It’s time to do a quick marketing self-evaluation: Take a look at your sales leads from the past six months. How many resulted in a sale? Now take a look at all of the leads that ran cold. Do you have a strategy in place to ensure effective follow up?
A Garden Of Future Customers
Many salespeople focus efforts on the here and now, perfecting the art of concise, effective persuasion when they have prospects’ immediate attention. However, sales leads can be like flowers: some blossom immediately, while others require thoughtful engagement over time to flourish. If you neglect the ones who require some nurturing, you could be missing out on a garden of future customers.
The strategy of nurturing a lead comes down to the right balance of engagement over time. Just enough can build a relationship with your prospect, while too much can turn that person off of your brand.
Working Mom, Future Student
One real-world example of this strategy comes from the experience of many adults who consider seeking a college degree. From a consumer standpoint, this demographic is motivated by a desire for self-improvement.
However, this desire could be fueled by circumstances that make commitment difficult; dissatisfaction with a current career or financial struggles lead to a late-night Internet search and a promise to research higher education options, but in the morning this same prospect is getting the kids off to school before heading to an unfulfilling job. A working mom may request information from a college’s website, but might not yet be in a position to make a drastic career move.
No Such Thing As A Dead Lead?
From a marketing perspective, this is not a dead lead for the college or university – rather, this is a lead that needs to be appropriately engaged over time. The same pressures will continue to affect the prospect and keep the dream of higher education alive, and continued engagement from the college will ensure that when the time comes for the prospect, the opportunity with a good long-term engagement strategy will be top of mind.
Adapting a long-term engagement strategy to your brand’s marketing needs will take careful consideration, but will almost certainly result in a higher conversion rate from your sales pipeline. Remember that list of dead leads from your self-evaluation? They are more valuable than you may think – some of those prospects could be the type that needs a little bit of nurturing before buying into your brand.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: The Long Tail Of Sales Leads
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