The real success of any marketing program, like it or not, is whether any of the leads generated actually turn into sales. Being able to attribute your hard work to revenue is the “holy grail” of marketing but we all know how complicated this can be in organisations with convoluted sales processes, big teams and long sales cycles.
No more finger pointing
Sales and Marketing should be on the same team, but honestly at most companies it doesn’t feel that way. There’s a disconnect between the teams – sales thinks that marketing has the “easy” job, they’re not accountable and all they do is blow up balloons at trade shows and marketing is sick of hearing the sales team's next brilliant marketing idea… usually about sponsoring trade show or taking clients to the football. Leads are generated and not followed up as sales think marketing generated leads are not worth their time. Overall this approach is a huge waste of talent and resources, but it doesn’t have to be this way. A conscious decision to work together needs to be made, numerical goals need to be set, yes by marketing as well, and a formal agreement between marketing and sales and what each is responsible for established.
Blurred lines
With 57% of the buying decision made before a customer wants to speak to a sales rep, the line between marketing and sales is now so blurry that it essentially doesn’t exist. Marketers need to stop handing every lead over to sales, a huge source of frustration about “bad leads”, and take on more of the lead qualification and nurturing. To do that successfully sales needs to help marketing to understand the customer and their challenges as well as specify what a qualified lead looks like to them, and no a qualified lead is not someone with a credit card in hand ready to sign an order.
Perhaps the hand-over point is when someone has requested a consultation, or has given some kind of sales-ready indication that they would like to speak to someone. However each company will have a different definition of what is “sales ready” and when is the right time for a sales person to be involved.
For marketers, your job has got more complex, however there is technology available now to help you move customers down the funnel, understand where they are in the decision making cycle and pass that information on to sales.
Not all leads are created equal
Just because a person has visited your site and downloaded a piece of content doesn’t mean that they are ready for a sales call. In fact the vast majority of them of them are not ready and may never be.
Thinking about lead nurturing as a process of disqualification can help. Calling everyone who remotely expresses interest in your company seems desperate and desperate is never attractive in love or business.
Intelligent lead nurturing helps by providing your leads with a steady stream of relevant information – but not too much either – we don’t want to be desperate remember.
The perfect world scenario of lead nurturing is that you take all your top of the funnel leads, and send them a series of relevant, targeted emails and offers that gradually helps to move them further down the funnel so you can separate qualified leads from the time wasters.
However the reality is not like this and marketing automation software has a lot to answer for. It’s very easy to set-up a sequence of emails that essentially turn a lead nurturing vision into an automated spamming machine. As Mike Volpe HubSpot’s CMO famously said
By unintentionally spamming your leads you can drive them out of the sales funnel entirely. So please, don’t SPAM your leads.
It’s not about you
We’re all guilty of it. We spend most of our time thinking about what we want the leads to do, rather than what your leads actually want. The result is unrequested emails that don’t add value.
But, I’m not a mind-reader you say! How do I know what they want? Well, if you are generating leads using inbound marketing then you should know a lot already about what your leads are interested in. They’ve already raised their hands and said I’m interested in a particular topic, and if you’ve asked them some creative questions in your forms, then you may even have an idea of the business challenges that they are experiencing, so build campaigns that use this information.
Break down the barriers
In its simplest form a lead nurturing email campaign has two objectives
- Get the email opened
- Try to get the leads to further engage with you and/or your content
If the nurturing email is too focused on you, your company and your sales process then it will probably be ignored or the contact will unsubscribe.
One approach that I’ve found works very well is just a simple question.
Did it download OK? or Did you find what you were looking for?
This is an easy, non-threatening, definitely non-salesy email and it gets responses. People these days are very conditioned to being spammed, and their barriers are up, they don’t want to speak to anyone, so you need to figure out how to get past those barriers. A simple question is often the most effective way.
Move your leads gently toward sales-ready offers
Further qualify your leads by sending them valuable, relevant content, based on what you already know about them. Types of offers that indicate sales readiness can be free trials, request a demonstration, request a consultation, but take baby steps, remember that their barriers are up.
The ultimate goal is to have that lead put up their hand and request to be contacted. When it comes to these types of “sales-ready” offers, you want to follow the same rules – be helpful (non-salesy), add value – offer a consultation rather than a sales pitch. Be creative about it, essentially you want the opportunity to get on the phone with the prospect, where you will be able to further determine whether they are a good fit for your product or services. So
- Be curious
- Stay on topic
- Provide value
Monitor the performance
You need to be vigilant with your lead nurturing campaigns. It’s all too easy to set and forget them. However you should constantly monitor your email open and click through rates. If less than 10% of your leads are clicking through to your follow-up offers then you’re not adding enough value or you haven’t built enough trust.
Don’t be afraid to turn off a lead nurturing campaign. A bad lead nurturing campaign is worse than none at all. Your email lists degrade at 25% per year just from people moving jobs and bad marketing automation can accelerate that, so be vigilant and save the kittens.
Stop your leads from going down the drain
Stopping your hard earned leads from going down the drain needs a consolidated approach. Firstly you must have alignment between marketing and sales on what a qualified leads looks like, when is the right time to hand the relationship over and a commitment to both generating quality leads and following up on those leads. Secondly you must set up nurturing campaigns that are truly nurturing and not spammy, irrelevant sequences of emails that are focused entirely on what you want. Lead nurturing done this way gains both the respect of the sales team as well as a healthier funnel of qualified leads.
If you’d like to learn more about lead nurturing, and are in Sydney, come along to the HubSpot User Group meeting on 13th November. I’ll be on the panel - we can talk about kittens.
