KPIs you set, it’s important to know how to calculate the ROI of lead nurturing strategies. It is possible to assign a monetary value to this process, so you can determine if you are losing or gaining profits.

You can simply calculate the metrics you want by analyzing the revenue produced from nurtured leads versus non-nurtured leads using these calculations and comparing the answers against the expenses you invested:

• Current monthly revenue from leads: New Leads x Conversation Rate x Average Sales Price
• New monthly revenue from nurtured leads: New Leads s Increased Conversion Rate x Increased Average Sales Price

Once those calculations are made, you will be able to easily compare your “before” and “after” numbers against your expenses to see what your ROI is and how it was impacted.

In Conclusion, Does Lead Nurturing Matter?

We understand the process of lead nurturing is time intensive. But, the payout leads to long-term success and high profitability for your business. It will also make your #salesandmarketing processes more efficient, saving your team time, even with a growing customer base.

Even though the profitability and efficiency impacts might speak for themselves, it’s also worth noting that nurtured leads funneled into a #customerretention program are more likely to become your most loyal customers. That’s because your team has spent time learning their behaviors, responding to them and building trust. They will likely purchase more, spend more time with you and send referrals your way.

If you’re on the fence about implementing this type of strategy in your own business, let’s connect. The odds are high your competitors are already thinking about this if they have not implemented it yet. You should start being the recognizable and reliable voice to your prospects before it’s too late.

Related Articles:

Integrating B2B Sales and Marketing Strategies

Marketing Strategies to Improve B2B Customer Retention Success

Build Thought Leadership and Measure Its Success

Maximize Your CRM

How to Define Your Target Audience