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Lead Management Put Lapsed Leads Back Into Your Sales Pipeline

Lead Management: Put Lapsed Leads Back Into Your Sales Pipeline

Even the best marketers are guilty of forgetting about lapsed leads and admittedly even some digital marketers – with all the technology available – sometimes mistakenly fail to get old customers and leads back in the funnel.

The good news is that there are plenty of ways for you to get lapsed leads back into the sales pipeline and it’s never too late to do something about this.

In this short article, we’ll show you a couple of tricks that you can try out today to make sure that no previous or potential customer is ever left behind!

The Importance of Taking Care of Lapsed Leads

Each customer has to be taken care of properly, and this includes your old customers or other clients that have happened to fall out of your pipeline. Believe it or not, a significant proportion of those who work in sales and marketing don’t even know how many customers they lose on an annual basis.

However, just because everyone’s been in that position at least once doesn’t mean it’s a good marketing practice. Statistics have shown that it is more expensive to take on new customers than to revisit ones that you have already marketed to before.

There is so much wastage in allowing lapsed leads and customers to remain as such, and they should consistently be tapped. On the plus side, they also help maintain loyalty to your brand, and that’s a great thing to have.

Related: New Customers and Repeat Business: Leverage Both for Win-Win Results

Ways That You Can Reach Out to Lapsed Leads

Remember, any lapsed lead or customers used to be exposed to your marketing, so they are, in a sense, familiar with your products or services. However, due to the time that has lapsed, it only makes sense that you try to reignite that “spark” that you had with them.

The first step is reaching out, and there are plenty of ways that you can do this.

Use a Personalized Email

Email is usually used at this step with a message that is short and sweet enough to encourage old leads to re-engage with them.

Avoid hitting them with anything too sales-oriented, but you should still include a benefit of being able to join your service. Make sure that it’s short; you don’t want to come off too hungry at this point.

At this point, you should be able to make sure that the email is personalized enough for them so that they will be able to see that their business matters to you and that you have taken your time to get in touch with them.

Personalization can be automated, too, with a simple mail merge you can be set to go with your list of lapsed leads.

Get creative with your subject titles because studies have shown that an email subject line could mean the difference between your emails getting read or being flagged as spam – and you can’t have that.

Related: Crafting the Perfect Personalized Email

Good Content is King

Putting great content in front of their eyes can help, but you need to be able to target it for their eyes only. You can include this in an email or any channel that you know they frequently use and achieve excellent results in no time.

Make sure you utilize rich content strategies that can be engaging. Examples include infographics, videos and even lead magnet-type spreadsheets and calculators.

Related: Shocking Statistics in Content Marketing in Asia [INFOGRAPHIC]

Social Media

If your lapsed leads use social media, then you’re in for a treat because social media is a great way to lure old prospects back. However, it can be a little tricky because you do not want to come off as a stalker of theirs.

Don’t be frightened to engage with customers on social media and make sure that you try to help them out without pushing your product or service on them. This might seem a little daunting in the beginning, but you’ll find that interacting with people on social media as a business has its benefits, too.

Related: Facebook and Twitter Metrics to Track in 2018 [INFOGRAPHIC]

Remember How You First Got The Lead?

This is our all-time favorite way to interact with a lapsed lead. Find how you have communicated with them in the beginning and let them relive that experience – in a better package of course. This way you can remind them of your services in a way that they have been previously comfortable with.

Whether it was through social media, an email or a phone call. One of the best ways of reaching out to people that you have marketed to before is just by bridging the distance again.

 

Final Thoughts

Whatever method you use, you can’t be too pushy because nobody likes high-pressure sales tactics. Learn the fundamental principle of marketing: they are people, too – so you have to appeal in a way that’s human.

So what are you waiting for? Get ready to get cracking and get those lapsed leads back into the pipeline!

What makes an effective Lead Nurturing Program [VIDEO]

AskCallbox: What makes an effective lead nurturing program?

I can drown you with numbers from a dozen sources that prove how important lead nurturing is in the marketing process, but I choose not to. Let me give you a sprinkling of the juicy tidbits, though, as compiled by Ellen Gomez for Convince and Convert:   

  • 79% of marketing leads never convert to sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause for poor performance (MarketingSherpa)
  • Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at a 33% lower cost (Marketo)
  • Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads (The Annuitas Group)

Very clearly, lead nurturing is an effective marketing tool to transform what were merely leads in the ToFu to paying customers in the BoFu. I will let you in on a secret: everybody can use lead nurturing to their advantage, and that includes you.

I know you’re excited, but before you begin any lead nurturing program, you need to clearly define goals so you know what is considered “success”. We all know there’s always that “everything depends on perspective” thing. A 100% increase in converts may spell success for you, but to others, it may mean nothing. See, without clear objectives of what you are trying to accomplish with your lead nurturing campaigns, you will never know if you’re seeing success or not. Now think of a concrete and measurable goal. You can even write it down.

The Four E’s of an Effective Lead Nurturing Program

Now, here’s what we’re going to do to realize those goals.

  • Establish

Build a good list of prospects, (operative word: good) from which you define buyer personas and do progressive profiling. Everything, and I mean everything, starts with a good-to-great prospects list. If you can tell yourself you have a pretty decent list, throw it away. You need at least a good one, or else everything that follows will be exercise in futility.

Related: AskCallbox: Where Do you get the List?

From the list, you have to understand who it is you’re trying to reach. It will provide you with a tremendous marketing and sales advantage. Creating buyer profiles takes time, but once completed, they focus and leverage your efforts. You simply cannot have a consistently effective nurturing program without clearly defined prospect profiles.

Get updated and targeted business list of your target market!

  • Educate

Create awareness, inform them about the product, and teach them how to make better decisions by creating relevant, timely, and useful content. In creating the content, make sure you:

  • Know your audience very well
  • Consider the buyer’s journey
  • Set a conversational tone
  • Keep it simple (or short and sweet)
  • Personalize your content

Related: Customized Content for your Target Audience Like These Payroll Software Companies Did

  • Engage

If  you have already mapped out the number of touch points you need and determined which channels to use – it could be email or phone or social media or all of them – you’re ready to engage them.

Helpful Stastistics: 5 Social Media Trends for Businesses in 2016

After sending the initial information about the products or services, you can follow-up by phone. By now, you should have already been able determine if the target decision makers are receptive or not. If they aren’t, you can try and reach out to them via social media. They have to be reachable somewhere; it’s your job to cover all bases and figure out where that is. And remember, key to engaging your prospects is not just giving them any old marketing bit you have prepared, a brochure or a link – it has to be relevant to them and their business, and you must give them that information in a timely manner – at a point when they need it and are actively looking for it, not before, not after.

Related: Statistical Proofs Show That You Should Invest In Multi Channel Marketing

  • Earn

Win them over with a final push! Sometimes, all it takes is a little nudge to make the prospect say yes. Apply all the theories in Psychology to get that sweet yes.

  • Try reciprocal concession: If there is an expensive and a cheap model of a product, it’s better to advertise the expensive one first. Selling down works better than selling up. We feel more responsible and satisfied after agreeing to a concession. We think we have brought that change.
  • Use social proof: We view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.
    The more number of people doing it, the more the rule works into making us believe that the behavior is correct.
    We use behavior of people (like us), to determine proper behavior for ourselves.

Mention how many people have bought the product in the past 48 hours and the prospect might just give in.

You have to understand that an effective nurturing program actively moves the prospects you’ve created through your marketing and lead generation efforts, through a complex sales development process to the point where they become paying customers. Yes, anyone can enjoy the benefits of an effective lead nurturing program. You just have to be willing to invest time and resources and patience and ingenuity. The list is quite long, really, but in the end, it’s all worth it.

Every Lead is Special (The Callbox Lead Nurturing Tool)

Every Lead is Special (The Callbox Lead Nurturing Tool)

I was never a fan of Hindi films until I was able to watch “Taare Zameen Par”. It’s a directorial Hindi movie by Bollywood star Aamir Khan which starred Darsheel Safary as Ishaan Awasthi, a child who had special learning needs. Ishaan’s parents misunderstood him for being a troublemaker and dumb, which resulted him being sent to a boarding school for boys to be disciplined. Ram Shankar Nikumbh (Amir Khan), a substitute Art teacher, discovered Ishaan’s special learning needs which were never known by any other faculty in the boarding school. Ram helped Ishaan discover his special skills, and nurtured him to understand his academic lessons through daily tutorials and mentoring.

Nurturing means to take care of something or someone to grow or develop or succeed. It requires continuous enrichment of knowledge and idea, and perpetual coaching on challenges met through the process.

Callbox just thought exactly the same for You.

The Callbox Pipeline’s Lead Nurturing Tool was created to ensure that the leads of your campaign are nurtured through all available channels – call, email, social, web, mobile, and postal mail – we leave no room for anything unattended. So let’s take a deeper look into how the Lead Nurturing Tool becomes your work-buddy:

1. It acts as an automated workforce that requires less supervision, giving you more productive hours to do other important tasks.

At the start of your campaign, a Lead Nurturing tool is set up by the Team Leader to work simultaneously with the agent’s daily calling routine. The tool comprises of Actions & Triggers which is linked together to perform an automated action.

Once the agent updates a contact in the pipeline as “For Follow Up”, “Not Available” or “Requested for more Information”, the lead nurturing tool will immediately send out email information to the contact. When the prospect opens the email, the agent is alerted with a Call Priority notification. This will result to a higher chance of lead conversions.

Other Actions and Triggers options are to send SMS or Postal Mail, which is dependent on the campaign specifications and requirements.

With these tasks taken care of, you will have more time to focus on other important things.

2. It will broaden your avenue of communications to prospects through different media.

Parallel to the Team Leader’s set up of the Lead Nurturing Tool; the Email Marketing Staff will also create the following materials:

  • Custom email templates – drafting the content of the email information based on your product/service features and offerings.
  • Custom Landing Page – you can either choose from our designs or use your preferred form
  • Custom Postal Mail Content – we can send your custom postcard design or letter-size documents to your prospects in a scheduled manner
  • Custom SMS – a reminder sent to your prospects regarding your phone or office appointment with them at a scheduled date and time.

3. It will enhance efficiency and accuracy of your business processes by leveraging current resources for more profitable results.

Real-time Alerts and Detailed Reporting of the Lead Nurturing Tool are comprehensively integrated with the Pipeline CRM at which you are able to track all touch points, both of the calling and emailing activities.

Callbox aims to bring your business at its peak. For us, every Lead is special, and deserves nurturing until it reaches its full grown potentials of success. Just like the Hindi flick I mentioned earlier – “Taare Zameen Par” which means “Every Child is Special”, for us it’s Every Lead is Special.

Top Reasons why Lead Nurturing is a Pretty Big Deal for Singaporean B2B Companies

Top Reasons why Lead Nurturing is a Pretty Big Deal for Singaporean B2B Companies

Nowadays, building relationship and establishing trust with your prospects takes time. Many B2B salespeople complain about facing a longer buying cycle. Because of this, there is a delay on the company’s ROI. Not to mention it also lessens the chances of completing the sale.

However, despite the longer sales cycle, many B2B companies in Singapore such as YuuZoo, B2B super brands like SAP have managed to grow and continues to grow their brand value at par with global players.

Related: Turning Targets to Sales-Ready Leads With a 50% Shorter Lead Nurturing Cycle

Why?

One reason is that Singaporean B2B enterprises know the importance of having an effective lead generation technique and technology. According to Hubspot, 79% of leads don’t convert into a sale. In fact, a purchasing decision isn’t like a beanstalk that grows overnight (and without the application of some sort of special fertilizer!). Many successful B2B companies are aware that modern buyers require progressive nurturing before they make a decision to purchase.

Related: 5 Lead Nurture Tools to Turn Cold Singapore Prospects to Warm

The only problem is many sales reps fall short on lead nurturing and are doing at least 8 to 10 times of follow-ups before closing a deal.

That is why lead nurturing is important because it allows you to know the right time when to follow up. At the same time, it lets you understand which stage your prospects are on their buying journey so you exactly know what approach to use to convert the lead easily.

Here are the reasons why successful B2B companies use lead nurturing.

To build relationship

Selling is not just about letting your prospects know about your products or services. Progressive follow up and constantly communicating with your prospects allows you to build trust, create a connection and grow a positive relationship with your prospects.

Not all leads are ready to buy

As a salesperson, you should know that only 2% of sales happen during the first meeting. While 98% of the leads are not ready and they need nurturing. Through lead nurturing, you will eventually discover certain behaviors and attitudes upon which you can base your next strategies. That way, you’ll be able to prioritize and identify the right time when to keep in touch with your leads.

Related: How to make Prospect Realize They Need your Product or Services

Pinpoint ready buyers

Having too many B2B leads in your database, you are not sure how many will end up buying something from you. You will need to organize these leads into specific demographics (location, budget size, and job titles), target them for email blasts and cold-calling and gauge their “warmness” by scoring them based on their behavior and on their responses. This way, you’ll be able to identify buyers that fit your ideal client profile, thus, enabling you to focus your campaigns on them.

Related: Utilize Customer Profiling and Buyer Personas to Achieve Revenue Goals

Last but not the least…

Lead nurturing can get you more long-term deals

Sure B2B leads can take months to convert. However, having an effective lead nurturing strategy you are opening opportunities for more deals by maintaining communication, minimizing wasted leads because you know how to prioritize them and increase your revenue.

Related: AskCallbox: What makes an effective lead nurturing program?

With all these reasons considered, it will be right to say that lead nurturing carries positive results not worth overlooking: A Forrester study has noted that the tactic achieves 50% more sales-ready leads and 30% reduction in lead acquisition costs. When you want to make an impact in this island-nation (and perhaps, the global industry), these numbers alone say a lot.