Times Have Changed – So Should Your Lead Follow-Up Strategy

While there are many iconic scenes from the classic movie, “Glengarry Glen Ross”, perhaps one of the most memorable is the scene with Jack Lemmon’s character, the salesman Shelley "The Machine" Levene. In the scene, he desperately implores his manager to give him the “premium leads” so he can get his sales numbers up. As he’s pleading, Lemmon clutches a handful of paper lead slips, using them to gesture while complaining about their poor quality, before finally shoving them into his coat pocket in frustration.

If this scene were to be recreated in today’s marketing and sales landscape, Lemmon would no longer be holding a handful of names and phone numbers on paper but instead would more likely be gesturing to names in a laptop, phone, or tablet. But what is so interesting about this, it that while many of us have updated our method for capturing and storing lead information since this film’s release nearly 30 years ago, our lead follow-up strategy still has room to evolve to match the times. 

Leads are not static, they are dynamic. They are not simply names inked on paper, but people with ever changing needs and desires. Yet, so many of today’s businesses employ marketing that relies on sending single mass broadcast messages based on minimal and often outdated information instead of the lead’s individual needs. To really influence someone and have an impact on their purchasing behavior, you must monitor their needs continually and build a communication strategy that meets them as they change.

But how do you do this? With lead nurturing.

What is Lead Nurturing

According to Pardot (a leading marketing automation software producer), “Lead nurturing is the automated process of sending personalized and relevant content to prospects and customers at every stage of their buying journeys.”¹ HubSpot (another leader in the marketing software space) gives a slightly different explanation, focusing more on the importance of forming connections: “Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with your prospects with the goal of earning their business when they're ready. Lead nurturing is important to inbound marketing because it’s your opportunity to provide value to your leads and customers and help them grow with your business.”²

Both of these definitions are correct, but combined, they can help us to form an even more complete understanding of the lead nurturing process and what it takes to do it successfully. So we’re going to take a deeper look at a couple key components from each - let’s dive in!

Personalization and Automation

To send the right messages at the right time, you need to know your audience. The more information you have about them, including demographic and behavioral data, the clearer your understanding of their needs and interests. Once you know your audience, you can then tailor your messaging so that it’s truly personal, meaning that it is not only addressed to them, but more importantly, gives them the exact information they’re looking for to progress them on their buying journey. You can also more accurately predict when that messaging will be most impactful and schedule it accordingly. 

In order to gather all of this information and use it most efficiently, it is helpful to implement marketing automation software like HubSpot, Marketo, or Pardot that helps you manage marketing information. For optimal results, combine your automation platform with a CRM. While you can still send relevant messages to your audience without such tools, it is much more difficult, manual, time consuming, and typically less effective. Marketing automation tools allow you to schedule messaging based on certain criteria, such as email clicks, page visits, and form submissions, enabling you to run the program automatically when people meet the designated criteria.

For the purpose of illustration, let’s assume you use HubSpot to do your marketing automation platform and as your CRM to manage your prospect and customer information. You log in for the day and are able to view a report of all the prospects in your system that clicked on the last email you sent. Looking at these behaviors, you can assume a few different things about these prospects: 1) that they have at least a moderate level of interest (enough to click through on your email) and 2) you can glean information about which product they are interested in based upon their engagement behavior.

With this information, you now have part of what you need to develop and automate a highly targeted lead nurturing campaign – this is that important concept we talked about before, the ability to deliver your message at the right time. Since they clicked on your email, you know they are currently engaging in their research process. But the correct timing alone is not enough - you also need the correct messaging. This is where the ability to provide value and the importance of building relationships come into play.

Providing Value and Building Relationships

Going along with our example above, you already have an idea of the type of information your prospects are seeking. Because they visited a specific product page on your website, you can assume they would like to know more about that product. The moment of decision, should you just send them an email with the features and benefits of that product and call it a day? While this information may be enough to convert one or two leads, it will not be enough to move the majority of your audience to action. You need more than features and benefits – you need good content that provides value.

The term “content”, as it is used here, can include many things, such as webinars, blog posts, eBooks, instructional videos, infographics, tip lists, and more. The type of content is definitely important, but what is even more important is making sure the content itself is relevant to your audience. While your content should include information on your products (specifically the product from your email that you know this particular audience is interested in), it should contain a lot more than that. This is a big part of how you provide value and start to build a relationship – by educating people about a topic in general, not just about what you are selling.

Remember, the goal here is not one or two sales, but many sales – even if some of them are a longer play. By focusing less on forcing an immediate transaction, and more on fostering a relationship, you are investing in your future success, so that even if your audience is not ready to buy from you yet, they will remember you when they are.

Now, back to our example. Let’s say your business sells specialty surgical instruments to veterinarians. This means that you want to create content that contains information relevant to that industry and that also highlights your product in some way. Here are 3 examples:

1. A downloadable purchasing checklist for surgical instruments

2. A free, educational webinar about current surgical techniques

3. A blog post that talks about “3 Common Mistakes Veterinarians Make When Purchasing Surgical Instruments”

Each of the pieces of content above provides value to your audience by educating them on topic that are important to them (for free!), and to you by educating people about your product(s).

Putting it All Together

Now you are now ready to send the right message at the right time! Using HubSpot, you can set up a lead nurturing campaign to the people from the email click report, and automate a series of emails, each containing a link to one of the great pieces of content you created, and voila! You are now actively nurturing your leads.                                          

If you want to create great content and build lead nurturing campaigns that convert, but don’t know where to start, we can help. From getting you set up in your own marketing automation and CRM system, to building content tailored to your audience, Red Brick Partners will provide you with the infrastructure needed to support your lead-nurturing success.

Schedule your free consultation here and find out what Red Brick Partners can do for you.

References:

1.     “What is Lead Nurturing?” SalesForce Pardot, https://www.pardot.com/what-is-lead-nurturing/

2.    “Understanding Lead Nurturing.” Hubspot Academy, Hubspot, Inc., https://academy.hubspot.com/lessons/understanding-lead-nurturing