Marketing Automation Simplifies Lead Nurturing

Sales Lead Nurturing: Stop Lead Leakage!

We call it the "No Good Sales Lead Left Behind!" initiative and it represents one of the more frustrating aspects of  marketing. It's a fact that sales leads drop out of the lead lifecycle; from inquiry to closed business. It's also a fact that many marketers have little control over stopping this leakage except through herculean manual efforts. 

Working with a marketing automation solution, here are five best practices that will help you dramatically improve your sales lead nurturing efforts and results. 

Five Best Practices for Improving your Sales Lead Nurturing Programs:

#1: Map the life of a sales lead.
First, go to a whiteboard and map out the path of every type of lead in your company from inquiry to close. Next, identify all of the places where you have “lead leakage” – sales leads that do not convert to the next step in the sales process. Examples may include prospects that received a demo but did not buy, or all leads passed to sales that did not move to the next stage after 30 days. These are ideal sales leads to nurture.

#2: Create sales lead nurturing programs based on online behavior.
Identify a set of online behaviors that indicate specific interest, but which are not yet ready for a sales call. Create a program that places these prospects into a specific sales lead nurturing program based on that online behavior. Examples might include prospects who visited your pricing page, or who visited multiple pages in a solution section of your website.

#3: Create sales lead nurturing programs based on demographics and a form.
Create a form that asks questions like, “What is your number one initiative for 2010?” Give several options to force a single answer. Based on that answer, create a nurturing campaign that addresses that top initiative and target it to prospects with this specific business pain.

#4: Set up a sales lead nurturing program post-tradeshow.
The number one complaint we hear from our customers involves sales leads generated from tradeshows. These leads are typically high in quantity, but low in quality. Take these tradeshow leads and enter them into a nurturing program designed to help you further qualify them.

#5: Create a sales lead nurturing program to reawaken an existing database or list.
Create a high level thought leadership campaign or series of offers to drip to your cold leads.

See the Spotlight article and listen to the interview with M5 Networks to learn how they deployed marketing automation and, with a team of only two marketers, launched 16 different nurturing programs - all active within a six month period.