As a marketer, you definitely want to capture as much lead information for as many people on your site as you can, but not everyone is ready to talk to sales. Follow these three steps to create a lead nurturing campaign that will help send early-stage leads further down the marketing sales funnel and give your sales team more qualified leads.
Step 1: Define What Makes Someone Sales-Ready
Getting leads is awesome – but not all leads are at the point where they can be considered sales-ready. Depending on whose research you read, only 5% – 25% of the traffic on your site is actually ready to do businesses with you at that moment, the rest are doing research.
Before you set the goal of your lead nurturing campaign, you should decide what actions make a lead sales-ready. For example, if someone downloads a white paper, they could just be doing research an may not be ready to speak with a sales rep – send them to lead nurturing campaign. If that person comes back and requests a demo, that’s a much better indication that they are ready to buy – send them to a rep.
Step 2: Create Relevant Introductory and Late-Stage Offers
Now that you’ve decided what makes a person sales-ready, you can create recommended offers by looking at all of the offers on your website as either introductory offers or late-stage offers.
An introductory offer is something that will is widely applicable and has a high lead conversion rate, but probably doesn’t imply that someone is sales-ready.
A late-stage offer is something that will probably generate less interest but indicates that someone is farther down the sales funnel and is ready to talk to sales.
In our case, our inbound marketing kit is an outstanding early stage offer; it has great value for our visitors, it has a killer visit-to-lead conversion rate, and it indicates that a prospect is interested in what we have to offer. This is a great tool to convert early-stage leads but not a strong sales-readiness indicator.
Step 3: Use Lead Nurturing Emails with Strong Call-to-Actions to Separate Early-Stage Leads from Sales-Ready Leads
Using a lead nurturing campaign, we can send a series of automated emails to leads who have downloaded our inbound marketing kit. Each of these emails will contain useful, related content that our leads can use and also calls to action that drives them to our later stage offers like requesting a demo, or starting a free trial.
Now, when an inbound marketing kit leads reconverts on a late-stage offer, like requesting a demo, we can send them to a sales team member knowing that they will be ready to speak with one.
Using a lead nurturing strategy effectively will allow your organization to spend more time with a smaller group of leads who have a significantly higher chance of converting to customers.
Learn about sales techniques here.
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About the author:
Andy Pitre
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewpitre/
Andy is a VP of Product, Customer Data at HubSpot. Andy is always looking for talented product people at HubSpot and if you’re interested in our mission of helping millions of organizations grow better, please reach out to him.
