How to set your warm leads on fire

Having leads is like owning Ferrari parts. Until you actually do something with them, they’re worth less than the materials used to build them. If your ROI isn’t growing and you have enough leads to craft a thousand demographics, you’ve probably already figured out that lead generation isn’t enough. As a sales director, you might be heavily reliant on your marketing strategy to generate fresh leads for your staff, but if your campaign doesn’t extract value from them, it’s well-nigh useless. Warm leads are kindling that’s ready to be set on fire, but somebody has to strike the match.

Data that Succeeds

One of the most valuable traits of the internet is the fact that it’s created a wealth of data just waiting for intelligent mining. Tracking your emails, webinars, and other marketing techniques lets you know which sources are generating the most rewarding leads. Tracking lead usage across your entire marketing funnel will tell you where you’re lacking.

Poorly timed lead usage, for example, creates a conversion rate of about 16%, which is only 6% higher than a lead that’s not used at all. Timing might be an intuitive skill initially, but those days and months are trackable. So are the returns on every follow-up media you try. Marketing is not about building a strategy, but rather adjusting it until it functions like a perfectly hewn race car.

Automation is Not a Dirty Word

The age of big data has turned marketing automation on its head. Gone are the days when its effects were limited to annoying your clients. Automation has become sophisticated enough to deliver a truly intimate marketing experience unique to every client. eBay, for example, sends unique outbound marketing material to clients based entirely on their shopping history. Amazon takes this a step further by altering the very pages its customers view on the site. If you’re not automating your leads to your individual clients, your campaign might as well be walking on crutches. 79% of the globe’s most successful companies use this method, with nurtured leads spending 47% more.

Quality Over Quantity

One of the fastest ways to extinguish warm leads is to collect useless ones in the first place. Don’t be stingy with the amount of time you spend prequalifying them. A sales funnel stuffed full of quantity instead of quality wastes time, money, and sales team morale.

Over-promising and Under-Delivering

Treat your warm leads as though they don’t matter and you’ll soon lose their loyalty. 73% of leads aren’t ready to buy, but this doesn’t make them dubious prospects. They need to be converted in a way that adds value to their experience of your brand long before they part with their money. White papers, webinars, and service that engages are critical ways to draw your leads along your sales funnel by satisfying their needs at every stage.

Engaging lead nurturing techniques include:

• Welcome campaigns with outbound emails.
• Top-of-mind campaigns that engage leads regularly.
• Competitive drip campaigns that set a product apart from rivals.
• Promotional drip campaigns that educate sales-ready buyers.
• Upselling or cross-selling existing buyers.
• Sales enabling that provides sales teams with resources to aid their work.

Closed-loop nurturing is twice as effective as demand generation, and with success being such a core part of your sales team’s morale, it’s critical that you breed triumphs. Pick your leads well, place them at the correct stage of your funnel, and make sure buying is glitch-free. Inform your sales team so that it can easily establish trust from a point of knowledge, and you’ll be well on your way to making those leads count.