Learn How Lead Nurturing Will Grow Your Business

Wed, Nov 6, 2019 5:00 PM GMT

Your company could be losing leads without even knowing it. Here is how it could be happening and how you can fix it.

Leads are the lifeblood of a company looking to grow and maintain market share. Every lead is an opportunity to gain a new customer and increase revenues. So, the idea of losing a potential customer because of inefficiencies, lack of process or employee neglect is troubling to the CEO or sales manager.

In this blog, we will look at some of the top reasons why leads are lost, and how to make the appropriate improvements.

Companies don’t respond fast enough to leads.

Response time is the number one reason why companies are losing leads and not connecting with new prospects.


The odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes are 100 times higher versus 30 minutes.  

The odds of qualifying that lead in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times. Responding to a lead in 5 minutes, rather than 30 minutes, will increase the likelihood of that lead entering your company's sales process by a factor of 21.

SmartDesk allows for 2 key factors to help companies succeed in this area. One, leads are instantly sent to the designated sales rep, and two, a second person can be notified if the leads are not responded to within a set time.

The average time it takes a company to follow up on a lead is 46 hours and 53 minutes. That is how long it takes to pick up the phone and respond to a lead. And the sales rep who does call only makes 1.3 call attempts before giving up and moving on. Considering 78% of people buy from the first company they speak to, responding quickly to leads should be a top priority.

I will end this point with a scenario to consider. Imagine walking into a car dealer on Monday and asking to speak to a sales rep and they say they will get back to you on Wednesday sometime!

Companies don’t follow up enough times

Persistence is key. Most company sales reps make 1.3 call attempts before giving up and move on to the next lead. By instituting a policy of 8 to 12 attempts , a company can clearly turn around a sluggish sales performance into a top-performing one.

Studies show that 80% of sales are made after the 5th contact with a prospect. However, 25% of sales reps follow up once and never call that prospect again.

Success is a game of numbers. SmartDesk uses marketing automation to nurture prospects to sales.

Understand your web traffic

Lead Nurturing by medium

Your website traffic has a lot of hidden gems if you know where to look. Google analytics is a great application, but it can be overwhelming for the non-techy. SmartDesk has integrated analytics giving you page by page details on where your traffic is coming from. It is important to see your paid traffic vs organic, your top performing social channels and how effective was your last email campaign?

Lead Nurturing by medium

SmartDesk does a great job of showing you the most important information in context of where you are within the system. At a glance from a single dashboard you can see your visitor to leads ratio (marketing efficiency) , leads to sales ratio (sales efficiency) , leads by campaign or leads by pipeline. Having key metrics on the health of your company is very important and can give you the heads up you need to address an issue before if becomes an issue.

Lead Nurturing by medium

Are you segmenting your leads?

Whether you’re marketing an e-commerce site, a B2B company, or a Fortune500 company, traffic segmentation has the potential to transform your lead generation results by a significant amount. Segmentation allows you to deliver the right experience to the right person at the right time.

The mistake a lot of companies make is directing all their prospects to a contact page to fill out a generic contact form. There are so many missed opportunities by doing it that way. Ideally, you want to segment your leads by opportunity and then direct them to the proper salesperson or team. By creating a lead form on each of your webpages will allow you to better engage, qualify and respond to the lead. Let me use an example to illustrate this point.

A music shop offers piano and guitar lessons on their website. If all the pages direct the visitor to the contact page and the visitor fills out the form, then the message they get will be something like “Thank you for your interest in our music lessons, we will follow up with you shortly”.

Lead Nurturing by medium

The better way would be to have a form on the page that talks about piano lessons. This gives you an opportunity to engage the visitor with a strong call to action regarding piano lessons. The lead comes in as a piano lead and can be directed to the piano teacher directly. By segmenting the leads in this way, the visitor can be put in a nurturing campaign and be delivered piano related content and calls to action within the email.

Use Marketing Automation tools

You will need sales and marketing technology to put your process in place and get it running. As part of your alignment process, your teams need to agree on tools they will commit to using every day to capture and manage leads and customers. The best solutions are easy to use and incorporate every aspect of inbound marketing, including:

Website content management system

Content creation and promotion (blogs, social media)

Lead conversion (landing pages, forms and calls-to-action)

Lead nurturing (drip campaigns, personalized content)

Marketing automation (email marketing, list segmentation, lead scoring, lead management workflows)

CRM integration (seamless, bi-directional transfer of lead data, KPIs and communications)

Nurture your leads

Did you know that 79 percent of marketing leads never convert into sales and that a lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance?

Lead Nurturing by medium

This is where marketing automation really makes a difference to the process of generating high quality, interested and qualified leads.

When you first get a lead from your marketing activities, you want to either manually move them to an appropriate stage and let the automation work its magic. Another option would be to have the marketing automation automatically move to different stages based on the user’s engagement.

These days buyers are self-educating, they will research the information they need to make a purchase. The more highly involved you are with their research the better chance you stand of closing the sale.

Marketing automation campaigns help you to educate leads over a period of time with clearly defined content. Making those leads sales-ready.

Next Steps

If you haven’t automated your lead nurturing process there’s every chance your sales team is interacting with leads that aren’t sales ready, while irritating potential customers with irrelevant content and untimely calls.

Automated nurturing gently leads your targets through the sales funnel, breaking down barriers to sales with timely, appropriate content. The result? Your sales team spends far more time on sales-ready leads, supercharging your sales cycle.

Request a demo of SmartDeskCRM to see how it can help increase your leads, sales and conversions!

SmartDesk Marketing Automation funnel
SmartDesk Marketing Automation funnel
Craig Poulton , VP Sales & Marketing
SmartDeskCRM Inc.
 
SmartDesk is a new and exciting multi channel marketing hub for small to medium sized businesses looking to improve marketing efficiencies across the board.

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