Lead Nurturing Practices that Lead to Success – Part One

Lead nurturing is as important an activity as the others in the sales funnel, if not more. So what if the leads are not yet ready to buy? They clearly have the intent, they have the need, and, once you are able to convince them to cross whatever hurdles that stopped them from buying, you will be able to make a sale. In this post, we’ll see some lead nurturing practices that can result in a sale.

Engagement: Constant engagement with your leads is a must for successful nurturing. Sometimes, months pass between the time the lead makes his first contact and the time he ends up buying. If you are not the first brand he recalls, you might lose the potential for a sale. The way to ensure this recall is to keep the lead engaged with your organization. You can achieve this engagement by delivering high-value content to the customer in a way that it does not seem like interruptive marketing. You can keep the lead updated about latest developments in the industry, give him tips on how to manage business processes more efficiently, or other informative, educative content.

Ensure beforehand that you have the requisite permission and always include the option to stop communication.

Lead nurturing as a customer development tool: Instead of finding customers, how cool would it be for us to develop customers, right? Think of the lead nurturing cycle as a customer development cycle, and you can see how you can benefit. Instead of going to the lead with a product, involve him in the product development process. Ask him for his inputs on what is missing from the solution now and what will make it more attractive to him. Once he becomes a part of your development process, you can even use him to test your product and get feedback to improve it. As he will be using the product all this while and become familiar with the interface and the functionality, there is a very good chance that he would pay to keep using it.

We’ll see more in the next post. For an online CRM solution that will help you with lead nurturing, Want to learn more about SutiCRM? Request a free demo today.