Why lead nurturing is vital to your success

One of the biggest mistakes we see in struggling businesses is a focus on lead generation over lead nurturing. Lead generation is finding new potential clients and getting them interested in your company, while lead nurturing is using a series of milestones to convert those leads into paying clients. Both processes are vital, but if you throw all your efforts into finding new clients and none into talking to them and cultivating trust, you won’t have much to show for your efforts.

Lead nurturing: The Stats

Don’t take our word for it – look at how lead nurturing performs in the real world.

According to Invespcro, 80% of your new leads never translate into sales. If you’re only conducting lead generation, you’re putting in a significant amount of effort into hundreds of leads that were never going to become customers.

Companies who operate a lead nurturing strategy generate 50% more sales ready leads, at a 33% lower cost. That’s a huge savings for you not just in cost, but in effort as well.

What’s more, the leads you nurture becoming more valuable customers. On average, nurtured leads make purchases that are 47% larger than those that haven’t gone through a sales process.

Lead nurturing: Tactics

Your lead nurturing process will depend on the type of product or service you offer, and the buyer journey of your clients/customers. To create your own nurturing process, you’ll need to consider:

The buyer journey
This is the stages a lead needs to go through in order to make a decision to buy. It usually involves obtaining more information, validating the product/service is a good fit, having their fears assuaged, completing an onboarding process, undergoing a credit check, etc. Survey current and past customers and view research from your industry to figure out your buyer journey.

Your resources
What do you have available to dedicate to lead nurturing? Consolidate your human resources, available software, budget, and skills on your team for creating content like whitepapers and emails.

Common lead nurturing techniques include:

• Building a sales funnel: This involves taking the information you learned from your surveys and research and creating a diagram of the steps you’ll perform and the content you’ll send out in order to nurture the lead through each stage of your sales process.

• Sales calls: A call from a sales person adds that personal touch and also enables you to qualify leads and ask important questions.

• Segmenting leads: As leads fill out forms and answer sales questions, you can gather information about them that enables you to pull out the leads who are most likely to convert based on your research, and give them extra attention/focus.

• Offering content: This content can be sent out via email on an automated schedule, and may address common fears, as well as providing details of what to do next.

• Onboarding: You’ll need to gather specific information from your lead in order to start them as a client. Make onboarding and credit checks as easy and painless as possible through automated emails, forms, and online tools like 1Centre.

What does your lead nurturing process look like? What improvements can you make to improve your costs and increase your results?