Technology marketers are faced with many challenges today, and it’s critical that they are doing the most with what they have. Luckily, through a well planned, high-quality lead nurture program, you can leverage your own captive, qualified audience to increase your close ratios, shorten sales cycles and generate revenue. In fact, a recent article in BtoB Magazine found that even simple “drip” campaigns outperformed one-time-only e-mail campaigns by 3 to 1.
As the article states,
“Good lead-nurturing messages provide insight and solutions, not overt sales pitches. As companies educate leads about their products and services—and how they can address prospects’ current challenges—they become trusted advisers. Lead-nurturing programs ensure that prospects will immediately think of your company when they are ready to buy.”
Nurture your technology prospects with an integrated plan
In order to effectively reach your tech buyers, you need to use more than the often relied on email newsletters or triggered email messages to fill your sales pipeline. While I agree that email marketing is a proven method of nurturing leads, you should consider at least three marketing vehicles to deliver these messages. A combination of email messages, direct mail, and telemarketing efforts can be very effective within a lead nurturing effort.
Telemarketing as a tool can:
- Increase your brand awareness
- Determine where in the decision cycle tech buyers are
- Offer educational materials to help further their awareness of your company, products and services.
Direct mail is a great way to invite people to virtual and face-to-face events, and remind users of new content or marketing materials they might want to check out on your site.
Email marketing is a good tool for drip-nurturing, and can be employed when you have a group of prospects that are actively involved in researching solutions, and want to nudged along with new content or new information related to your offerings.
Respond to tech buyers quickly
With so many competitors contacting tech buyers, it’s important that you cement your relationship with new leads inside of a few hours. I know that may be aggressive, but theer is plenty of sales data that suggests “calls placed within five minutes of receiving a Web lead have the highest likelihood of making contact.”
This real-time responsiveness, may require you to move toward automating your lead generation and reporting processes, so that leads land in your CRM system as soon as they’re generated. And while moving from weekly lead reports to automated reporting processes might require an overhaul of your entire lead management practices, doing so may also significantly improve your overall sales.
Prioritize and score your leads
Lead scoring is a great way to segment your leads and determine how best each prospect should be nurtured through the pipeline. By rating leads based on a series of filters, such as their location, their time frame for implementing a solution, or their role in the IT decision making process, you can place your leads in separate silos, and nurture each group according to their specific needs. Leads can then be contacted immediately upon entering your CRM system, and by nurturing your scored prospects with a variety of tools, you should be able to accelerate your sales as you continuously move leads through the pipeline.
Lets not forget that throughout the nurture effort, content should be key driver in all of the vehicles. It’s important that distributed messages clearly address prospects’ greatest needs or challenges, so give them an opportunity to share their insights
Don’t let leads slip through your fingers :: BtoB Magazine.
