The Best, Least Expensive Leads to Work in the Second Half of 2022 – Three Steps to Success
You are, no doubt, sitting on a goldmine of opportunities and do not know how to mine them.
Right now, leads are moving from marketing to sales. But they’re not being worked. They’re sitting in a black hole called CRM.
The relative value of those leads, mostly marketing dollars down the drain, is unknown. Upwards to 40% of them, floating in suspension, will buy what you sell from someone else because they are ignored and lost due to your processes – or lack of processes.
Between now and 2023, you have a choice:
Continue sending raw, unqualified leads to sales and letting them end up in a black hole.
Work the leads so that you mine three times the value – supplying the best, least expensive leads to sales while keeping the pipeline full for future periods.
The choice is that simple.
Even a Man Lost in the Woods Knows Where He Wants to Go
You know marketing and prospecting are not working; you just do not know what to do about it. Marketing has become black box fixated – companies would rather invest in a recent technology instead of fixing the prospecting problem at its core.
The prospecting problem is that marketing is relying on cutesy emails, social media and unvalidated marketing automation rather than investing in a balance of phone calls, voicemails, emails and, in some cases, direct mail to educate prospects and generate response. Any leads turned over to sales that are outside this quarter’s closing window are ignored.
Three Steps to Success
Segment, prioritize and work micro segments with cadences that perform.
Create marketing sprints (based on prioritization in #1) and rapidly assess the effectiveness of the delivery of prospect-focused insights and conversational intelligence.
Measure and repeat.
Segment, Prioritize and Work the Following Micro-Segments
Leads:
Companies let leads that are not worked effectively to a closed won, loss, or other disposition (outcome) disappear into a black hole called CRM.
What needs to happen instead? Leads that do not progress need to be returned to the nurture pool and reworked, eventually reconverted into fresh leads and sent back to the sales force to engage.
Note that a lead could ping-pong between a Lead status and Nurture status multiple times over multiple quarters. That’s OK. The best opportunities are nurtured over extended periods of time.
Pipeline:
These are prospects with a specific planned next step to be taken, usually by a BDR or other marketer, within a reasonable timeframe (six weeks to three months). Reasons for this status include, but are not limited to, other project priorities, closing the books, personnel changes, acquisition. or divestiture.
Nurture Opportunities:
These are fully qualified prospect companies that are not interested in the short-term. While often dismissed, they are important outcomes that require more work. Each of these future opportunities should be tracked based on changes in the pain, priority, process, and environment situation in each prospect.
No Response:
These are prospects that we have not reached (after a full touch-cycle) and we consider them to be past the point of diminishing return on the current touch cycle. After re-segmentation, these prospects should be added to future touch cycles, and they will perform better than a “cold” list.
Action:
A segmentation workshop and the development and testing of micro segments is needed to conduct this step.
Create Marketing Sprints
Repetition and persistence that is perceived as professional, are extremely essential elements of effective nurturing. Equally important, but not more important, are prospect-focused insights and using conversational intelligence to create value for the prospect in exchange for his or her time.
Action:
Conversations with clients (research) and a messaging workshop are next steps to the development of insights and to train sales executives on conversational intelligence that will make discussions with prospects more relevant.
Each segment and each sprint need to be mapped out to work. Generic content does not cut it.
Measure and Repeat
Better to implement a series of small steps than to bog down in every detail – good enough is better than perfect. Design is important but delivering the right message using the right media to the right prospect at the right time trumps complicated automated processes.
Action:
An outside assessment to measure progress against the three steps outlined here is necessary to ensure a factual analysis of results and for supplying the best go-forward plan.
Whether you make changes now to help the rest of 2022 or need to make changes now to affect 2023 and beyond, you must do things differently. I can show you what to do, even help you and your team do it, based on over 30 years’ experience in B2B marketing to companies selling a complex solution.