MarketLauncher clients often ask about ideas and strategies for nurturing their new business pipeline. They want to know how often should you stay in touch; how much is too much; how little is too little; how do you know who to prioritize; and when to leverage the best opportunities.
At MarketLauncher, our philosophy is simple: formulate a consistent, planned approach to harvesting your target market over time. There are steps that any company can take to craft their plan for reaching out to potential buyers on a regular basis.
Crafting a Cyclical Lead Nurturing Strategy
The following checklist will help you craft an ongoing communications strategy for successful lead nurturing. Walk through these steps to assemble ideas for a plan that works:
- What is our buying cycle? If I talk to someone today and they have no need, what is the likelihood of their revisiting that need – 3 months? 6 months? 12 months plus? Determining the frequency of when decisions are made will help to determine the overall frequency of your communications.
- Who are my A, B, C companies/contacts? All prospective buyers are typically not equal and more aggressive/proactive strategies can be deployed accordingly.
- What are my delivery mechanisms – Email? Phone? Events? Social Media? This will help you to come up with the right mix at the right frequency for the right contacts.
- What’s my messaging strategy? Do I want opportunities to educate/keep top of mind? Do I want a strong call to action? Do I want to simply get my name out there? Deciding what content/messaging you want to utilize for the nurture process will help you formulate the best plan.
- Have I spoken with or met with portions of the market in the past? Do they need a different strategy versus those I’m still reaching out to but haven’t spoken with yet? Usually, different stratas of data in your CRM/database will need a different approach.
- Are there hot – or slow – times of year that I need to take advantage of and plan around? Typically, there are standard hot pockets across most industries and/or typical “budgeting” cycles that can be taken into consideration. In addition, there are usually slower periods that can be recognized and planned for as well.
- Do I communicate with direct users, those with budget authority, or influencers on the buying process? Understanding the different layers of potential “decision makers” in your buying cycle and who you are communicating to, will help to define what/to whom and when.
- What results am I looking for? Do I want to solicit information as I go; do I want to increase sign ups to the newsletter; do I want to drive people to the web site; do I want people to attend a webinar? Defining the most important objectives and outcomes will help to shape the best approach and will help you measure the success – and impact – of your efforts.
Implementing Your Lead Nurturing Plan
For a good number of our clients, MarketLauncher is the implementation team who executes on the designed lead nurturing strategy and works on the company’s behalf to generate the agreed upon results. Once we’ve worked with our clients to map out the strategy/approach/plan via the questions above, we get to work – and typically stay at it – year after year. The following are all real-world examples of the power of consistently and proactively mining your market over time.
- For the past 9 years, MarketLauncher has helped a firm that specializes in sales, service and coaching performance improvement solutions leverage their experience into a number of key growth verticals to impact their desire to achieve deeper penetration in top tier companies. Last year, the company experienced record growth – 40% of it directly attributed to new business generated from the ongoing communications campaign.
- Working with an executive leadership and training company, MarketLauncher has been able to help the client increase market share, increase their brand awareness and shorten the sales cycle. To date, ML has converted over 25% of the desired targets into sales opportunities.
- MarketLauncher provides ongoing prospecting efforts to secure appointments for a technology solutions provider specializing in tools for mobile workforces. Through a consistent and dedicated ongoing communications effort, over 500 new business opportunity meetings have been identified.
The key to any successful ongoing communications strategy that nurtures your pipeline and generates opportunities for growth is to combine the right people with the right process and the right message. MarketLauncher’s approach is to spend due diligence on each of those three elements in order to ultimately generate new business revenue.
