Nurturing sales leads

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Phil Fernandez: Hello, I'm Phil Fernandez, president

and CEO of Marketto. And I'd like to talk today about

the topic of nurturing sales leads. Drawn here for

contacts on the board is what most business executives

would draw today if you asked them to describe how

revenue happens in their company. They would draw a

funnel, something like this. And describe that it had

several stages of their sales process, like establishing

needs, determining if the buyer has a budget,

negotiating a contract, and ultimately producing revenue

through a deal. This is the sales funnel or the sales

cycle. But if you really look at how the world works in

today's world driven by web marketing and other modern

online interactive technologies, it's really a different

picture we need to draw. We need to extend this funnel

back from the sales organization into the marketing

department. And in this world the funnel actually gets

quite wide on its front end. At the front end of this

funnel companies meet their prospective buyers in a

variety of ways. For example, traditional means like

trade shows and direct mail, but increasing in

importance every day, things like the web site and

Google ad words search advertising. The trouble is this

can be a very inefficient process in today's business.

According to consultancy Inaudible today, fully 80% of

the leads generated in a marketing organization are

completely wasted. They go down the drain and nobody

ever calls them. At the same time according to

consultancy CSO insights, fully 50% of sales time is

unproductive and wasted, with sales people talking to

buyers who don't really want to talk to them, doing

things like cold calling. But the fortunate story is

that companies that get this right can radically improve

this process. If we drill in to the front end of this

funnel, statistics show that about 25% of the people you

meet in a business are ultimately lousy leads. They

really need to just go into the waste basket and never

be contacted. And at the same time about 25% of the

leads you generate through your online and off line

activities are really hot. They rock, they need to get

right into the sales organization right away. But that

leaves this middle ground of 50% of leads that are

interesting to people that want to talk to you and buy

from you, but they're not ready to talk to a salesperson

today. There's something we can do about this process.

So let's look, for example, at a buyer who comes to your

web site through a Google ad words click. You obviously

respond to them right away when you click on ad words.

But let's say now that one day later you send that

customer an e-mail that contains an attachment with a

white paper that reenforces the topic of the

advertisement from the day before. That simple step,

that follow up one day later can literally double the

effectiveness of your Google Inaudible right there.

But companies can do even better. For example, we send

an attachment with information to that buyer one day

later. Let's monitor that and ask a week later did that

buyer actually open and read that white paper. If so,

then I might want to send a follow up e-mail and invite

that customer to come to a webinar where they learn more

about the product that we're selling. If not, we don't

want to just abandon that customer, though. Maybe what

we want to do is cue a call so that a telemarketing

representative can make contact with that prospective

buyer and ask them some questions and nurture them along

in the buying process. If it's a good interaction you

might then invite that same customer to the webinar. Or

if not, you will continue to stay in touch with that

customer over time, always with the goal of ultimately

nurturing that customer until they're ready to talk to a

sales representative. The amazing thing is if this is

done right statistics show that fully 70% of this middle

set of leads that you meet ultimately will be ready to

talk to a sales representative, and ultimately be ready

to buy. Powerful ROI. If you do this right, you take

this lost 50%, turn 70% of those into people that you

can sell to, and ultimately you can make revenue from.

That's the key of nurturing sales leads through an

automated lead nurturing process.

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