Designing a lead nurturing process

A basic concept to increase sales results by qualifying more leads

The core business of my company is customer acquisition based on leads who have started signing up on a website, and have abandoned the process at some stage. There are a few basic aspects that make this job relatively simple:

• The product that we sell is cost-free. We do offer a subscription model as well, but new customers typically opt for a commission-based model;
• Our customers can use our product as well as our competitors’ at the same time.

This doesn’t mean that our sales reps have an easy life. Especially in the summer, when we seem to face the highest amount of prospects who aren’t interested enough in getting to the final step.

The concept of lead nurturing is something that I have first introduced to my team two years ago, when I have shared it with trainers and team managers, but somehow the newer sales reps have never followed it properly. It’s one of those things that companies tend to postpone without considering what results it could bring.
What made me want to look back at this idea, and implement a new strategy, was the number of leads that I saw disqualified with comments such as ‘not yet’.

The exercise

I used a Salesforce report (Activities with Leads) that I had created a while ago to show disqualified leads with the related Feedback Value, call Subtype and Comments along with Call duration and Transaction ID to help team leaders audit calls and identify the reasons for disqualifying.

A portion of a Salesforce report that I created to help sales managers evaluate feedback on disqualified data and audit the related calls.

I exported the entire data of our third quarter into Excel, and started digging through the activities logged and the associated comments in free form text. The combinations were too many, because different sales reps work different ways, so I had to spend a bit of time and use quite a lot of creativity. I chose the Feedback Value field, and I changed all the content to 19 different values which I then grouped into 7 categories:

1. Bad Data: spam leads, wrong phone numbers, etc.
2. No Sale: leads that we weren’t able to convert, not interested
3. Wrong audience: leads that aren’t suitable for our product
4. External Factors: leads that can’t use our product due to local regulations
5. Nurture: leads that have an interest in our product, and could turn into sales within 3 months (note: these are mainly my own assumptions based on the logged activities, but also on my experience)
6. Long Term Opportunities: leads that have an interest in our product, but won’t be converted before 3 months
7. Other: various types of comments; 10% of the total in this group suggest additional nurturing opportunities, similar to category 5

I was excited to find that 11.5% of the leads we have disqualified over the past quarter (2.2% of the whole data received) could be classified as opportunities to nurture, and an additional 7% of the disqualified — almost 2% of the total — could not be signed up within the next three months, but could still turn into customers within one year.

Adding nurturing to our sales process

In order to create an interesting pipeline of leads to nurture, I don’t imagine adding new tasks to our sales reps’ workload, instead I just assume that they would keep doing two things: one is establishing what the prospect’s interest in our product is, making it grow by presenting features and benefits, giving recommendation, discussing ROI, etc., and the other one is creating urgency. These are two fundamental steps of the customer journey which in our specific context are better done on the phone, and we cannot delegate to email. If we are able to determine that a prospect has some interest, but isn’t willing (or able) to purchase soon, disqualifying that lead is a waste!

An ideal process to generate lead to nurture should be this simple.

Show your prospects an outline of a proposed evaluation & buying process with clear timelines and determine if this timeline works for them. Adding this one simple step at the beginning of your sales processes can help keep deals flowing efficiently through your pipeline and avoid unexpected delays. — Collin Cadmus

The nurture activity

Once we get off the phone, these leads are converted into opportunities, and logged with a call-back date as agreed with the prospects. What they then expect from us, and what will likely keep their interest high, is a very well drafted email that reminds them in a few lines the product features and benefits, along with FAQ and a link to Terms & Conditions.
We then send them a second email shortly before the appointment, adding some useful market info. After these two activities, we should be able to establish whether those leads are still warm, and if there are no blockers, we attack with a second phone call aiming at closing the sale.

Obstacles and solutions

As an outsourced sales team, we don’t communicate directly with a marketing team, and many of their tools to evaluate customers engagement aren’t even available to us. That’s why we need to be creative with what we have.

Salesforce makes it very easy to set up a dynamic List containing the opportunities converted from qualified leads, and using it to send emails, update the stage and the probability, the customer’s response, and even to create a scoring system based on a few simple formulas.

An example of a Salesforce List. The ‘Last Activity on Account’ actually represents the due date for the next call.

Expectations

In the second half of September we have tested for the first time an email campaign on closed-won opportunities that hadn’t resulted in closed sales yet. This effort has impacted 10% of those opportunities in just three weeks, generating additional sales. And that is usually the toughest quarter for us.

In a time range between 3 and 12 months, this exercise would return at least an additional 2.4% of the sales that we have closed. Once it’s properly set up, the above mentioned 10% result achieved from our first email campaign could realistically become a 20%, which would mean an additional 4.8% of our closed sales. That is also the ratio of leads that we would save from disqualifying too soon.

Although these numbers seem quite small, they are still significant in our context if you consider that such a simple process can be easily put in place with no added costs, it doesn’t require sales reps and their supervisors almost any additional effort, and it can be constantly improved. Working more efficiently to turn a portion of disqualified leads into qualified ones can help many businesses concentrate their effort ultimately increasing their ROI, while testing new strategies, such as different ways of reaching out to prospects.

Could a WhatsApp message make them more responsive, for example?
Let’s discuss this in the next article.

You can find plenty of literature and guidelines on the topic of lead nurturing on the Internet. Salesforce Trailhead is also a good place where you can learn more and discover new tools.