Building and Nurturing Leads
Develop your lead generation program
Penny Schneck -- Furniture Today, August 7, 2009
What's a lead? A lead is an actionable inquiry from a potential, qualified customer. You may already have a database of leads that is not getting the attention it deserves.
Think about it. If your average cost per new contact is just $75 and you have a modest house database of just 2,000 email addresses, then the database is worth $150,000! What are you doing to grow and nurture these leads?
Here are some tips to help you effectively nurture leads already in your database:
1) Make sure the information you send is of value to the prospect. Special offers and promotions aside, if a lead is not ready to convert to a paying customer the best approach is to ingratiate your firm by regularly reaching out with helpful information that creates a relationship of trust and credibility. Start a regular email program that provides helpful tips and news that shows your company is more than just a vendor, but also a partner in building a relationship of mutual business success.
2) Provide regular communications in short "nuggets". Straightforward how-to's, fast facts and actionable ideas make it easier for the prospect to consume and remember information.
3) Segment your leads into buckets based upon demographics. The more targeted your communications, the more effective you will be at getting his/her attention.
4) Develop communications for each stage in the buying cycle. Buyers go through a 5-stage process before making a purchase. The process goes like this:
a. Trigger: The trigger could be a spontaneous impulse; the need to solve a problem; a lifestyle decision; or simply the routine need to replenish a supply.
b. Considering: The customer thinks about the need that a purchase will satisfy. Samples of this need might be self-expression, self-reward, a gift or self-improvement.
c. Searching: At this stage the prospect collects and evaluates information and suppliers.
d. Choosing: The prospect begins to compare and form preferences for brands.
e. Buying: The prospect makes up his mind what to buy and from whom.
It is critical that you use the right tactic and communicate the best information at each stage of the buying process in order to continue to effectively move prospects through the buying cycle.
Online lead generation is the perfect tactic to use when reaching out to prospects in the considering, searching and choosing stages. Be sure to allocate a portion of your overall online marketing program to collecting new leads so that your sales funnel remains full. This is especially important now, since it takes even longer to close new sales during tough economic times. Don't dismiss leads who are not immediately in the buying stage. Score your leads and place them in the right "bucket" for cultivation. By continually building a database of leads in all stages of the buying process and creating a lead nurturing program, you can feed your sales team a regular list of fresh prospects when they are sales-ready.
Typically, a lead is incentivized by an offer of quality, free information in exchange for contact information. The type of offer you use in your lead generation program will determine the quantity and quality of responses. To initially jumpstart your pipeline, offers that don't require much commitment from your prospect work best. These include white papers, reports, e-newsletter subscriptions, sweepstakes (ideally related to product or service you offer), directory listings, on-demand web casts, and free calculators or other tools.
To target leads closer to the purchasing stage requires greater resources and typically involves some contact from a sales person. To reach leads at this stage means you require a higher level of commitment from the prospect and thus the number of leads will go down. To attract leads closer to the purchase stage use live web casts, online demonstrations, free consultations or audits. Industry publications such as Furniture/Today can partner with you to both develop great content and deliver it to a targeted audience.
Frequently, there is miscommunication between marketing and sales on the definition of a lead. Marketing departments become frustrated when sales does not appear to follow up on leads. Sales teams get frustrated because they feel the leads they receive are a waste of time. Sometimes, sales people feel there is no alternative to manually prospecting and cold calling. Yet these tactics are expensive and time-consuming. A well-run lead generation program requires regular, closed looped communications between marketing and sales. Marketing and Sales must agree on the definition of a sales-ready lead and define the hand-off process. It is marketing's role to nurture the lead and only pass it along to sales at the appropriate time. It is Sales responsibility to promptly contact the leads they receive and provide regular, constructive feedback on each lead's position in the buying cycle.
According to Michael Webb, author of "Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way", there are five steps to properly developing a lead generation program:
1) Develop an offer of information that is attractive to the types of prospect you want to attract;
2) Go where those customers are to make the offer of that information;
3) Fulfill the offer of information in exchange for capturing their contact information;
4) Follow up on the initial offer with another designed to sort the sales-ready individuals from the "I'm just looking" leads;
5) Implement a nurturing program to maintain contact with and to educate and motivate those who are not ready to buy now.
Done well, lead generation and nurturing will lead to more efficient and effective sales.
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