For many organizations, the middle of the funnel is where leads go to die. Marketing says they delivered hundreds of leads, and sales says all the leads were bad. In fact, the problem was never with leads—it was with the process. There are two important steps that are being skipped that are forcing organizations to always feed the top of the funnel—which is the slowest and most expensive sales channel.
Step 1
Marketing must qualify leads before sending to sales. In this step, their 500 leads are whittled down to 50 who are ready to talk to sales today. This is a more manageable number for sales to tackle, and because they are qualified, it is a better use of their time.
Step 2
After sales talks to the 50 – only 5 will immediately move to the proposal stage. Those 45 must be documented and passed back to marketing to nurture. Most companies literally throw these hard won, qualified leads away. These are your opportunities in 6, 12, 18 months.
You likely have the ability, but not the process, to develop a robust middle of the funnel filled with qualified targets that understand your value proposition and have expressed a need. This is your fastest and cheapest sales channel. Imagine a world where 20% more leads make it through the funnel—20% faster. That is good math.
Enter Sales Lead Nurturing
A Sales Lead Nurturing strategy tackles the two main issues impacting lead loss—failures in communication and technology. At many companies, the Sales and Marketing teams are siloed. Poor communication between the groups, weak processes, or disparate goals make for a failure to follow qualified leads home to a close.
“When sales and marketing are integrated, companies get better results, period,” says ROOT3 CEO, Scott Christiansen. “CRM technology provides next-level visibility and intelligence that our clients use to set priorities and that we use to amplify sales efficiency.”
With built-in automations and clear reporting, CRM tech platforms enable the kind of scalable nurture campaigns that keep companies top-of-mind without a heavy lift of marketing support, staff, and other resources. The automated technology frees up sales reps to invest their time and energy into other business development priorities, while efficiently tracking a lead’s level of engagement. So when the time is right to turn on more transactional messaging, we know.
“Most of our clients are as focused on lead nurturing as they are on filling the top of the marketing funnel,” Christiansen says. “By mapping the customer journey and integrating technology and automations at pivotal points, a higher number of leads move through the marketing funnel in significantly less time. Those two strategic steps have an enormous impact on both top- and bottom-line income.”
Learn more about moving more leads through your pipeline in a short video with Scott.
