Inbound Lead Nurturing (IMU)

by jbreazeale on June 26, 2009

Inbound Marketing UniversityProfessor: Brian Carroll, MECLABS, InTouch

Your lead generation efforts have really paid off and you have a full database of people just waiting to hear from you, but maybe not buy from you, not yet. What do you do next? Continue blasting them with email and phone calls?  Or,  maybe you’re ignoring them altogether? Brian Carrol from InTouch gave us another idea during his IMU presentation – you should nurture those leads through your pipeline.

Brian’s definition:

Lead nurturing is a relevant and consistent dialog with viable, potential customers, regardless of their timing to buy.

Much of the information included in Brian’s presentation would be helpful to anyone looking to better understand sales processes in general and he provides some very colorful mind-maps that would be useful when brainstorming some of these lead generation and nurturing activities.

Some of my key takeaways were:

  • Lead nurturing can take a significant amount of resources (time, money, people). And, if you’re in a larger company, don’t discount the internal battles between sales and marketing that you’ll have to negotiate if you want to put one of these plans into action.  (Who owns lead generation? Who owns lead nuturing? When do the leads pass from the nurturing team to the sales rep? How do we know that the sales rep is following up? Etc…)
  • Don’t underestimate the power of the human touch. Although email and other online tools can be helpful, when it comes right down to it, you’re trying to build deep relationships with selected leads, not lots of shallow relationships with every lead. Building those deeper relationships requires more consistent and meaningful contact.
  • Spend enough time at the beginning to clarify who your ideal customer is, how you’ll be able to identify and qualify them, how they’ll be scored and prioritized as they move through the pipeline, and how you’ll nurture them in a way that’ s meaningful to them (e.g. CIOs typically like to have printable reports, so don’t just send them webinar invites).
  • Keep building your lead nurturing library of articles, reference guides, white papers, podcasts, etc. that may be of use to your leads. Not only does this help position your team as a trusted advisor, but it also gives you the opportunity to provide value in the form of meaningful and relevant data to your lead instead of just another sales pitch.
  • Consider building custom lead nurturing “tracks”. For example, a CEO lead may get “targeted email #1″ in Q1, followed up with a phone call in Q2, and a personalized invitation to an executive briefing in Q3.  If you can match these to your lead’s business cycle, even better.
  • At a minimum, you should probably contact your leads on a monthly basis (with  meaningful and relevant content, of course!)

Here’s Brian’s presentation:

#8 IMU: Inbound Lead Nurturing (CV201)

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hippie and hardcore

by jbreazeale on March 5, 2009

A yellow rubber duck.

Image via Wikipedia

I attended this fun and wacky business call with Havi (the hippie one) and Naomi (the hardcore, swearing one) yesterday and thought I’d jot down some of the bits that caught my attention…

Success doesn’t mean you’re done

Havi and Naomi have built successful1 businesses, but that doesn’t mean they’ve done everything perfectly or that they’ve done all that could be done to make their business successful. In fact, they both started the call by listing a variety of pretty important and basic business stuff they should be doing.  Like:

  • Having a friendly and helpful contact page. Make it easy for people to get in touch.2
  • Having a organized shopping cart. What if someone wants to buy all of your products at once – can they? Can they even see all of your products in one place?
  • Managing the sales funnel. Provide (non-pushy) opportunities for people to buy more or similar products from you. You know, “If you like ABC, you might also like DEF…”

Remember, spend time on the big issues but don’t forget to regularly go back and revisit some of these basics for your business and your website. Get some fresh eyes looking at these issues and you’ll probably be surprised at what you find.

Be kind and helpful

You might be surprised about how many people are just waiting to help you and your business — don’t piss them off. The blogger you just sent an obnoxious email to may have been in the middle of writing a glowing article about your product  — are they still going to post it after receiving your message? Hmm…  On the flip side, what are you doing to help other businesses? Are you writing those glowing reviews or recommending products to your friends or other businesses? We’re all in it together, people. Step it up!

Don’t forget being kind and helpful to yourself, either. If you “hate” sales, go out there and read some books about it and you just might learn that you don’t hate sales – maybe you just hate the high pressure, guilt driven, shadily manipulative sales that you’ve experienced in the past. Same goes for “marketing,” just check out one of Havi’s articles on that topic – she’s way funnier than me! Everyone has parts of their business that are tougher for them than others, so be patient with yourself when addressing these, but *do* address them.

Also, give yourself permission to spend time doing the things you need to do, regardless of what others may say. Feel free to refer to your staff of consultants (real or imaginary, paid or unpaid, doesn’t really matter.) For example, “My marketing consultants advised me to spend at least 30 minutes a day monitoring and participating on Twitter and Facebook to build my business.”3 Ok, this was actually one of my favorites and I’ve can’t wait to find out what my “consultants” suggest that I do next…

Think about the opportunity chain versus the opportunity cost

Example: Someone’s browsing around on your website, she’s a new (or relatively new) customer and she wants to buy your product, but {insert tragic technical/personal/act of God event here} happens and she can’t complete the sale. Will she come back and buy later? Maybe, but she’s going to have to make a significant effort to do so. What can you do to make it easier or more desireable for her to come back? Do you have a way for her to “hang out” with your business? A blog or newsletter or some way that you can contact her  (in a non-spammy way) in the future? The lost sale cost you $50, but the lost opportunity of connecting with your customer was priceless.

Other random thoughts and quick tips

Don’t homogenize. Be your wonderfully unique *you* – the world’s a big place, you’ll find your audience. Besides, who wants to work with a “life coach” when you could work with a “habits educator (+ duck!).”

Answer the (obvious?) questions people are asking. For example, if you’re an acupunturist and the top Google questions about acupuncture are “Do I have to get naked?” and “Does it hurt?”, then maybe you should be answering those questions.

Make it simple. Keep it simple. Everytime you add a new choice for your customers, you decrease their likelihood of choosing anything.4

Sell the relationship, not the product. Example: You’re promoting a workshop at your local community college. Instead of pointing people to a static page about the class, direct them to an article (or send them an article) with the opportunity to “subscribe to more like this.” You can start a relationship and expand your audience.  I may not be interested in class XYZ, but I might be willing to receive your newsletter and when you offer class VWX in the spring, I might be the first one to sign up.

Notes

1. I don’t know details, but they seem to be supporting themselves by running businesses that help others and are fun and interesting to run. Pretty good definition of success, I think.

2. A specific example was Amazon.com not having a phone number on their website to contact their customer support. And, while I agree with the premise that you should have an easy way for people to contact you, you should also emphasize contact in the way that’s most effective for you. I would hate to have people calling me directly – I hardly answer the phone anyway, so you’d probably just go to voicemail – but I can answer emails all day long, so having a big “contact me” phone number might not be the best option.

3. A statistic from Naomi — the ratio of “marketing” to “doing” your business should be 4 to 1. So, just refer to all of those hours on Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. as *important business marketing* efforts. Ok?

4. Check out the Getting Real book from 37signals for lots more on this idea.

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