You just spoke in front of 300 people at an industry event.
At the end of your talk, 100 people take action on the book that you are offering them.
You take these 100 names and give them to your sales team who then tries to up-sell them into a higher ticket product that you offer.
15 of those people buy making your time spent at the event profitable.
You then proceed to ignore the other 85 people who had expressed some interest in what you do.
Those 85 people just hit a dead end in your business.
If you know anything about persuasion architecture then you know that there are certain people that pounce on opportunities without much thought. You should try and sell a larger package to that person immediately because if you give them too much time, you will lose them. In fact I expect that this post will resonate with that type of buyer most.
But what about the rest of us?
The rest of the world wants to build a little bit more of a relationship. I liken this to meeting someone at the bar for the first time. When you meet them, do you immediately ask them to sleep with you? If your answer was “yes” then you have bigger problems then marketing so stop reading now. Most reasonable people would not take this approach. They may start with simply buying someone a drink and getting to know them a little better.
Your business is no different. You have to nurture your leads and bring them in closer to you and give them clarity of what it is that you do and how you can solve their problems or improve their lifestyle.
In the above speaking scenario, a great opportunity exists for business owners to drop those leads into an e-mail management service like iContact or Aweber and start to build a relationship with the people who don’t buy immediately.
Most small businesses miss that step. They try one campaign for a group of people and when that doesn’t work they abandon those people and go out to pursue a different audience. That wastes your business time and money.
In marketing you have a loyalty loop and a sales loop. It’s important that the loops by seamless abd direct your potential customers to where they need to go next. Inbound marketer, Hubspot, talks about using CRMs to help you close sales loops in your business and track results to see where your efforts are best served.
The moral of the story for your marketing efforts is to not leave your potential clients at dead ends of your sales processes. It’s much easier to nurture the leads you have than to go out and constantly find new ones.
How can your business better nurture leads? What’s worked for you?
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