Earlier this week, I wrote about the opportunities for profitable sales that are ignored by almost 50% of businesses – today, here are some important elements of a successful lead nurturing program.
Step 1: Segmentation
For most businesses, ‘target audience’ is too broadly defined. That ‘be all things to all people’ really does make you less effective.
So ask yourself the following questions:
Who are my best customers? How do I know they are my best customers? What makes them ‘best’?
For most companies, the best way to answer these questions with confidence is to use RFM Analysis. Recency, Frequency, Monetary – this will tell you who bought from you most recently, frequently and spent the most dollars during a specific time frame.
There is no better way to define ‘best customer’ – unless you can factor in ‘profit’ to the equation!
The next step is to overlay other data and identify segments. For B2C, focus on demographic and psychographic data; for B2B, focus on firmagraphic data. This allows you to identify smaller segments within the larger ‘buyer universe’.
The third and final step is market research – interview and survey these individuals in order to understand needs, wants, demands, perceptions, buying process, and motivations. This helps you get even more granular so that you can develop the most appropriate messages and offers – and questions for your sales and marketing to ask and answer along the nurturing and sales process.
Buyer Personas
At the end of this data analysis, you create ‘buyer personas’ that allow you to understand the unique characteristics of everyone that buys from you. This can help you deliver the right information more effectively – and should positively impact your conversion rates, shorten the sales cycle and increase average order sizes.
Buyer personas also help you identify media as well as develop messages and offers!
Lead Scoring and Prioritization
As the leads come in, score and prioritize. (In the old days, we called it qualifying the inquiries but that’s so last century!)
When you score your leads, you are looking at those key factors that make the individual a ‘qualified buyer’ – and that leads you back to your segmentation work.
Does the individual look like your best customers? Do they have the budget, authority and need for your product? What is their time line for buying?
‘Sales Ready Leads’ vs. ‘Leads’
At the end of scoring, you prioritize them – with sales ready leads being immediately handed off to sales because they are ready to buy now.
The rest of the qualified leads remain in marketing and become part of the nurturing program.
Map Nurturing to Buying Cycle
Successful nurturing programs are 5 times more likely than less successful programs to tie lead nurturing content to the buyer’s position in the buying cycle.
Attention > Interest > Desire > Action
These are the typical stages of the buying cycle – and as you can imagine, the buyer needs different information in each stage so an effective lead nurturing program will make certain that the right information is delivered at the right time!
What to Say, When to Say It
During the Attention stage, the focus should be on problem/need identification. What you are doing is helping the buyer wrap their heads around a need or want – so don’t push “Buy now!”, but focus on information that helps identify problems and needs.
The Interest stage is the beginning of researching solutions – and this is where you start qualifying (budget, authority, need, time line). That’s why the focus is on exchanging information because the buyer is still seeking clarity and you re looking to make a good impression by asking insightful questions, providing relevant and accurate responses, and helping the buyer identify best possible solutions.
Next, the Desire stage is when the buyers starts to speak directly with those vendors that they feel offer the best solutions. Now you need to focus on features, benefits and key differentiators. This is where you start introducing promotional offers.
And finally, the Action stage is where the buyer evaluates the information gathered in earlier stages and prepares to make the decision so you should introduce delivery, installation, training and after sales support. These are the topics that should help further differentiate your solution from others because few organizations think about emphasizing these points. (Most stop short of these topics and remain focused on feature-benefit, feature-benefit…buy, buy, buy.)
What kind of content will you need to succeed?
Educational materials including whitepapers, webinars and on-the-ground events, product and service information, news about the company, promotional offers and marketing messages about the product/service.
You will want a mix of off-line and on-line – email and direct mail, webinars and face-to-face events, telephone calls and more. Remember to ask how the individual prefers to receive information, then make sure you have the information in that format!
A couple of valuable tips
First, buyers needs will change – so when sales identifies a buyer that is no longer planning to buy NOW, sales should be able to hand that lead back to marketing for nurturing until the need to buy becomes more immediate.
That’s why it’s key to have sales and marketing working together – in many organizations, the friction between these two areas would prevent the lead from being placed in the nurturing program (if one existed) – and the sale would be lost (or at least it would be placed at great risk).
Get sales and marketing together. Let them come to an agreement on the definition of ‘lead’ and ‘sales ready lead’. And let them identify how buyers will be handed back and forth between sales and marketing.
Finally, the content you develop for lead nurturing should be developed to help turn first-time buyers into multi-time buyers, and multi-time buyers into multi-product buyers. After all, you need to nurture customers in order to ensure higher lifetime value.
Double and Triple Conversion Rates
Setting up the right processes for scoring and prioritizing. Getting sales and marketing working together and clearly defining ‘lead’, and ‘sales ready lead’. Segmenting the buyers based on needs, wants, buying process, motivations. Making the right information available at the right time to the right people via the right channel.
Do all that and you should see the payoff in terms of higher conversion rates, shorter buying cycles, higher average orders and order frequency.
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