Talented sales people have known for years that the best way to keep the pipeline full is to identify prospects, develop relationships with them and then close the sale when the time is right.  But, if it were that easy, very few sales people would ever find themselves “excused” from work due to lagging numbers.

Most sales people are very skilled at the last part – closing the sale – but lack the time or resources to spend cycles identifying the leads and developing the relationship.  This scenario is where lead nurturing can fill the gap.

We think of lead nurturing as the process of developing a relationship with potential leads and engaging them in quality conversations to assess their level of interest and sales-readiness.   Marketing automation software can play a valuable role in lead nurturing strategies by automating these relationship-building communications and sending recipients down different decision-trees, based on their interactions.

Sounds like a great plan, right?  Marketing qualifies the prospects using a systematic lead nurturing approach, and once the leads are deemed qualified, sales scoops in to close the business.  However, much like the thought “if sales was easy, no one would get canned,” if lead nurturing were that simple, every company would be doing it.

With that in mind, we’ve taken a moment to run through 4 objections to lead nurturing from various internal departments and how to successfully overcome them…

• “I don’t like turning my leads over to someone else because who knows what promises you’ll make or what you’ll do with them.” – Johnny Sales Wizard
  Overcome this sales’ fear by working together to road map the communication cycle and listening to what sales has to say about how they sell successfully.  See if you can emulate some of their one-on-one dialog on a lead nurturing scale of one-to-many.

• “I don’t have time to develop a bunch of articles, emails, case studies, etc. and implement it…my day is already jam-packed.” – Sue Marketing Guru
  Help marketing come aboard the lead nurturing train by identifying existing content that can be repurposed for the nurture campaigns.  And don’t be afraid to start small with a 4 or 6-week cycle of communications that can be expanded as nurturing efforts take shape.

• “You people are always spending the company’s money on some new tool or system that no one uses after 3 months.” – Richard Bean Counter
  As much as it pains us, the CFO has a legitimate point.  Shiny new toys don’t do anyone much good if they aren’t used.  Have your game plan and content mapped out with both sales and marketing’s buy-in beforehand. If you’ll be using a marketing automation tool to streamline the processes, check into CRM integration or an API so you can manage your contact’s activities from one centralized place.

• “Does lead nurturing really help or is this another complicated excuse for why sales and marketing can’t work together?” – Mitch E. CEO
  The key to overcoming the dreaded “does it work” question is to first establish metrics that denote success.  While the end-game goal will always be more opportunities and closed deals, that probably won’t happen overnight.  Maybe the first metrics are improved email interaction and content downloads. Set realistic expectations and metrics from Day One.

With these tips in mind, you should be able to get buy-in and ideas for shaping your lead management and nurturing efforts.  Happy nurturing.

While it’s a no-brainer that your hottest leads are the highest priority and warrant attention, what about the rest of your contacts whose interaction with your email campaigns is just so-so? With email interaction becoming an increasingly important consideration in keeping your status as a white-listed email marketer, should you continue to send emails, even though their lack of engagement can chip away at your reputation as an above board email marketer?

This question is a tricky one, because removing them from your list could eliminate these leads from becoming a potential customer, but keeping them on your list could damage your email marketing integrity. While you rarely want to completely remove a contact from your database (unless of course, they’ve opted out), you can use your marketing automation software to create segments of “cooler” contacts that you communicate with on a less frequent basis.

Right now, stop what you’re doing and take a moment to define what constitutes a more (or less) qualified prospect in your organization. This discussion can be quite ‘animated’ to say the least because sales may be rejecting leads from marketing as unqualified, while marketing thinks sales should be…well…selling. Once you’ve navigated this slippery slope, bridged this communication gap and defined the characteristics of qualified leads (ta da!), it makes sense to segment these leads from the cooler ones. With differing levels of interest, these segments within your database should receive customized streams of communications. Leads that are cooler could receive more educationally focused information such as newsletters and product updates, while more qualified prospects could go into a nurturing campaign to receive more frequent communications that are relevant to their areas of interest.

By thinking of more than just your hottest prospects, you’ll be able to further segment your database into lists associated with different levels of interest and readiness. Once these lists are in place, you can send communications at a pace that feels more comfortable and tailored to each segment of leads. Your lead database will remain in good shape, you’ll keep your integrity intact as an email marketer – and the most interested prospects will rise to the top – making your lead nurturing efforts shine.

Although Marketing Automation is certainly not “New” it’s also not a concept that is deeply engraved into the mind of every marketer.  Net-Results provides one of the most effective and user friendly marketing automation platforms out there, but we too must send our own sales soldiers out to encourage consumers to shed the shackles of basic marketing and learn to love the web 2.0.  In our efforts to spread the good word, we come across every size, shape and color of marketer, and gather quite a few interesting questions on the way. One of the most recent, which seems to be quite common, is the unsettling rebuttal to our pitch: “But I already DO marketing!” Read more

Utilizing Net-Results has its obvious online marketing advantages, but how do you take your marketing to the next step efficiently and cost effectively? One of the most effective ways to integrate Net-Results with outside and interactive efforts is to use it to promote, register, track and analyze webinars, seminars, or interactive events. By utilizing Net-Results for your event marketing, you have the ability to integrate your event registration, email marketing, post event analysis, and website tracking of event attendees and registrants, all in one platform.

The first step to getting the word out to your prospects about your upcoming event is to create your email invitation campaign in Net-Results. You can not only create a standard email campaign, but an action based campaign that will track whether or not a recipient has signed up for your event either through your email or through a registration form on your site. If a recipient does not register, Net-Results can be set up to automatically send them another set of emails until they elicit the desired response. Net-Results will of course also track all opens, clicks and visits to your website from your email invitation. However, unlike other ESPs, Net-Results tracks the recipients visits to your site far beyond their initial opening and viewing of your email, and provides individual contact information and site navigation each and every time they return. You can even set up a real time alert to let you know when someone has opened your email, visited your site, registered for your event, or opened your email and did not register for your event. You can even set up an alert to notify you when registrants return to your website in the future.

When using Net-Results to track your registration, you are not only collecting your data in a streamlined, easy to access fashion, you are also able to view your registrants return visits to your website, automate your responses when someone signs up for your event, and cross reference your website’s pre existing web form capture mechanism, to ensure you are capturing each and every registrant and visitor. Not only can you see your registrants contact information and navigation through your site once they sign up for your event, you can also see all of their future visits, whether its next week or next year, you have access to exactly what they’re looking for and when and how to contact them.

Additionally, mapping your registration forms to Net-Results eliminates time consuming and manual data transfer, because all of your registrant’s information is easily streamed into a list in Net-Results, and hopefully into your sales pipeline. Also, having all of your registrants in a list in Net-Results enables you to send them future email marketing campaigns, promotions, discounts, and nurture them to the point of sale.

Once you’ve mapped your registration forms to Net-Results, the next step is to set up your auto responder emails to confirm their registration and provide them with any further information regarding your upcoming event. It also gives them a chance to respond back with questions, comments or suggestions. By using the Net-Results auto responder functionality, you’re saving money and time with email invitations, automatic confirmations and 24/7 self-service online registration.

I met with a client this morning who currently uses Net-Results to track website visitors and identify companies coming to her site. When she sees one who could be a good prospect, she picks up the phone and attempts to call the person who came to her site. She doesn’t always get to the right person, but she does typically make contact with someone in the organization and has a good initial prospecting call. When I asked her how she normally follows up with those prospects, she said she generally handwrites notes and mails them. I thought that was a great idea – very few people do that because email is just easier – so it really makes her standout. But, I felt that the combination of handwritten notes and automated lead nurturing could further enhance her follow-up strategy and give her greater insight into the actual interest level of her prospects. Read more