Aircall’s & Teamleader’s Best Practices for successful Lead Nurturing in the B2B-World
You collect data from potential customers, present them with your service or product, and close the sales deal. Sounds easy, but in practice it rarely is. Simply because a lead hesitates, thinks, inquires and then probes again. That’s why they will rarely be convinced by one conversation or a single email. What you can do, however, is get your lead excited about your product. This is called lead nurturing: a process in which you inform potential customers, answer their questions, challenge them, offer solutions and thus guide them through the sales process.
Does that process take time? Yes, but you can largely automate it with software. The cost per new customer will be lower compared to what you would spend if your sales team was to be let loose on your brand-new connections.
Lead generation vs lead nurturing are actually two concepts with the same purpose: to generate new customers. Yet there is a clear difference. In lead generation, you cast your net as wide as possible, so to speak, to get in touch with new prospects. Only then does the nurturing begin: feeding your customers, taking them by the hand and guiding them through the sales process.
According to research, lead nurturing can increase turnover between 30 and 50 per cent. Even if you take these figures with a pinch of salt, it’s quite clear that it is an effort that pays off. After all, nurturing your leads in the right way also has an impact on your long-term customer relationship. Customers are more loyal and more likely to return and recommend your product or service to others. All these elements together have a major impact on your business results.
"Having a clear goal for your lead nurture program, as well as the personas it's serving, is mission-critical. Is the nurture segmented by industry, persona, language, or geography? There may be multiple calls-to-action depending on the nurture content, but keep you end-goal in mind or the action you want leads to take that would result in the best outcome for your business."
When nurturing your leads, it’s important to segment the audience and offer personalised content that makes sense for a specific lead’s situation. However, choosing the different paths and criteria to personalise these nurture tracks often ends in complicated flows and a lot of setup and maintenance. Choose your segments and personalisation variables wisely, and don’t overcomplicate your flows for the sake of segmentation.
"Setting up a lead nurture campaign should go beyond just sending the right audience emails. Inboxes can be messy, so make sure your message is getting seen with multi-touch campaigns. While enrolled to receive nurture emails, look for other opportunities to get the message out there. That might mean having remarketing ads run while they’re in-between emails to keep you top of mind or adding a chatbot to boost engagement."
“Do you like receiving an email a day for the period of 10 days after attending a webinar or downloading an ebook? I don’t think so. When setting up your nurture tracks, think about how many emails YOU would like to receive and at what time YOU would like to receive them. Combining your own experience with email marketing and the information you have on your target audience or persona, can help you make the right decisions considering volume and timing.”
"To build a world-class nurturing program, start by understanding your buyer personas. You can then nurture each unique buyer by creating or leveraging targeted content, based on their objectives and pain points."
Lead nurturing starts with segmenting your leads: where are they in the sales process, what service or what type of products are they interested in? On that basis, you offer them relevant content: e-mails that answer certain questions, video tutorials, interviews with other customers, etc. In short, information that is useful and brings them a step closer to a purchase decision.
The advantage of an email campaign is that you can automate it, so you save time and never forget to follow up on leads. Which does not mean you never have to look at them again. So scrutinize them regularly and update or replace them with new relevant content such as webinars, e-books or white papers.
Lead nurturing starts with the segmentation of your leads: where are they in the sales process and which service or type of products are they interested in? Based on that info, you offer them relevant content: emails that present an answer to certain questions, video tutorials, interviews with other customers, etc. In short, information that is useful and brings your leads a step closer to a purchase decision.
The advantage of an email campaign is that you can automate it, so you save time and never forget to follow up on leads. This does not mean you will never have to look at your nurturing content again. Check and review your nurturing campaigns regularly and update or replace them with new relevant content such as webinars, e-books or whitepapers.
With our rapid global expansion, we knew that we couldn’t keep up with the growing needs of our customers if we continued using cell phones for customer service and sales. We faced growing phone bills and a relatively limited choice of options for fielding calls from international clients, not to mention it was impossible to track the team’s call activity.
However, after testing a few VoIP systems, Our Inside Sales Manager, Naomi Egyaful, and our team were hesitant to try another. Most tools were difficult to use and couldn’t integrate with Hubspot—the team’s main CRM platform. Plus, learning how to use VoIP systems took too much time and significantly reduced our team’s efficiency.
Our team needed a tool that could teach us to easily and quickly integrate with Hubspot. That’s how we came to choose Aircall after considering a long list of possible alternatives.
