This is the Best Lead Nurturing Strategy to Move People Down Your Funnel

This is the Best Lead Nurturing Strategy to Move People Down Your Funnel For several quarters, your organization has been excelling at almost every metric  and you’ve been generating tons of leads. The only problem is that you haven’t been seeing the kind of revenue that even comes close to the number of leads you’ve generated. While there could be a number of reasons behind this, it typically stems from improper lead nurturing or the lack of it. It’s not enough to just generate leads because those leads do not automatically translate to revenue. For that, you need them to convert. And to convert them, you need to nurture them so that they follow the conversion path in your sales funnel  and  eventually result in a sale. That’s where a lot of organizations get stuck and what this post addresses. Lead Nurturing Templates to Get Your Sales Funnel Right Before learning how to troubleshoot your lead nurturing activities, check out these templates. This download includes: A content audit guide to help identify your content deficits. A content mapping template to map your content to each funnel stage. A 2019 content calendar to get your year planned out. A user persona worksheet to help you target the right people.What is Lead Nurturing and Why is it Necessary? Lead nurturing refers to the process of building and nurturing your relationships with potential customers throughout the buyer’s journey. The goal is to guide them through different stages of your sales funnel and eventually get them to convert. Which means you need to provide them with relevant assistance, information, content, and offers depending on where they are in the funnel. This is important because 80% of new leads  will never result in a sale. But nurtured leads are 50% more sales-ready. In other words, nurturing your leads will improve your chances of converting them. And an increase in conversions can increase your revenue. It’s easy to nurture your leads, in theory. But in practice, a lot of organizations struggle with their lead nurturing efforts. In fact, 86% of B2B marketers in a DemandGen survey  rated their lead nurturing initiatives as only average or below. This isn’t too shocking considering how 80% of respondents have found it challenging to generate responses with their lead nurturing programs. Image Source: DemandGen It’s important to note that these aren’t just startup business owners or marketers who are struggling. Clearly, lead nurturing isn’t something that you can easily master, even if you’ve run a business for years. There’s always room to keep learning because the B2B landscape keeps evolving with new technology. There are also frequent changes in buyer behaviors and preferences. So you need to brush up your knowledge every now and then to learn some of the best ways to nurture leads and increase conversions. Beginners, on the other hand, will have to learn from scratch.   Recommended Reading: The 4 Simple Stages of an Engaging Email Funnel Strategy Steps to Nurture Your Leads for Sales There are tons of ways to nurture leads, but you can’t attempt all of them in one go or you’ll get overwhelmed and end up failing. You need to start slowly – from the basics and the most effective tactics. So check out the following essential steps and advanced tactics to nurture your leads for sales: #1: Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams A misalignment between your sales and marketing teams could be the main reason you’re falling behind in your lead nurturing efforts. When there’s collaboration between the people who generate leads and the people who convert those leads, your organization can effectively guide potential buyers through the funnel. This will eventually result in better sales and customer loyalty. Recommended Reading: The Best Sales Enablement Strategy for Marketers (+ 4 Free Templates) In fact, 58% of respondents to a LinkedIn survey  felt that sales and marketing alignment improves customer retention. 54% of the respondents also felt that sales and marketing alignment boosts the financial performance of their organization. Yet 38% of respondents in a Conversica study  did not follow up on their inbound leads. Even among the companies who did follow up, 63% gave up after only 1-2 attempts. This shows that even when marketing has done their part to generate leads, there could be a  lack of or insufficient follow-up attempts from the sales team. Image Source: Conversica Here are some tips that will help you align your sales and marketing teams: Develop a unified set of goals that you can measure.  A misalignment in team goals could result in overall misalignment between the two teams. Define specific goals that both teams should work towards such as attainment of a revenue goal, a percentage increase in revenue, a certain number of conversions, etc. Come up with a formal process of qualifying leads  and determining when to pass them on to the sales team. A proper lead scoring system will help you with this process. You will learn more about this in the next step to nurture your leads for sales. Coordinate content marketing campaigns  with your sales team. Consider their suggestions in your content brainstorming sessions. And make sure you communicate with them about any deals and offers you have in place. This communication should include talking points about the offer, leads generated from the offer, and other essential information. The marketing team needs to consult with the sales team about what kind of buyer information will be most helpful to them. Knowing the exact kind of buyer data to collect will help your marketing team smoothly transition more qualified leads through the funnel. #2: Learn to Score Your Leads As mentioned briefly in the previous point, you need to learn how to score your leads so you know when to transition them to different teams. Lead scoring is a process of ranking your leads based on how likely they are to convert. But more importantly, it helps your sales and marketing teams to align their definition of a hot lead and helps them coordinate more effortlessly. Since lead scoring assigns a numerical value to the quality of each lead, it becomes easier for each team to identify when and how to approach each buyer. This makes lead scoring an essential element in the lead nurturing processes of most organizations. In fact, an Eloqua study  of 10 B2B organizations found that lead scoring systems increased deal close rates by 30%. The companies also saw a revenue increase of 18% and a revenue-per-deal increase of 17%.