These days, noise is a significant distraction and causes a lack of sales and marketing productivity. If you do not have a repository like a CRM, a transparent flow process for all traffic and interaction sources, you are probably wasting more than 80% of your prospects. Studies show that active lead nurturing and opportunity planning can double and even triple your sales. So, you are now wasting 1/2 to 2/3 of your sales potential by not addressing lead nurturing in a process oriented, structured and planned manner. If you realise the danger, you probably already tested either Digital Sales Funnels or Flywheel Model as a way to tap into your wasted opportunities with your sales planning process.

Organise your sales and marketing funnel

A lead can land on your website from any social network. From a webinar or an online ad, or many more sources. The way you manage their flow through different lead nurturing phases will determine the transformation rates from a prospect into a customer. The better you do, you should see the churn rate decreasing with the number of customers increasing.

Additional benefits for adopting smart sales funnels include shortening the sales cycle and the price per customer acquired. The best practice is having it all planned out and running your sales and lead nurturing process in a predictable framework.

To plan a sales funnel, you may use different tools, usually included with your CRM. With these tools, you can customise your lead nurturing, opportunity planning, account management intelligence, and deal stages all integrated into a step-by-step pipeline. You can also use the free Hubspot CRM tool. You can download the Winning B2B Digital Strategies to access other resources for planning your sales funnel like an advanced sales spreadsheet referenced in the white-paper to help you with your opportunity and nurturing process.

Optimize your sales

Benchmarking for best transformation rates closing the gaps where necessary and identifying areas that do not work and need further work will ensure optimum sales results.

Use tools such as Benchmark sales close rate against your industry competitors and Funnel benchmarks by industry to make sure you are looking at the right numbers.

Map your Content and Information to the Buyer Journey

Why are the BUYER JOURNEYS so important and talked about these days? Once you understand your customer persona you should translate this into a Buyer Journey or customer path so that you can align all your strategy, content and information to the ideal pathways and stages you would like new prospects to take when interacting with you and your company and team. To automate the lead nurturing process in a way that is personalised and meaningful to your prospect.

Buyer journeys promote a clear understanding of the information and content mapping to the buyer needs. Defining buyer journeys also ensure marketing and sales strategic alignment while exponentially increasing your transformation rates from prospect to customer, ensuring no lead gets lost along the way.

Here is a sample IT decision maker buyer journey mapped out and aligned with the right content to move the prospect from one phase to another.

For all your buyer journeys set your goals and benchmarks. Having SMART goals can help you be sure that you’ll have tangible results. What gets measured gets managed and later on optimized.

Automate Your Marketing and Lead Nurturing Process

Two-way dialogue is important. From automating the initial conversation through smart chatbots to assisting and personally nurturing the leads, a clear plan is required to ensure conversation personalisation and lead nurturing and flows. 

The success lead automation formula: Plan + build your automation => Nurturing Workflows

Your campaign doesn’t end when leads convert on your landing page. Plan and build your follow up campaigns to nurture leads down your funnel to a clear conversion path into sales.

Automation tools are used and accepted by most marketers with more than 50% using these tools for:

• Content personalisation
• Campaigns
• A/B testing and improvements
• Data-driven marketing, and
• Buyer journey mapping

With benefits like improved targeted messages (68.5%), increased customer engagement (45.9%) and better quality of leads (37.7%) among other benefits, marketing automation must be a tool for performance marketing in any company.

You can find out more on the benefits of sales and lead nurturing automation from the Winning B2B Digital Strategies white-paper, packed with resources, best practices and sample use cases.

Marketing automation tools can integrate with all your other business tools to provide you with the right business flow and to make a seamless alignment between marketing and sales.

Here are some questions for you to ponder:

• Are you currently automating your lead nurturing process?
• Are you mapping your content to the prospect expectations using personalisation, workflows and meaningful 2-way conversations?
• Are you converting the traffic to serve quality leads to your sales teams?

If you have any questions or challenges with b2b marketing and sales related topics, let us help. Contact us and we'd be happy to help you with customer acquisition, engagement wile generating better leads faster!