Forming relationships in sales is everything. Learn how to nurture a lead, why it's important, and what tools can help take your strategies to the next level.
When many sales professionals think about how to nurture a lead, their minds often go straight to direct communication. While that is certainly important, it's only part of what you must do to accompany your leads on their journey through the sales funnel. From starting with the right people and using multiple channels to crafting valuable content and ensuring timely follow-ups, lead nurturing is a multi-step process.
Of course, building a strong relationship that earns a lead's respect is your ultimate goal. Lead nurturing helps them view your brand as credible and trustworthy — or someone they want to do business with. Not only does it move them through the sales funnel, but it also sets you up for long-term success. When customers build strong relationships with your brand, they tend to be loyal. This can lead to improved customer satisfaction and retention rates and possibly even referrals. After all, don't you tell your friends, family, and followers when you discover a company you like and trust?
Lead nurturing is the art of building relationships with your leads as they make their way through the sales funnel. You can do this through addressing their needs and paint points, offering valuable content, and engaging with them throughout the process.
Lead nurturing is extremely important throughout the entire sales cycle. It can help with everything from finding the right leads to target to customer retention. When you take the time to build relationships with people, you gain their trust and respect. This, of course, can push them over the edge towards making a purchase. And, if they're satisfied, they'll remain customers beyond their initial purchase and recommend your business to others.
But lead nurturing can also help educate your sales team. As you build relationships with prospects and customers, you learn more about them — what they want, what they need, their pain points, and their interests. This can help you gain a better understanding of your leads in general and target the right people in the future. It can also help you better understand what's working for your campaigns and what you could do better. It can even help you learn which prospects are most ready to move through your funnel. Those who engage are typically more likely to eventually buy, so you may want to encourage your reps to spend more time focusing on them.
Before you can start building an effective lead nurturing campaign, you must decide on your goals. What exactly do you want to achieve? More conversions? Increased engagement? Better customer retention? All of the above? Once you have a clear idea of what you're working toward, you can craft your campaign accordingly. The steps you take will typically look something like this:
A large part of lead nurturing is understanding your buyer. The best way to start is by identifying your target audience and beginning the process with high-quality leds. Take a deep dive into market research, your historic data, the behaviors of your current customers, and what your competitors are doing. Use this information to find the key demographics for your audience and create buyer personas.
Once you've gathered your target audience, segment them into smaller groups so that you can tailor your outreach to better suit each one. You can focus on demographics like age, income, job title, industry, or geographic location. You can group them by their interests or values. You can also segment them by engagement behavior (have they opened your emails previously or responded to your social media outreach?) or where they are in your sales funnel. For B2B, you might divide them up by the size or type of company they work for. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of ways to segment leads.
Before you reach out to your target audience, you need to decide what to say. A generic sales pitch will end up ignored, hung up on, or in a spam folder. Focusing on personalized content that will resonate with your buyers is key to generating interest. Understand their pain points, needs, and wants. Explain how your product or service solves their problems or fulfills their needs and wants. Provide reviews and feedback from current or previous customers and case studies to help make your point even further.
At first glance, adding automation to your workflow may not seem like it has much to do with lead nurturing, but it can actually be a huge part of the process. First, it can help with consistency. Following up with leads in a timely manner without overdoing it is essential for building relationships, but many sales reps don't do this for one reason or another. It could be that they have a huge workload and forgot or ran out of time. Maybe they procrastinate or don't fully understand the importance of following up at the right time. Whatever the problem, using automation tools removes the potential for human error. They schedule follow-ups at the right time without a hitch. Even if your reps are great at following up, utilizing automation frees up their time to focus on building relationships in other ways.
Automation tools can help you create sequences and follow through on them. They can also respond to triggers. For example, if someone interacts with your website, the tool you choose might automatically send them an email with a discount code to encourage them to revisit your site and make a purchase.
Your sales team probably has a particular type of outreach that you prefer or that works best — email, social media, etc. But your customers also have a preferred channel. This is just one reason why implementing multi-channel strategies can help with lead nurturing. Someone who doesn't like email may spend a lot of time on social media. Someone who doesn't answer phone calls may prefer email or text. The more channels you have access to, the bigger your reach. Why limit yourself?
Working across multiple channels also provides you with more opportunities for personalization. When you send someone a message on LinkedIn, you can mention the article they just posted or the award they just won. And when your brand is consistent across multiple channels, it can help build credibility.
Setting KPIs is an important aspect of your entire sales campaign, including lead nurturing. Not only does it help you establish clear goals for your team, but it also helps you measure how effective your campaigns are and where your attempts at building relationships are falling short. Click-through and open rates, conversion rates, and customer retention metrics, like churn rate are all great places to start.
Once you've built and implemented your first campaign, there are several steps you can take to continue nurturing your leads and building relationships. Let's take a look at some of the most important.
Consistently delivering personalized and valuable messages can go a long way in gaining a lead's trust and proving your credibility. If you wait too long to follow up or don't follow up at all, a warm lead is likely to go with your competitor. Even after closing a deal, continuing to build a relationship through regular intervals of communication can lead to future sales.
You may not get it exactly right the first time, but doesn't mean you failed. One important aspect of building strong sales campaigns is experimenting, measuring your results, and trying again. Using metrics, both quantitative and qualitative, are the best ways to determine what needs improvement. You can also implement tools like A/B testing.
If your sales and marketing teams are working towards the same goals, it can go a long way in improving lead nurturing, engagement, and the overall customer experience. Establish a convenient communication channel between the two teams, and utilize tools that help team members share insights and information about leads and customers.
CRMs are excellent tools for lead nurturing. They centralize information to enhance collaboration, and they help with automation of your workflow, lead management, and tracking your metrics. Integrating your CRM with a sales engagement platform (SEP), like Outreach or Salesloft, can really ramp up your lead nurturing efforts. Whatever tools you choose, consider those that possess important qualities like lead scoring capabilities, predictive AI, and sales engagement.
Lead nurturing is an important part of the sales process. Focusing on building strong relationships with leads at every stage of the sales cycle can help you convert more leads, close more deals, and retain more customers. While there are many ingredients that go into the art of lead nurturing, targeting the right leads, personalizing content, consistent engagement, automation, and staying on top of your metrics will help you get started.
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