Keeping leads in your sales funnel is a real challenge. If the lead is not an immediate opportunity, it gets lost in the abyss of your sales database never to be contacted again. Studies suggest that almost 60% of leads that come into your funnel will buy from someone within the next 24 months. That someone could be you or it could be your competitor. It all depends on how well you are able to nurture those leads through the buying process.
Whether the leads are cold or warm, a good percentage of them are qualified and need to be nurtured. Your sales team already has the responsibility of managing and closing active opportunities and they don’t always know how to generate relevant lead nurturing emails or calls to the non-active opportunities. According to MarketingProfs.com, “Nearly 80% of leads that Marketing generates are never worked on by sales, let alone turned into sales opportunities.”
The good news is that you don’t have to manage all of this manually. A CRM system can help by creating detailed profiles of customers and prospects over the course of the relationship. This information can be stored, reported and segmented for future campaigns. For example, you may want to record the prospects digital behavior (what have they clicked on or downloaded from our site?) or what phase of the buying cycle they are currently in. Even if you don’t have all of that information at your fingertips, it’s a great goal to work towards. Marketing lists can be recorded for future reference and a CRM system provides the option to re-use successful campaign lists as needed.
A CRM system can also be configured so that campaign responses trigger sub-lists for the next wave of the campaign, with successful responses moved to sales and non-responses kept on a reminder list (or removed if required). This enables the marketing team to deliver dynamic content that will continue to engage the prospect.
Don’t lose leads just because you fail to contact them. This mistake is costly to your bottom line and completely unnecessary. Use the technology available to automate your marketing in such a way that your prospects are continuously engaged and buying when the time is right.