Using Automated Lead Nurturing Software to Super-Charge Your Sales
According to MarketingSherpa, nearly 80% of leads are never followed up on by sales teams yet Hubspot argues that 50% of leads are qualified but are not ready to buy. How can your sales team help qualified leads become ready to buy with limited time and resources? The answer is automated lead nurturing software. Let’s discuss what lead nurturing is, how you can automate it, and how it can supercharge your sales.
What is lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing is building relationships with potential customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey and, when they’re ready, encouraging them through the stages of your sales funnel. It focuses on listening and providing value to prospects so that when the time comes, they’ll choose your company and become a customer.
What is automated lead nurturing software?
An automated lead nurturing software, system, or CRM helps reduce the workload of following up with potential clients. This technology should let you create a lead nurturing process where your leads will be sorted and then contacted at specific times with personalized content. It is email marketing automation specific to lead nurturing. This helps improve your sales while making things easier on your staff.
The Impact of Automated Lead Nurturing on Sales
You’ve gone through all that work to generate leads, so why waste them? While not everyone is ready to buy, they may be looking to purchase in the future – it can take up to 8 touchpoints before a sale. If you don’t follow up on these leads in some way, you’re throwing away business.
Lead nurturing builds a relationship where you provide value as the prospect moves through the buyer’s journey so that you can be there when they’re ready to purchase. According to Hubspot, companies who are good at nurturing leads can generate 55% more sales ready leads at a 33% lower cost1.
Lead nurturing software helps automate this process, making things quicker and easier for your brokerage or agency.
Essentially, lead nurturing can super-charge your sales – if it’s done right.
Automated Lead Nurturing Software: What You Need
Unfortunately, it can be tough for a sales team to have the resources to follow up and nurture every lead. Luckily, there’s automated lead nurturing software through a lead management system (like truLeads!)2 that will help encourage your leads through the buyer’s journey and bring in your sales team at the right time. Effective automated lead nurturing software includes:
- Real-time integration with web forms
- The ability to send automated, personalized messages
- Lead prioritization and categorization
- The ability to record activities and set up reminders
- Quick access to metrics and reports for valuable insights
An automated lead nurturing system should help you encourage prospects towards buying, allow your sales team to track the lead and be brought in at the right time, and give management an overview of your sales and automated lead nurturing campaigns performance.
Real-Time Integration with Web Forms
Your web forms should connect to your automated lead nurturing system in real-time. This means that as someone fills out and submits a form, it will appear instantly in your tool and inform your sales team that they have a new lead. If you have a multi-step form, you should also be able to track the lead and identify the drop off point if it isn’t completed. This provides valuable targeting data for lead nurturing campaigns.
Automated, Personalized Messages
Obviously, your sales team doesn’t have the capacity to personally follow up with every lead multiple times. Automated lead nurturing software delivers essential touchpoints with relevant, personalized emails and text messages. These messages should be based on the stage of the lead, the relevant product, and their perceived needs. It should provide value and be written like it’s from a real person.
Lead Prioritization and Categorization
Your lead nurturing software needs to be able to categorize and prioritize leads. Your sales team will tackle the hottest leads and the others can be enrolled into a lead nurture campaign until they’re ready to buy. But enrolling your prospects into the correct lead nurture campaign is critical – you want to ensure your emails are relevant and valuable in order to help the prospect and encourage them to become a customer when they’re ready.
Ability to Record Activities and Set Up Reminders
An important tool for automated lead nurturing software is the ability to record activities and set up reminders. This allows your sales team to record what happened with the prospect and set up follow up reminders. Alternatively, reminders can be set as part of a lead nurturing campaign to follow up when the lead has demonstrated that they’re ready to buy, through email or website actions.
Quick Access to Metrics and Reports for Valuable Insights
Metrics and reports help you understand your sales team and lead nurturing campaign performance. You’ll be able to identify areas of improvement and see what’s working well. It can also help you calculate the ROI of your lead generation sources and lead nurturing campaigns.
Setting Up Automated Lead Nurturing Software
Setting up automated lead nurturing software comes with some trial and error. You should be setting up a different campaign for each lead source and product at the minimum. You’ll need to consider:
- Who is your target audience?
- How can you segment this audience?
- What are the segment’s problems and needs?
- How many steps will there be in your lead nurturing workflow?
- What is the goal and desired action of each step and the overall lead nurture campaign?
- What will the content of each step be?
- How long will the workflow take to execute?
- What actions should remove a lead from the campaign?
- How will you evaluate your campaign?
A good lead nurturing and management system will help you build these automated lead nurturing workflows. Don’t be afraid to experiment and try different things – just make sure you’re only testing one thing at a time. Otherwise, you won’t know what truly impacted the results.