What is Lead Nurturing?
- Lead nurturing effectively identifies prospects who are ready to buy, and helps them through the sales funnel
- By providing different types of content at each step of the cycle, companies can help prospects qualify themselves
- Marketing and sales teams must work together closely to create and provide useful content for each stage
- Smart Funnel uses multiple platforms to generate and nurture better leads for our clients
Sales is a complicated process. It may not seem that way at first since most people are pretty familiar with the basic process. You have a product that you want people to buy, so you talk to lots of people and find the ones who want to buy it. Easy, right? Well, not so much. There’s a great deal of nuance to the process, especially now in the digital age. Technology has made it easier than ever to hang a shingle and reach out to people. That’s great, except that there is also exponentially more competition. Buyers are bombarded with sales pitches every day, so they’ve gotten smarter about how they sort through them. Lead nurturing is how companies can help them do so.
Stages of Content and Contact
Fewer than one out of every five leads that enter a company’s sales funnel are already prepared to make a purchase. That fact gives us a couple of very important things to consider. How do we know which one of the five is the one that’s ready? And what do we do about the other four?
Some leads will never end up buying. They enter your funnel to comparison shop. They’re just gathering information or learning about the industry. It’s important not to waste too much time pursuing these leads, for obvious reasons. Besides the waste of sales team resources, badgering them is bad PR.
The rest might buy if your solution is right for them. So this is where lead nurturing comes into play.
The foundation of nurturing your leads is to provide every lead with useful content. But this does not mean just loading up your website with every single scrap of information that exists about your services and pricing. That’s information overload.
It also doesn’t mean hiding anything that your potential customers want to see.
Useful content is information you provide intentionally, right when each lead needs it. The way to manage this is by setting up a combination of automated processes and personal contacts.
A More Efficient Funnel
The top layer of content is the basic stuff: your website content, including blogs. Anyone can read this stuff and do what they want with it.
If they’re interested in learning more, then they should be able to easily find the next layer down: an email newsletter signup, or a free white paper to download, in exchange for their contact information.
Right then and there, you’re generating warm leads.
With that contact information, your sales team can reach out to speak with the lead and start the qualifying process. They will either have questions, or they’ll say that they only wanted to learn a little more and got what they needed. The ones who still want to know more are the most likely to be the one in five who will buy.
From there, it’s just a question of letting your sales team work their magic while providing them with all the detailed documentation, spec sheets, pricing charts, demos, and other stuff that enhances the pitch.
What makes it all happen in the first place is cooperation between marketing and sales. Content is still king, but kings have no power when they’re alone. Marketing provides the materials that sales teams can use to give prospects what they need and help them decide to buy.
The end result of this synergistic lead nurturing process is better performance. Nurtured leads are more likely to purchase, and not only that but to purchase more. That’s because the nurturing teams take the time to help them along, to listen to them, and to answer their questions
Lead Nurturing by Smart Funnel
Smart Funnel helps clients generate and nurture more leads by enhancing engagement with content across multiple platforms. Harnessing the power of social media and the best techniques in search engine optimization, we provide companies with the very best leads possible. Contact us today to widen your sales funnel the smart way!
