By Frank Paterno
Maintaining and improving your business’ record of lead generation success requires hard work and dedication. One of the best and most important things you can do is develop an effective lead nurturing strategy. Tailoring your strategy can not only improve your outreach efforts, but will allow you to build great relationships with the most qualified and prosperous leads.
Immediate Action
Once you have received information regarding a new lead it is important to call the prospect within five minutes. If you are able to make contact with the lead on your first attempt, it is vital to determine whether or not the lead is qualified. After determining qualification, connecting on platforms like LinkedIn demonstrates your dedication to a great relationship. Converting your new lead to a contact is the last step to this process and opens the door for you to progress by beginning the lead nurturing process with your next prospect.
What if the Call was Missed?
Instead of getting discouraged and ending your outreach efforts after the first missed call, it is important to begin the follow-up process. A few next steps include sending a LinkedIn request, leaving a voicemail and emailing the contact. In this email, you can reference the voicemail you left to reveal your genuine interest in making contact. Noting the attempts you’ve made to connect will ensure that you are not overdoing or skimping out on your outreach efforts.
Day 1 – Continued Outreach
If the above steps do not lead to contact within a few hours, it is important to make sure you reach out two more times during the first day. All that is recommended for the remainder of the day is calling twice more – once in the early afternoon and once towards the end of the work day. For these calls it is vital to keep track of your activity, but unnecessary to leave more voice mails as you do not want to overwhelm or annoy your prospective leads.
Days 2 & 3
Lead nurturing may require outreach after day one. In order to give your prospects a chance to get in contact with you, continue to call them three more times on days two and three. Since perspective leads may be extremely busy, make sure you space out the three calls into various time periods – morning, noon and afternoon. These strategic efforts will give the prospect plenty of opportunities to answer your calls, which will then give you a chance to determine their qualification. If the prospect does not answer the first call on either day, make sure you leave a voicemail and send an email referencing the voicemail. For the remainder of the calls on day two and three, you do not need to leave voice mails or send more emails, just keep record of your outreach efforts for future reference.
Day 4+
After three days have passed, it is time to switch up your lead nurturing strategy. Instead of getting discouraged and stopping all outreach outreach efforts, simply cut down to one to two calls and one to two email every week. The desired outcome is getting in contact with a highly-qualified lead, which can only be achieved if thorough outreach efforts are maintained. To ensure that you are top-of-mind throughout the lead nurturing process, you can also encourage marketing to send nurture emails. Being proactive, not overwhelming, will ensure an eventual follow-up with the prospective lead.
Incorporating consistent outreach efforts into your lead nurturing strategy will demonstrate how important building relationships is to your prospects. This dedication to lead nurturing will ultimately lead to great connections with qualified leads.
Frank Paterno is the vice president of marketing at IntelliConnection. Follow him at @IntelliFrank .
