Why Most Lead Follow-Up Processes Are Broken

How many actions does it take before a lead converts into a customer?

A LOT more than most sales and marketing teams are planning on with their lead generation strategy. In fact, the mere definition of lead gen creates problems for marketing and sales teams alike.

Sales wants leads that want to BUY NOW. And marketing is trying…but very few people are ready to buy right now. And a lot of them have already done their “shopping around” prior to a bottom of funnel sales conversation.

We need to be talking more about nurturing them toward a next action….but I digress….

Before we solve that, let’s address the cold hard truth:

Businesses need to plan on 5x more touches

I recently attended a virtual event/webinar with Airmeet (amazing event btw) and the stats from McKinsey & Company and Forrester shared in that webinar further confirmed the ugly reality.

Source: Airmeet

However, if you think about the logic (even of your own B2B buying behavior) this is as true as it gets. In 2016, buyers needed about 5 touches.

Today it’s 27 or more. In other words, the days of “yes, I’m interested” to “let’s buy now” are few and far between.

YIKES.

Buyer’s aren’t ready to buy. But they are ready to learn.

Learning and educating IS lead nurturing.

The easiest way I describe this is that contacts are just needing to “date” your company a while longer before they’re ready to talk marriage. So nudging those folks toward a sale using lead nurturing emails, SMS or other tactics help us round out some of the interactions needed to get to the altar.

Aka…lead nurturing.

Wait, what exactly is lead nurturing?

Lead nurturing is designing a group of emails that are meant to “nurture” a contact or lead into becoming a customer of your company.

In most cases, it’s a handful of emails that get sent over time, in response to a particular action that the contact took in your customer journey.

For example:

• Enrolling a contact in lead nurturing flow after they downloaded an ebook or piece of gated content from your website.
• Following up with a series of emails to attendees of a webinar if they haven’t booked a bottom of funnel consultation or demo
• Enrolling a contact in a drip sequence after they joined your email list, to deliver them the top 5 performing articles from your website that you know they would enjoy

B2B lead nurturing is most effective (and in our opinion should only be done this way) when you take into account three variables:

1. Original intent. Why did they initially engage with your brand? What problem were they trying to solve?
2. Desired outcome. Based on that problem, what desired outcome do you think they are hoping to achieve?
3. Obstacles or barriers. What obstacles or barriers exist to them realizing that outcome?

Answering these three questions will help you design effective lead nurturing. And as you may soon realize, you’re going to need great content to address these topics in email.

The moral of the story:

Lead gen is changing, and consumers are educating themselves long before the sales meeting. It’s critical to engage our target audience sooner and nurture them longer so we have a shot at the sale when it shakes out.

If your process and expectation is:

Lead > Call > Sale

…then your lead follow up process is probably broken and it’s time to bring it into the modern era and fix it.