Your Contacts Database is Growing! How Do Help Leads Become Customers?
In Part 1 of our Inbound Marketing series, we talked about how publishing great content with a purpose, or context relevant to what prospects search for, can drive new traffic to your website. In Part 2 of this series, we followed up with how to convert those visitors into leads. Educating visitors helps earn their trust. Giving them information or tools they value encourages them to give you their information, and thus permission to contact them.
Now it's time to take a closer look at the leads in your system. Visitors have gotten some answers to burning questions from their search. They've even traded their contact info for something of value in return. How do you decide who the best leads are and then close them to customers?
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Close the Best Leads into Customers
Closing leads to customers takes nurturing and a personal touch. This is where Marketing and Sales must work together. Both groups need to agree on the definition of a good lead. Is it the first time someone gives you their information? Or is it later when they've read several things and downloaded several content offers? Is it a defined lead score that could be a combination of several interactions?
The answers are different for every company and can even vary quite a bit over time. The important step is for Marketing and Sales always to agree. In fact, both groups need to think of themselves as halves of the same team: Team Revenue. Together both groups should understand what the other is doing and why.
Once Sales and Marketing agree, both can go to work. Marketing should focus on capturing new Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and nurturing them. Sales should focus on the Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) and closing them to customers.
These MQLs, who are a good fit but not ready to buy, should continue to hear from Marketing. Automation can play a big role in this process. This group should get pre-planned emails and extra content to educate them. Later, when they've met the criteria to become an SQL, Sales can take the hand off and close the deal.
Marketing needs feedback from sales on what makes a good lead. If criteria changes, Marketing should update their workflows to capture meaningful lead information. Sales needs this lead intelligence. With it, they can make more effective sales calls and can provide the best help to new customers that need what you do.
Inbound Marketing provides a structure to both Sales and Marketing. Sales has traditionally been good at tracking information. Marketing not so much. But with Inbound Marketing, both groups can, and should, measure everything. Over time you learn what works well and you can improve what doesn't. Processes get better, and things run like clockwork. Content or processes that deliver a great return on investment get repeated. The best part? Customers are coming to you instead of you hunting for them!
In Part 4, we'll outline what may be the most important part of the Inbound Marketing methodology. Delighting customers again and again encourages them to become advocates for what you do and spread the word the great things you've done for them. When they do this, your network grows and the process of turning strangers into new customers starts all over again.
