Nurturing – the process of developing and reinforcing relationships with your target market at every step of the buyer journey – is the best way to generate leads for complex B2B sales. In part one of this blog, we stressed the importance of nurturing potential opportunities until they are ready to commit. At the same time, it’s just as crucial to know how to avoid losing these leads, while reporting the success of your programme. Part two of this blog explores the critical elements of working with your sales teams, lead management and reporting.
Integrate with a sales development (telemarketing) function
Whether you call it sales development, inside sales, or telemarketing, this function is an essential part of lead nurturing. As field sale people focus on qualified opportunities, lead developers will typically progress engagement following your marketing interventions to qualify a prospect's level of intent and propensity to buy.
Even in today’s self-service world with buyer enablement, marketing automation, content, email, chatbots and other digital channels, it’s likely you’re going to need to have a conversation with a prospect for an opportunity to progress.
It’s important to ensure the follow-up process is as slick and responsive as possible if a prospect engages with your content or website. You need to strike while the iron is hot i.e. when they still have you on their mind - so it’s important to call them within a few minutes of their interaction with you. By calling them as soon as possible, you will be able to demonstrate a positive experience, while ultimately giving yourself the best chance of converting that lead. Always jump on a lead to showcase your utmost attention and willingness to assist.
Lead management process - sales & marketing alignment
It’s no secret that sales and marketing people generally think and behave differently. Often an unhealthy divide exists where both functions are doing completely different things. This can be counterproductive and at times, destructive. So you need to establish a reliable and efficient lead management process.
The tension is normally sparked by sales bemoaning the quality of leads. In-turn, marketing complain about how poorly the leads are managed. With an effective nurture programme in place this conflict is unlikely to exist. But first, you’ve got to get sales and marketing working together to get the initiative going. The key is agreeing a common goal. Ultimately, both marketing and sales exist to deliver predictable orders and revenue.
It’s still surprising, given how much some organisations spend on marketing, that leads fall through the cracks, aren’t followed up on, or are just discarded because no serious buying intentions present themselves at a particular point in time. Although lead nurturing does make marketing more of a science, you still have to account for chaos. Procurement cycles get shelved, go on hold, come back to market and so on. Your lead management process should account for these things. The key is to think of a buying cycle as a single, yet fluid process that the marketing and sales team manage together. Leads will undoubtedly move back and forth. But don’t let them go.
Marketing and sales also need to agree specifics such as the definition of a qualified (sales-ready) lead; how leads will be allocated; how the handover process will work; who logs activity and records progress; how long leads stay with sales before returning to the nurture programme and so on. Leads are precious. So take good care of them. Why do you think it’s called ‘nurturing’?
ource: Forrester
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Lead categorisation and scoring
Once you embark on the execution of your nurture programme, Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) will be identified at various different stages in the buying process. You therefore need to find a way of categorising them. The most common is the A, B, C and D method. ‘A’ is hot and ‘D’ is cold. ‘C’ and ‘B’ are somewhere in between. Obviously, you need to ensure your categorisations are consistent with your lead definition and that everyone involved in your nurture programme understands what they mean. ‘A’ leads will normally reside with an allocated sales person, whilst the others will likely sit with marketing, but might be prioritised and treated differently.
Once you’ve decided how to categorise your leads, you can get smarter and score them. Scoring is based on the fit with the characteristics defined in your ideal buyer profile, along with their behaviour in terms of how they interact with your organisation and your content. In simple terms, a strong fit prospect who downloads all your case studies, attends your webinars, requests your ‘How to develop a business case’ guide and visits your pricing page, will likely get a higher score than a student who landed on your website and clicked off after 3 seconds.
Be very careful with lead scoring until you have enough lead volume that you absolutely have to implement it. While leads are at a manageable level, don't leave it too late to follow-up purely based on their online behaviour and suggested intent. Data may be misleading and only tell part of the story - the real insight and qualification almost always comes from a conversation.
Analytics and reporting
It really goes without saying that developing your nurturing programme requires a lot of trial and error. You have to closely analyse response rates, conversion ratios, and call report narratives - as well as test, compare and contrast different content, campaigns and channel combinations.
Logically, you might think that the longer you run a nurture programme, the better the results will get. You might even have a picture in your head of a straight-line trajectory. However, in practice this rarely happens. No matter how much science goes into these things, you’re still dealing with people, buying committees and changing priorities. The key is continual testing, modification and plain perseverance.
The other key things are setting expectations and reporting progress. It’s important to establish a baseline of KPIs, which you can use to show improvements. There are two main areas of focus. Firstly, measures that help you track marketing performance. Use these to identify areas that enable you to make more headway. Secondly, there are those all-important ROI measures that you must stay on top of to show the programme’s contribution to your company’s top and bottom lines. Here are just a few examples of marketing KPIs and ROI:
- Number of enquiries per week
- Qualified opportunities per month
- Cost per qualified lead
- £s of revenue initiated per annum
- Won opportunities per quarter
- New customer margin and value analysis
Final thoughts
When it comes to lead generation, many organisations embark on a rollercoaster ride of random marketing activities in search of an elusive silver bullet. The truth is there isn’t one. Many also take an ad hoc approach, with activity triggered by an urgent need for leads. Results are therefore inconsistent, often with much time and money being wasted.
Today, buyers live in a multi-channel world and use different ways to research their problems and evaluate potential solutions, often preferring not to engage directly with sales. For complex, considered B2B purchases, they go through a process of education, consideration and decision-making before buying.
So lead generation needs to be an ongoing, multi-channel programme with activities that nurture buyers through each of these stages. And it should be seen as an iterative process to be monitored and adjusted based on results.
Not sure how to prime your marketing team for a successful nurture programme? Check out part one of this blog, where we outline the foundation your marketing team needs to have in place to make sure it's effective.
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