Inbound marketing focuses on enforcing the relationship between a company and its leads -potential customers- so that when they come to the buying decision, they choose it.
According to DemandGen report in 2014, 67% of marketers see an increase of 10% to 30% in sales opportunities through lead nurturing. Lead generation helps you enforce your relationship with your leads so that you guide them through every stage along their buyer’s journey.
The same report shows that emails in a lead nurturing series get a 4 to 10 times more open rate than stand-alone emails.
Your CRM is a crucial pillar to improve your lead nurturing strategy. You cannot nurture your leads unless you have a clear visibility of your sales pipeline. Having a clear record of your communication with your leads and customers will help you better nurture them. It will also enable you to coordinate your marketing and sales programs, according to your contacts interactions with you and the state of each in the sales cycle.
Not all your prospects have the same needs, even those who do are not at the same stage of their buyer’s journey, so, you need to map your content to the stage of each of them in the sales cycle. Create new content and curate your existing one to provide your leads with the content that best suits their needs and helps them overcome the challenges they face.
After freshening up your content, start nurturing your leads using the convenient channel for them.
According to the Marketing Lead Management Report of Aberdeen Group, prospects pay attention only to one third of the touch points you send. But be cautious not to invade your prospect’s inbox with emails so that they end up reporting you as spam or unsubscribing from your contact list.
If you know the preferred modality for your buyer persona whether visual, auditory or kinesthetic, then create the content that would attract and impress them.
A study published by Harvard Business Review of the short life of online sales leads found that the average response time to inquiries was 42 hours.
The study also found that the 5-minute response creates 21-times higher rate of qualification than 30-minute response; which means, you have to hire highly qualified employees to create a keep-in-touch process with your leads and your customers, especially, if you provide highly priced solutions.
Lead scoring is an activity or a methodology that you use to give a score or to determine the value of interest of your leads into your product or service based on their interaction with you as well as their impact on the decision making process.
Companies using lead scoring assign point-based systems to qualify leads or refer to them as “hot,” “warm” or “cold”, based on their history of interactions.
To score a lead including occupation and role in the industry information, as well as interactions with you are gathered in order to determine whether they’re appropriate to sell or not. This will also enable you to determine how you’ll nurture such a lead and what exactly you’ll be sending.
To make it easier for marketing and sales teams, marketing automation software includes built-in lead scoring features.
Bringing It All Together...
Long story short, the B2B client acquisition seems to be hostile to sellers who use old-fashioned client acquisition methods -outbound selling. Today, to have an outstanding sales performance in B2B, you should adopt some up-to date inbound activities like the ones mentioned above.