In a complex sale, my experience is, most of the selling actually happens when the sales person isn't there. I know there's a lot of emphasis on lead generation (that's a good thing) but, getting a ton of leads doesn't guarantee that increased sales will follow.
Startling as it may seem, recent research (and even studies from ten years ago) shows that longer-term leads (future opportunities), often ignored by salespeople, represent almost 80% of potential sales.
You can increase your odds success by adding a lead nurturing program.
What’s lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing is all about having consistent and meaningful communication with viable prospects (those that are “a fit” for your solution) regardless of their timing to buy. It’s not “following-up” every few months to find out if a prospect is “ready to buy yet?” Lead nurturing about building trusted relationships with the right people.
Walking in their shoes
Consider the following concerns that are going through a potential customers mind before they make a buying decision:
• How will this product/service help my company?
• We’re doing okay, why do we need it?
• Is there another company out there that is better?
• Will their solution really work? Can they prove it?
• Is the company credible?
• Can we afford it?
Lead nurturing helps people find the answers to these questions and remind them of the benefits of working with you. You're creating value by giving them useful information in digestible, bite sized chunks.
How to start lead nurturing
A typical lead nurturing program includes: a series of letters, emails, voicemails, case studies, success stories, articles, events, white papers, and web events that are meaningful to your potential customers. You’re providing relevant educational or thought leading content.
The tactics employed and the frequency of touches will depend on the solutions being sold and the buying cycle of the prospect.
Basic Lead Nurturing Plan
Below is a sample lead nurturing plan.
| Initial Contact | Introductory phone call and follow-up “thank you” e-mail |
| Month 1 | 3rd party article on pertinent technology via e-mail |
| Month 2 | Industry relevant case study via e-mail with follow-up call |
| Month 3 | E-newsletter with voice mail alert to check |
| Month 4 | 3rd party article on pertinent technology via e-mail |
| Month 5 | Relevant white paper via e-mail |
| Month 6 | Targeted campaign via direct mail |
| Month 7 | Relevant eBook via e-mail with follow-up call |
| Month 8 | Link to relevant Podcast via e-mail with follow-up call |
| Month 9 | Free report via direct mail with follow-up call |
| Month 10 | Invitation to webcast via e-mail with follow-up call |
| Month 11 | Call to invite to industry trade show and follow-up with registration link |
| Month 12 | Prospect calls you and becomes a sales ready lead |
When we create lead nurturing programs, we create different lead nurturing tracks based on demographic criteria such as size, industry, role in the buying process and more.
So what’s the ROI?
As a result of lead nurturing, companies will see more sales-ready leads, higher close ratios, a stronger sales pipeline and shorter average sales cycles. Client’s that have committed to lead nurturing program find that they can sustain their production of qualified leads over the long term and build a much more predictable and sustainable sales pipeline. Perhaps more interestingly, another client determined that their nurtured prospects brought in nearly 100% more initial revenue than those that were not nurtured and another said nurtured their prospects cite a greater overall positive impression of their company.
I’m giving a webinar on a multimodal approach to lead nurturing in June. I hope you can make it.
Customer Engagement Can’t Be Automated
For the past five years, marketing has gone through a significant repositioning as consultants and gurus seek to recast marketing as an efficient revenue generating machine.
It’s an idea whose time has come—after all, for how many more years could any CEO endure marketing’s de facto tagline: “I know half of my budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half.”
Marketers need to be accountable for every dollar invested in acquisition and retention programs, and they need to demonstrate an ability to drive both top-line revenue and bottom-line yield. But the transformation is far from complete, and along with the new requirements for financial accountability, marketers face a host of other challenges they need to understand in order to manage.
Companies serious about marketing exert tremendous pressure on marketers to transform their operations. Marketers must assimilate new technologies, benchmark business processes and develop entirely new skills to leverage emerging channels and respond to global competition. They must integrate more effectively with sales, justify their programs to the CFO and develop closer working relationships with IT. And at the end of the day, they are expected to deliver precisely targeted customer acquisition and retention campaigns that strategically position the company while driving measurable revenue and market share gains. With all of these challenges to address, who has time for customers?
In fact, that may be the most significant question marketers face in navigating and negotiating the new requirements for marketing. Despite the resurging trend in brilliant theories and bestselling books about customer-centric organizations, the reality on the ground appears to be that many businesses are becoming increasingly disconnected from their customers. This at a time when customers are increasingly leveraging social media to take control of brand positioning and messaging. At precisely the time when marketers need to improve their ability to engage customers directly, they’re increasingly distracted by a relentless focus on internal customer data systems and business process management.
In this age of increasingly advanced CRM systems, marketers report an overwhelming reliance on their data systems as a primary source of customer intelligence, with very little insight gained through customer service, distribution channels, customer organizations or communities, or even online customer networks. The reliance on CRM might be acceptable if systems were robust, but a study I managed last year with the CMO Council showed on average 40% of marketers rate their customer data systems as “weak” or “very weak” in critical areas, including the timeliness and depth of transactional data; the availability of useful data, reports and analytics and the relevance of available data to marketing strategies. Despite the fact that businesses have generated strong customer relationships for centuries before CRM existed, marketing executives have grown so focused on marketing technology that in the CMO Council study, they cited the complexity of data and system integration requirements as the most significant barrier to achieving optimal customer intimacy.
As important as it is for businesses to build effective CRM systems, creating a technology infrastructure that serves, measures and responds to customers is not sufficient. Companies need to follow the lead of businesses that have succeeded by first building a passionate customer following, and then building a customer data system to support growing demand—businesses like Apple, Nike and Nokia. Marketers can’t afford to get lost in the weeds on internal systems and processes while losing their connection with customers. In fact, direct engagement with customers should be the source of inspiration driving technology systems and business processes.
May 01, 2007
Content Becomes King Once More – This Time of Search Marketing
Edelman's Steve Rubel may rue the day he recently professed to throwing away his print trade magazines without ever reading them any more. But the man has a good point.
The new essential media is search. Increasingly, the way the get noticed and be understood by those most important to your business is to be easily accessed via the major search engines. It's now fair to say that if something does not exist in search, it does not exist.
I fully expect that marketers will soon offer not just PR and AR and IR, but SR -- for search relations. You have to know how to play the game, and I don't mean to game the system. I have found that the best way to get high search ranking on the native content side of the search results (as opposed to the paid side) is to create great content on your values and services, and get it placed widely.
In a recent podcast I did with Sam Whitmore, the founder and editor of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey at www.mediasurvey.com, we delved into the reasons that content is once again king.
Here are some excerpts:
Whitmore: We're now getting people to understand the concept of "You don’t have to browse anymore." They still search, of course, probably more than ever before. But you think about the two ways ... that people get their information now, it's either through RSS syndication, or through search. And it’s almost quaint to think back about, "Yeah, I think I am going to go through my bookmarks and see what I haven’t visited in a while." I don’t know anybody who does that anymore.
Gardner: The thing that’s interesting to me, and what’s changed in my business in the last year or so, is this emphasis on search. And that search, from what some people tell me, is the "new media" -- that when you want something, you know enough about it to start a search. If you are a little bit diligent you can find just about anything you want. That includes B2B content that describes products and values and services that companies want you to know about.
What’s been interesting for me is that as I have created content -- some of it of by my own creation and, and other content that is sponsored -- that people want help in creating content. As an analyst I can moderate a panel or discuss something with users, and then make that available to many people. But that content has now become a very powerful force in search, and I did not intend it that way.
I intended this content to be something that was more of an RSS play value. But what’s happened is that the content is a search ranking benefit for the topics we cover. I will blog about this content on three blogs, and I share it with distribution partners who are often IT media companies like TechTarget and E-Commerce Times. I also share it with direct subscription-based content deliverers to IT decision buyers, including Books24by7's AnalystPerspectives, Gerson Lehrman Group's News, and Insights24.
Because there are a number of channels that this audio and text content then finds its way into -- where it's tagged, and it has a different URL, and it's associated with a different web domain -- the search engine crawlers and the algorithms that rank content take a look at this content and say, “Wow, it's going across multiple domains, it's been tagged a lot, it’s been put into bookmarks, and linked to -- so it must be highly relevant." And this content tends to move up swiftly in the search ranks.
So, my question to you, Sam, is, Are you seeing search marketing as I am seeing search marketing -- that it is becoming as important as advertising?
Whitmore: Yes, in a word. I will know a lot more in a couple of weeks, because at the end of the month out in San Francisco, I will be going to ad:tech and hanging around with that crowd. But, I mean, it's been building for a while, the investment in search engine optimization (SEO) and some of the acquisitions that we have seen such as big, multi-national marketing companies now snapping up the iProspects, and iCrossing is doing a great job. So, it’s definitely being built into the mix. That’s what Content 2.0 is. And you’ve really staked a high ground in that, haven’t you?
Gardner: I am trying.
Whitmore: So, you tell me. How are you doing with that? Is it driving your business?
Gardner: It is. About 90 percent of my business is now supported through custom podcast content creation. And I even hesitate to use the word podcast anymore, because for me, podcasting is really a means to creating content -- and not an ends. Just as you and I are having a discussion now on the phone, and I can create a transcript from this in about two or three days, that means this content can be widely distributed through multiple modes or modalities across different distribution networks and partnerships. We can even license it to people to use and create more content.
That’s sort of led me to another concept, which is what I call the content pyramid. And interestingly enough, I’ve stumbled into this, again, in the same fashion that I stumbled into search as an important element here. Because I look at software development and deployment strategies as my main domain area for coverage -- and then I am more of a practitioner of Web 2.0 in terms of how I deliver content -- I’ve noticed over the past five years or so, a more strategic approach to software development.
That is to say, instead of small groups off doing their own thing, creating their applications that run autonomously on a monolithic stack of some kind, that have no real relationship to one another, and that at some point I might have to integrate and/or assimilate that data that they contain and create, there's a new way. The idea is to take a strategic overview, to think about applications from an architectural perspective.
Let’s think about them for their lifecycle, not just how we create them -- but how we might want to use them in the future, or even sunset them, and then what we’re going to do with this pile of data that in many cases is about the same customer or the same product but in a different format in a different application? This approach is just not productive, and it’s expensive.
Companies are spending 70 percent to 80 percent of their IT dollars on just maintenance of these existing applications, and are not doing innovative new things. And so there has been a whole host of things that have happened around, "Hey, let’s create components and let’s use standards and let’s develop around a common framework such as, say, Eclipse," ... and so there’s more of a strategic approach to software.
Ultimately, the goal is a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) where you have lots of different business services that you can then package and mash up and aggregate to create different processes, and then you can tear them apart and build them up again. And it’s more of a use-reuse, common-repository mentality, and not just one-off production.
Whitmore: All right, so let’s see how you pull this off with content.
Gardner: Right. So the idea is to start thinking strategically about your content. Instead of having thousands of people around your company, each creating their own content without much interaction about it, without much coordination about it, but perhaps a lot of overlap and a lack of reuse, adding to more of a case of redundancy. And that goes for everything from mimeographs to RSS feeds, and all in between.
But when you think about content more strategically, and can plan for and create core content that they can be reused and extended across different uses, like marketing literature, the documentation you provide for your services and products, your advertising, as well as your communications with your investors, with analysts, with press -- you create more of a coordinated core set of messages and documents and content. And we'll be seeing more audio and video increasingly in this mix.
If a company can create this content core and allow people to use it and make it accessible -- in the same way as with the development of software tools and components -- you can better control your costs; you can control better your message because more of your messaging will be in synch because its all coming off of the same core. And you can create a lot of this core without having to go through a sixth-month review process, and without taking up your experts’ and your company’s time by forcing them to write 80-page papers.
Maybe this whole notion of the conversation that is prominent in social networking and in Web 2.0 -- of having a series of conversations, capturing it as audio, creating it into text, reusing it across different aspects of your communications, and increasingly, capturing it as video as well -- will allow for a much easier way of gathering knowledge from your experts and users, keeping it on message, and then making that available as a set of core content.
Now, it’s a vision. There is always going to be a lot of need for exceptions, but conceptually starting to think about content strategically to me makes a lot of sense now.
Whitmore: Well, I know that Netflix has somebody in the CCO position, Chief Content Officer, and that they have looked into that as a fundamental principle of communicating to their constituencies, their prospects, their customers, their investors, people like that. So, it is a good idea.
Gardner: It’s really all about content discussion and community. As more and more companies outsource and offshore elements of their production and distribution, and as more business services become available off the wire, what is it that’s really going to define the business of the future? It’s going to be their relationships, and the way that they foster those relationships is through ongoing content-based discussion.
In the next blog we'll discuss how to take this strategic content creation value out to the web, to give the search engines what they crave -- relevant, vetted, oft-linked to and knowledge-rich content.