How Lead Nurturing Works to Improve Your Sales Funnel.

Organizations like to talk about "funnels". Most people understand the funnel concept: prospects start at the top of the funnel with limited contact information. With additional contact, they move down the funnel provided they match the characteristics that indicate a high probability that they could become a customer. Each step through the funnel has fewer people as the "weak" prospects are eliminated. Marketing has a slightly different objective than Sales does in the funnel concept. Marketing screens for people who know roughly what your company does, are familiar with the brand and (maybe) the value proposition. They find prospects that are willing to talk with someone to see if you have a match to their company need. Sales, on the other hand screens for ability to use your product or service and for buying intent. Ultimately the goal is to turn them into a new customer. This process of screening for desirable attributes and helping prospects to move through the funnel is the lead nurturing process. We will focus on the Sales Funnel in this article.

Managing this nurturing process is usually done through Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) software. Some widely known versions are Salesforce, ZOHO, and HubSpot. They all have a means to capture information on the prospect and you can usually customize the criteria that qualifies someone to move through each stage of the sales funnel.

LEADS

This is the topmost level of the Sales Funnel. To be a lead, the person must work in a position that is broadly speaking, typical of your customer base. The minimum information that sales needs to have at this stage is an email account, position in the company and the company name. This is enough information to fill out more on your prospect through on-line sources. You can find a person's work history, prior positions, even hobbies. You could identify the person's boss, find out if their company has multiple locations, discover their product line, annual sales, number of people employed, and any prior contact this person may have had with your company. All of these should be existing fields that are captured in your CRM.

BECOMING A PROSPECT - INTRODUCTION

With enhanced background information, the salesperson can send an introductory email whose objective is to get a phone call. Based on your research building a file on the lead, allows you to introduce aspects of your product or service based on a more personal understanding of their business. Your introductory email could say, "I saw that last April we sent you our eBook. I hope it answered any questions you had about our product, but if anything was not clear, I can hop on a quick call to clear things up."; or "One interesting thing that we've found out over the years is that companies of your size do especially well with our bronze level service, saving an average of 30% in lost time. I'd be happy to show you how in a quick call . . ."; and so on. Notice that the salesperson was able to introduce new information of a more personal nature into the conversation (shown as underlined text in the examples). This should initiate a phone call.

LEAD QUALIFICATION - THE PHONE CALL

Once you are on the phone with the lead, they become a prospect and they need to be qualified to see if they could become a buyer. Lead qualification is a conversation to determine:

• What are the issues at work that lead them to contact you? This is often referred to as "finding the pain points". It's important to listen carefully and take notes during this stage. This establishes the level of need for your product or service.
• Different people have different influence on project budgets. The salesperson wants to establish where the prospect is in terms of budget control or influence. If they don't have influence then can they provide an intro to the person who does?
• In addition to influence on budget decisions, do they also have influence or authority about what their department purchases? Again, if they don't, can they provide an intro to a person that does.
• Lastly what is their budget cycle if any? Most companies have an open time interval where they add to their product "wish list" of purchases.

If the prospect could use your product or service, has influence over budgets along with spending authority, andthey haven't begun their budgeting cycle yet, then they are a very qualified lead. If anything is missing, youwill need to fill in the blanks. Some companies rank the level of qualification depending on the strength ofbuying attributes.

BUYING INTENT AND CLOSING

When the above information has been determined, it is time to address buying intent. This is usually prettyquick, since all of the considerations will have been discussed by this point.

Some indications that the customer is moving toward purchase are:

• Double checking about how the product will work for them (Making sure your offer is a solution that will fixa problem)
• Verifying the price (Indication that they may want to put an ROI together)
• Lead time (Can it be delivered within their budget cycle?)

If they have asked (and gotten answers to) these three things then this shows buying intent. This is the time todetermine if the budget has been approved, the potential customer is happy with the product, and they havedetermined the desired delivery date. If the answers are "Yes", then it's time to ask for the Purchase Order(also called Closing). When they issue a PO, they become a customer.

Congratulations, you've successfully moved a lead through the sales funnel to become a new customer. Betterstill, all the work that went into this sale has been captured in the CRM, which shows that you are building arelationship for future purchases.