Turning Your Sales Process Into A Lead Nurturing Machine
Marketing Is The First Spark
In order to start generating the leads your business needs, you have to build up interest and visibility before your salespeople make any contact at all. A strategic marketing plan not only needs to build awareness and grab attention, but it also has to match your business goals. In this case, content marketing, paid ads, social media, SEO, and creating educational content can all build interest and demonstrate the value of your business to those who are more likely to become leads further down the line. You want your potential clients to identify their own needs and where your services can match up with them. Basically, you’re taking a cold audience and warming them up so that, when your sales team engages, they already understand what you’re offering, making it easier to sell them on the benefits.
Start Sourcing Quality Leads
Finding your methods of gaining leads is just as important as anything else. You want qualified, valuable leads that will be worth your team’s time to follow up on. Having lead capture methods natively built in your business, such as sign-up forms for your website or newsletter, is where your most promising prospects lie. Outside of that, however, you want effective outbound lead prospecting tools, too. This can include buying lead lists or using industry-specific generation tools, such as an app for dumpster rental leads if you’re running a waste management business. Relevance is the key here, not just volume. You want leads that fit your ideal customer profile.
Manage Customer Relationships With Care
Your sales team is going to do much of the work of nurturing your leads, developing a relationship where they understand their needs and are able to effectively target their pain points. That can be a lot easier with the help of the right customer relationship management tool. These are able to track every interaction, record your communication history, and tailor follow-ups for every lead and client. By automating your workflows, setting reminders, and segmenting customers based on their place in the life cycle or sales funnel, you can make sure that you’re hitting every prospect when the time is right. It can also provide vital insights into which parts of your sales process are currently working.
Make Personalization The Core Of Your Process
As soon as you start reaching out to your prospective clients, you need to show that you’re able to treat them as individuals, rather than as just another customer. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses don’t take personalisation much further than simply learning a name. Instead, you should be tailoring every part of the funnel, whether it’s making content that’s more specific to certain segments of your audience, or making bespoke offers to those who are more likely to need one type of service than another. This step is all about gathering and using data, based on discovery calls, website behavior, email engagement, and the notes from your CRM profiles for each client.
Ensure Every Touchpoint Delivers Data
Whether it’s a pop-up on your website, an email, a phone call, or anything else, you should never reach out to your potential clients and customers with nothing to offer them. If you’re just getting in touch with them to ask them if they want to convert, then they can feel like they’re being pestered very quickly. Instead, deliver value to them, whether it’s providing insights and education on the industry, sharing best practices, answering common questions, or just highlighting features of your service that can make their job easier. When you’re always leading with value first, then they can start to look at your team as advisors and partners in the industry, rather than just salespeople.
Know When To Follow Up And When To Close
When your lead is signalling that they’re interested in your services, but aren’t yet ready to commit, be sure to follow up with the prospect down the line, be it with more information on what you discussed or a call-to-action. However, if they mention that they’re interested in buying your products or services, that’s when you move to close. Be ready to handle any objections they might have or points of concern that they might want to raise, with actionable steps that can help you get closer to selling. This might mean negotiating with them, or it might mean preparing a slightly altered pricing or service plan to meet them where they’re at. If your team has some wiggle room to play with, it can be important to tell them that.
Retention And Upselling Are Just As Important
Most businesses that rely on a thorough sales process tend to work with clients and customers over the long term, rather than just on a single purchase. To that end, your sales process shouldn’t end with conversion; it should extend into retention. Your existing customers need ongoing nurturing just as much as new ones, but often they don’t take quite as much work. This can include onboarding processes to help them make the best use of your offerings, check-ins to make sure they’re satisfied, as well as loyalty incentives to keep them coming back. As your relationship deepens, you may learn of further needs and pain points that you can pivot around to upsell them on other products and services you offer.
With the tips above, you should at least be aware of what it takes to create a full sales process within your business. It can take time and effort to run, which might necessitate more expense, but it can be worth it if you can actually generate the sales necessary to grow your business to the next level.