Fatal Flaw #4 -Term Lead Response Strategy

The fourth fatal flaw involves how sales and marketing continue to pursue old or dead leads. Does your sales team just throw them away? Does your marketing resort to sending a monthly email as a part of a “nurturing” campaign?

Take the current closing rate of all qualified leads and subtract from one-hundred. This is your failure rate. The percentage of people that have expressed interest but didn’t buy. These are marketable leads that continue to dwell in your database.

A local company that we worked with struggled with throwing away leads. After two to four weeks of calling on their hot leads, they would be placed in a pile, which stacked up in one of their offices. When we walked in, there were stacks and stacks of paper leads collecting dust.

What are the reasons that qualified leads say no?
1. Lack of Budget
2. Competition
3. Wrong Timing

One thing remains constant...CHANGE. Circumstances change. Businesses change. Your competitors will undeniably fail keeping clients happy. Prospects return to the marketplace when they are ready to buy. Some businesses are successful and need a better solution, sooner rather than later.

When change happens, who gets the business?
One thing is for certain, if your leads are sitting in a back room, it’s not you.

Why should you care?
If you’ve found a way of growing your business without the help of money, then you should be presenting this seminar. Every lead that you generate that is not sold, adds to the cost of each one that is sold. Would you believe me if I told you that there are five deals sitting in that stack of paper in your office? Would you believe me that it will cost less to find those five deals than it would to go find five new deals?

How do you guarantee that you get the business?
You can hope you get it through the “top-of-mind” program of nurturing. The real problem with most nurturing programs is the content. Most monthly email correspondence is all about YOU. They already didn’t buy from you. Why would they care about your press release? Why would they care that you won a product of the year award? Why would they care about the addition to your board of directors? In short...they won’t. They care about themselves, not you.

In order to be truly successful, nurturing must meet three criteria.
1. It must be a collaborative effort between sales and marketing. Marketing has the message, sales has the relationship. Often, a marketing department will take the leads away from the sales team in order to nurture them. If that nurturing is not done on behalf of the individual within the company that has spoken with the prospect it will lose power. Whether that individual is a sales executive or a lead qualifier, he or she is a person and it is always easier to say yes to a person than it is a company. On the flip side, it is always harder to say no to a person as well.
2. The content and approach needs to be about the prospect and not about you. You must identify and create content that is desired. Content that will bring people back to you time and again even if they don’t currently have a need for your product. You can learn a lot by watching television. A television network’s product is its advertising. They sell Tide, Budweiser, Coke, McDonalds and Wal-Mart. Yet their content includes sports, talk shows, day time dramas, sitcoms, and news. I watch ESPN almost on a daily basis, not because I am in the mood to buy Doritos or a new car but because the content of the show is applicable to my interests. ESPN has earned the right to pitch me their products because they deliver content to me that I love. How do you develop this content? If you have a smoking gun, or a unique selling point then you have the basis for content. Your product or service solves real problems. Make your prospects aware of those problems in an education format. Have real concern for them and try to help them. One way of doing this is creating educational material around problems that exist in your prospect’s industry or personal lives that has nothing to do with your core product or service. If you provide quality content that keeps people coming back to you, you will earn the right to pitch them when they are in the proper mindset for buying.
3. It must be consistent, frequent and through multiple media types. I recently visited a website with a product that I might be interested in at some point in the future. As part of their registration form, they asked if I would like to receive a monthly newsletter from them. I agreed. I have been receiving this newsletter for just under a year now. How many of those newsletters do you think I’ve read? I don’t have any control when it comes. It interrupts me in the middle of my busy day and is usually deleted or put aside to refer to later. How often does later come? Now imagine if that same company sent me articles relevant to MY business, not theirs. Imagine if they sent over a fax every month with a tip that would make my life easier. What if they offered a free dinner if I performed a simple task such as register to view a webinar on a subject that I am already interested in? What if they sent me a little trinket attached to a flyer that uses humor to relay information that is for MY benefit. Can you see that I am now looking forward to correspondence from this company? I can’t wait to open the next email, or read the next fax. I’m still not going to buy right now, but when I am looking for the solution, who am I going to buy from? In fact, after so much time and relevant, interesting content, they would earn the right to pitch me on their product as many times as they want. And, since every piece of correspondence came directly from the person I spoke with 9 months ago, it is much harder for me to say no to him. How much did it cost, over the course of twelve months, to send me emails, faxes, direct mail and receive multiple phone calls and a gift certificate? These are just examples and I am sure that you can come up with free offers that are just as powerful. The consistency component applies to both your message and your delivery. If you are not automated, then you will undoubtedly lack in your follow up and miss excellent opportunities to build your relationship with your clients. This is why automation is the first fatal flaw of marketing and sales teams.

In summary, there is money in your dead leads. That same company that had stacks of paper collecting dust is now pulling more than $250,000 per month in sales from those same leads. It just took a paradigm shift and a focused effort to collect money from marketing dollars that they had already spent. Have marketing develop your message but deliver it on behalf of an individual that can develop a relationship with the prospect. Send content that is relevant to your prospect. Send it frequently and send it from every angle possible.