The Real Cost of Lost Leads

For many sales teams, Lead management is like fast food. Salespeople want leads now, and they want them hot. And with good reason, right? As a marketer, as a manager, as a sales professional, you understand this, and naturally you want your team to focus time and energy on leads that are ready to close. But what about leads that are warm or cool? How much time and energy do you expect your sales team to commit to nurturing leads that aren’t quite ready to close? Do you hold your sales team accountable for warm and cool leads, or have you inadvertently created a system that rewards minimal effort? Are you leaving money on the table? How much money?

Fast Food for Thought

Let’s take a look at the stats.

• Nurtured leads produce as much as a 20 percent increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads.
• Nearly 80 percent of leads never convert, and lack of lead nurturing is among the biggest causes for high rates of lead loss.
• Less than 50 percent of B2B organizations score their leads in the first place.

You don’t need these stats to tell you the value of a Lead Nurturing program. You need a simple solution that allows you streamline the lead generation and nurturing process and provides your sales team with the tools, motivation, and accountability that everyone needs to start seriously growing your business.

Many small-to-midsized businesses are overwhelmed and intimidated by the perceived complexities of a lead generation and nurturing program, which is completely unnecessary. With the right strategy and the right tools, lead management can be easy, hands-free, and require minimal time and effort from your team. One approach is Automated Lead Nurturing, and it can allow you to automatically generate and nurture more leads while managing sales team accountability and keeping attention focused on closing.

Our national storage and furniture manufacturing client experienced a 288% increase in leads in just seven months, and our weapon storage manufacturing client increased sales by 83% in the first seven months of a lead-focused campaign.

Don’t cry over lost leads. Automate.

You and your team know how to handle the hot leads. What you don’t know is how to efficiently and consistently nurture warm and cool leads. You need a strategy and a system that continuously cultivates your prospects and moves them through the funnel from “just looking” to “might be interested” to “let’s talk.” All this can happen automatically with a program we call automated lead nurturing.

Automated lead nurturing works best when it aligns your marketing efforts with your sales efforts. Communication between marketing and sales helps define the messaging that will generate the right leads—high-quality leads—and drive them into the sales funnel, where all leads are scored and hot leads are quickly delivered to the sales team. The collaboration between sales and marketing helps businesses target specific buyers by role, by industry, by product type, or by pain point, and it connects the buyers’ needs with the right products and services.

“Most reps give up on the sale way too early. Prospects typically require multiple touchpoints across numerous channels before they ever speak to a sales rep, especially in a B2B setting where sales cycles are longer with more decision-makers.” Source: https://spotio.com/blog/sales-statistics/

As leads come into a sales funnel, not all are ready for a call, an email, or a meeting. This is where the lead nurturing function of the program takes over and continues to automatically deliver targeted messaging and offerings to your prospects over a longer period of time. (You define the timeframe.) As nurturing continues, so does scoring based on prospect activity and response. Once a prospect reaches a predetermined score, the sales team is notified that the prospect is ready for direct engagement. The automated portion of the program also allows a prospect to leave the funnel without permanently opting out.

Automated Lead Nurturing—Key Takeaways

• Automated lead nurturing is easy and affordable and can be customized to fit your needs and budget.
• Automated lead nurturing supplements and supports the efforts of your existing sales team. It does not require additional sales personnel.
• Lead nurturing is absolutely essential for any company that is sick of losing sales and is ready for meaningful growth.

The best next step is to talk to someone about your lead management needs and discuss your options. Options may include a small lead nurturing program that you manage inhouse, or for larger, more ambitious sales goals, outsourcing a lead generation and nurturing program may make more sense. We also offer options for integration into your current CRM, such as Salesforce.

You have lots of questions. We can provide answers. If you’d like to chat, just give us a call at 717-823-6963.