Lead Nurturing-Stop Dripping and Start Building Relationships

Lead nurturing is certainly the rage in lead management software. The problem is most likely this just means drip email marketing. The difference between lead nurturing and email drip marketing is important to your sales conversion. Drip emails frustrate your prospects--lead nurturing builds a relationship.

Start at Lead Capture

Every new sales opportunity should begin with your lead nurturing strategy in mind. Immediately upon distribution the lead should be touched with multiple angles: email thank you for inquiring, telephone follow-up, and maybe even a mailer. From that point your pursuit of the opportunity should set a precedence for various channels of communication.

These methods alert the customer into a sense of urgency and help you verify all available contact information. These multi-channel communications also establish preferences and potential buying intent from the customer.

At lead capture, it is also important to track source and initial inquiry. This information will begin to shape and marshal the lead into the right campaign from the beginning. This early tracking information will also allow you to perfect proper point of transition from sales to nurturing.

Opportunity Tracking

Buying intent is your key interest in opportunity tracking. This is also what separates your sales pipeline from the lead nurturing pipeline. Separate the two and they will both become more productive.

The trick is making sure you mark or adjust the opportunity every time you work on the lead. Simple upgrading or downgrading the opportunity can quickly sort and improve the efficiency of your lead management.

Opportunity tracking need not be complex. In fact, the simpler for the sales agent the more likely it is to be used properly. I often recommend a plus or minus, thumbs up or thumbs down system. Much like social software this can quickly surge good leads and suppress bad ones.

Status Every Lead

Status every lead, every time. Even if you simply review or leave a voicemail--things have changed. You want to track and potentially act on that information. For example, by know how many times you call and lead on average prior to converting can help you sales forecast and sorting out unproductive pipeline.

Adding status to lead will quickly fill your pipeline with actionable markers. These markers, or statuses can be great triggers for lead nurturing campaigns--kicking off phone calls, mailings, product updates, even emails.

Using status tracking allows your lead campaigns to seem more natural to your clients. It also allows you to gather powerful reporting to continue improving the overall practice.

Build a Relationship

Lead nurturing is a relationship building process, not an email spam campaign. Vary your communication between email, mail, and phone calls to create a more natural flow of communication.

Your process to take a customer with a lower propensity to buy and elevate them to a motivated client is a bit of an art. This is even tougher if you try to entirely automate. The best nurturing processes attempt blend automation and manual steps.

Like you would in building any relationship this process should attempt to mingle a natural mix of information, education, awareness, and some sales.