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Do you manage lead relationships?
We don’t normally think about managing prospect and lead relationships since we tend to assume that prospects and leads who drop away were not interested. After all, if they had been interested, they would have stayed, right?
But if we manage customer experiences in order to retain customers and expand our relationships with them – and they’ve already bought from us – shouldn’t the same logic apply to leads and prospects? What if we approached lead experiences in terms of retaining leads and expanding our relationships with them – so they will buy from us? Could we increase the number of leads closed and cut the number lost to competitors?
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5 Answers
Prugh,
You asked, "Do I manage lead relationships?"
If you're picking fruit off a vine, will you throw away the fruit that's not ripe, or will you keep it on the vine and continue to care for it until it ripens?
My short answer is, "Absolutely!"
The process of managing/establishing a relationship with a Lead (that's not ready to buy now) is called Lead Nurturing.
Lead Nurturing is a process of delivering progressively relevant messages to the Lead, to educate them over time on your solutions, while building a relationship and establishing trust.
Nurturing works like this:
You send an automated email to the Lead this month.
Based on how they respond (or not), you send a different message next month. You continue the process like you would a conversation - based on the response from the Lead, you deliver another message.
As the Lead continues to engage with you at a deeper level over time, they'll eventually be ready to buy. At that point, you will have established a high level of trust and familiarity, and will likely become the preferred vendor.
But this can only happen if you invest the resources to nurture - or, build relationships with - your Leads.
Of course, no sales rep has the time or inclination to manage this nurturing process on their own, which is why many marketing organizations will use an automated nurturing solution.
Good Luck, Prugh.
Prugh:
The answer to your questions is do you? The answer for every company should be yes and this is the very essence of the Lead Management Process which goes far beyond lead scoring and lead nurturing.
Numerous studies have indicated that 70-80% of first time contacts are not in ready to buy mode, however they will buy eventually, so it is in the best interests of any organization to develop the proper internal processes to manage them appropriately as each one is a potential source of revenue.
In addition, organizations that do not manage these contacts/leads the right way are actually losing money as they have already paid good money to get their information in the first place. Think about a company who has spent $50 per contact/lead on a campaign that returned 1,000 leads. If these are not managed appropriately through a defined Lead Management Process, then the losses stack up rather quickly and you run a negative ROI.
I agree with Jim that you must build relationships with your leads, but this will not be done unless a process has been developed, implemented and adopted by marketing & sales.
Carlos Hidalgo
The Annuitas Group
@cahidalgo
Prugh,
Just wondering who "we" is when you speak of "We don't usually think of managing prospects and leads".
It's a great discussion question though because if you only work with folks who clamor to buy from you after your first contact, you're walking away from a lot of business.
My company tag line is "Acquire - Develop - Close". While there are obviously a plethora of processes, skills and activities in each of those three components, all three must be done in order grow your client base.
Hi Everybody,
Thanks for your responses.
I asked this question to try to get at why more companies don’t address the quality of the experiences they offer to leads. An overarching – and agreed-upon – lead management process is absolutely necessary, but it seems that many of those in place don’t address this issue.
As Carlos points out, “Numerous studies have indicated that 70-80% of first time contacts are not in ready to buy mode, however they will buy eventually, so it is in the best interests of any organization to develop the proper internal processes to manage them appropriately as each one is a potential source of revenue.” As such, it’s all the more important to make the quality of lead experiences all it can be. Yet many companies treat first-time contacts as raw inquiries to be sifted through to find the good ones, while relegating the rest to low- or no-priority status.
As Jim describes, marketing automation tools make it much more feasible to provide individualized experiences to early-stage contacts, and build meaningful relationships. Yet these MA tools are often used to whittle down the first-time contact universe before beginning the relationship-building. Perhaps it’s a carryover from the old way of pre-qualifying leads?
Excellent question Prugh.
Lead Generation concentrates on the prospects who do qualify. But it ignores the others.Who are you ignoring?
There is a classic push marketing mindset behind this which I call lottery marketing - send out to enough people and one will be bound to buy - you can forget the rest.
But in a social media world that's dangerous. And it doesn't help you improve.
Why didn't they buy?
Is it because you failed to establish value?
Because you didn't show adequate ROI?
or that you were beaten by a competitor?
Or is it that they should never have been in your pipeline in the first place - you attracted them using deceptive or catch-all techniques (after all, you use open and click through as key metrics you need to maximise)?
Or that you were talking to the wrong person - someone who hadn't the authority to carry the project through. Perhaps you failed to give them the help they needed to promote the idea effectively internally.
Or that you turned them away through inappropriate marketing - too much, not relevant, or downright wrong for them? It can be a fine line between helpful and pushy.
I used to work closely with a sales team who worked hard to find out why they lost business - and we doubled our win rate by learning the lessons our failed customers were only too happy to tell us (once we'd got -past the politeness barrier)
Sirius stats say that 70% of the people who don't buy from you do buy from a competitor within two years. That's a lot of business to leaving lying on the table for someone else to pick up.
And a lot of people tweeting, blogging and promoting against you.
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