Most marketers know almost 80% of the sales conversation happens before the inbound leads reach sales. This is where marketers successfully work their magic optimizing B2B websites and landing pages with SEM, and leveraging social marketing to target and capture marketing qualified leads to hand over to their sales team. Unfortunately, not every lead turns into a sale. I’ve already written about how Salesforce Engage can help you enable your sales team, but if you’re wanting to increase the number of conversions for your sales team, but today I want to cover how Engage can help them preserve and nurture prospects, and increase the number of sales qualified leads over time.
Let’s dive into a game plan to develop an effective portfolio of lead nurturing campaigns to equip your reps with the right campaigns to use at the right time.
Play#1 – Pick up the phone!
You can’t make a sale if the buyer never answers the phone. Buyer behavior has changed and if you can’t successfully get them on the phone here’s a suggestion: first leave a voicemail, and then send a follow up personal email referring to it. Acknowledge they are busy and probably get a ton of calls – it’s true! Tell them you are going to send them some additional information and will circle back soon.
Tactics
Develop a Top of Mind nurture campaign to send the lead more information to keep you brand top of mind. Repurpose content from the B2B Blog or newsworthy information about your company and what it has to offer.
Play #2 – Buyer Objection
Every rep hates getting objections whether over the phone or in person, but Salesforce Engage can help here as well. Sales reps can revive cold leads by adding them to nurture campaigns aimed at warming them up until they’re sales ready.
Tactics
First, marketers can develop nurture campaigns based on your most common objections. By looking at cold leads that have successfully converted in the past, you can get an idea of how long it can take to convert leads like these. With that schedule in mind, you can automate the process of keeping up with these leads by having them receive emails at regular intervals.
Develop a 30, 60, and a 90 day campaign with a completion action that will alert the sales rep if the prospect engages mid-campaign by interacting with content or emails, or, simply set up a task for the sales rep to call the prospect back for a follow up once the campaign has completed.
Give your sales reps 7 days to set an appointment once the campaign has completed. If the rep sets up an appointment, make sure they then know to take the prospect off the list. If they’re not successful, you can implement an “assign to list” task at the end of the nurture campaign. This allows you to loop the prospect into a longer nurture campaign like a Top of Mind campaign for example.
Play #3 – Plan for the future…events!
Engage prospects ahead of time to help boost lead generation. If you have local event, program or webinar coming up, you can use Salesforce Engage to help your sales reps easily access a nurture campaign to help generate interest and attendance.
From everyday objections to staying top of mind, Salesforce Engage can help you streamline the buying cycle and prime your sales reps to build the strong customer relationships that will result in more deals closed.
