Enhancing Your Lead Nurturing Strategy
Whether you are a fast growing start-up or an established business, defining your target market is extremely important, that market is always going to be finite and it’s important you get the most out of every single lead to ensure as big a customer base as possible.
No matter how big or small your target market is, one day you will have reached the end of the list, you’re not going to stop sales activity so most companies find themselves going back to the beginning of the list and repeating the cycle. This however, presents a number of challenges; the data has eroded and needs enriching, the campaign requires a different tact & the responses need to have been properly tracked and managed to ensure we are not breaking GDPR or emailing anyone we shouldn’t have been.
The best way to think about this is looking at data as accounts rather than contacts. If there are 5,000 businesses that fit your target market you should be continuously sourcing and refreshing data for these, as opposed to buying a list or sourcing all the data and emailing through. Rather than finding 5,000 companies before going back to number one, instead continuously refreshing the data and running re-contact campaigns. Timing is key and without recycling data you are never going to hit the person at the right time. Lead generation is a continuous process and while also making your target market go a lot further, shifting to account based re-contacting will also increase your conversion rates.
When re-approaching the data you want to be sending 50% new and 50% recycled leads. At the recycling stage it’s important to re-enrich all the data. Individuals may have left the company, changed positions…etc. All of these are great trigger points and new ways into companies you otherwise haven’t been able to get into yet. Typically you want to keep your key decision makers, if this person has changed find the new contact person that has replaced them. With our secondary and Tertiary target titles we would then look to replace these with alternative people at the company. This provides a constant stream of new contacts that haven’t received any sort of outreach yet to be targeted.
Trigger Points
We all know that when setting up a re-contact campaign we can expect results to be typically lower than a first contact campaign. Perhaps the individuals have marked you as spam, perhaps they recognise your name and don’t even read the email…etc. By adding in new contacts we give ourselves a chance for a fresh approach. This is also a great time to start looking at trigger points, what triggers may have made this company be in a better position to buy our product?
1. Revenue – their revenue has increased and they have more cashflow to spend.
2. New Employees – new Target titles in the company that will have a fresh set of ears and ideas.
3. New product/service – If a company has launched a new product or service this is highly valuable information. Maybe your services tie in better with their new launch
4. Funding – if a company has received funding they will be more likely to invest?
Trigger Points
We all know that when setting up a re-contact campaign we can expect results to be typically lower than a first contact campaign. Perhaps the individuals have marked you as spam, perhaps they recognise your name and don’t even read the email…etc. By adding in new contacts we give ourselves a chance for a fresh approach. This is also a great time to start looking at trigger points, what triggers may have made this company be in a better position to buy our product?
1. Revenue – their revenue has increased and they have more cashflow to spend.
2. New Employees – new Target titles in the company that will have a fresh set of ears and ideas.
3. New product/service – If a company has launched a new product or service this is highly valuable information. Maybe your services tie in better with their new launch
4. Funding – if a company has received funding they will be more likely to invest?
It is important to have your SDR team monitoring trigger points for all accounts in your database, if a company launches a new product or service, you need to be ready to hit them with a tailored approach around this. If a company has just received funding ad this means they will now be in a better position again this should be picked up on in their next re-contact campaign.
Our SDR’s do this through research and Google alerts keeping up to date with all the latest news in the companies we are trying to convert.
Campaign strategy
Alongside the data collection cadence needs to be very carefully strategised. There is little to no point continuously sending the same campaigns to the same companies, who in turn have the same or no response. You need to get creative here and find new ways to grab their attention. Trigger points are obviously a vital element of this and be sure to include dynamic custom fields that can be tailored around various tigger points. In combination we use multi-channel approaches and especially tailored re-contact copy to re-engage the conversation with a mix between Email, LinkedIn, calling & video.
By spanning your re-contact campaigns over a slightly longer period of time you can ensure they do not come across in the wrong way causing any negative reactions. There no doubt will be a day where your target persona is facing the very problem you will be able to solve for them, and should they be nudged on this day you will be sure to get a response. Timing plays a part but we can have some control on this.
It comes similarly with industries, you wouldn’t target a bar or a restaurant now during covid as we know responses will be massively impacted, instead we will re-contact restaurants doing takeaway, or if possible another industry all together such as virtual training.
By spanning your re-contact campaigns over a slightly longer period of time you can ensure they do not come across in the wrong way causing any negative reactions. There no doubt will be a day where your target persona is facing the very problem you will be able to solve for them, and should they be nudged on this day you will be sure to get a response. Timing plays a part but we can have some control on this.
It comes similarly with industries, you wouldn’t target a bar or a restaurant now during covid as we know responses will be massively impacted, instead we will re-contact restaurants doing takeaway, or if possible another industry all together such as virtual training.
Conclusion
It takes a lot of resources and effort to plan continuous successful outbound campaigns, these are crucial to the growth and maintenance of the company, there is always a finite market so important you target all these leads efficiently. Data needs to be continuously recycled and funnelled into re-contact campaigns in a continuous process. By switching to account based selling it allows you to effectively do this while contacting multiple people at the company.
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