No More Aged Leads: Nurturing Your Leads Forever

Generating online leads is hard and expensive.

Generating high quality online leads is even harder and even more expensive.

Converting those leads into sales and revenue is the hardest and most expensive.

Given all of that effort and expense it, seems irresponsible to let the majority of leads go to waste, neglecting the customers and the investment.

In this book, you'll learn to build lead nurturing systems. Systems that will prevent your leads from being neglected into the arms of your competitors.

[story]

Several years ago a good friend of mine called me and asked to meet for lunch.

In a little Thai restaurant, over an unexpectedly spicy Chicken Pad Thai, he confided in me that his investors were about to pull the plug. After nearly three years, laboring and building his technology-driven platform startup the runway was being dramatically shorten. His investors were telling him to register a profitable month imminently or he would have to fold up shop.

That started a series of questions, an audit to figure out what we had to work with. How to generate immediate revenue.

Thousands of emails.

First send $25,000 in revenue. Quickly growing to $300,000 per month.

44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up. (Scripted)

The average sales person only makes 2 attempts to reach a prospect. (Sirius Decisions)

63% of people requesting information on your company today will not purchase for at least three months and 20% will take more than 12 months to buy. (Marketing Donut)

50% of leads are qualified but not ready to buy. (Gleanster Research)

70% of the buyer's journey is complete before the customer reaches out to sales. (Sirius Decisions)

Methodology for researching and optimizing your nurturing to the customer’s buying process, not necessarily just to your sales process

Awareness

Consideration

Decision

Navigational

Informational

Transactional

What does your user need to know and understand to get the value proposition of your product or service?

What motivates your customer to buy?

It's rarely purely rational. It's often largely emotional. There is often someone else involved.

It's essential to create interest. But, it's also important to know that interest is a long way from saying, "yes." This is why the average cart abandonment rate is over 70% and on the phone (where more and more of your web visitors are experiencing your website), jumps to over 80%.

Now, for the fascinating part. The the data shows, definitively, that this doesn't mean they aren't interested in buying. If you nurture those leads, 45% open the cart abandonment emails, 21% of those get click throughs back to the cart, and over 18% of those clicks convert into sales. That kind of math can quickly explode your ROI on any lead generation program.

I use this e-commerce data to make my point for a couple of important reasons.

All of that is to make my point that a show of interest is simply the start of a journey that you have to diligently follow up on to help the customer complete.

Sales people rarely burn out from talking to too many customers. They burn out from repetitive, seemingly unproductive, sales tasks. At any given time, only 3% of your market is actively buying, 56% are not ready, and 40% are poised to begin (Vorsight). That means hundreds of unanswered calls, as many repetitive voicemail messages, email after clever email trying to coax any kind of response, and endless requests to "send me something."

Data shows us that all of those things do bring more sales, at less cost. Companies that nurture leads make 50% more sales at a cost 33% less than nonnurtured leads (Forrester Research). But, no human can endure that drudgery. Definitely, no high quality sales professional will put up with that mind-numbing monotony.

This is where sales and marketing automation comes in.

How to use drip email campaigns, text messaging, and content marketing to create sequences that keep your leads engaged and aware of your business and products allowing them to convert on their timeline

Review actual campaigns for mortgage, insurance, and solar leads

Mortgage customers, even seasoned ones, often come into the process confused or misinformed. It's a huge investment and commitment and the process still often seems clumsy and haphazard to customers.

[Data]

The process of preparing to buy a home often begins at least six months in advance.

10 weeks and 10 home viewings

Insurance customers typically are triggered by concern, maybe even fear, and forced compliance. Making them feel smart and wise about their choices is often the secret to up-sells, cross-sells, and the holy grail bundling.

[Data]

Solar installations are compelling for many homeowners and most markets. But, you do need to run the numbers. And, numbers can be hard for some consumers to understand. This is where good lead nurturing can move your sale forward with education.

Solar prospects are the researching type. A content campaign is going to be a sure fire winner with these prospects.