Lead Nurturing Funnel

Lead Nurturing Funnel

Most B2B marketers spend a lot of their time thinking about how to fill the lead funnel—how to create leads. While lead generation is critical, it’s equally important to think about how to move contacts through the funnel better and faster. There’s a huge ROI in doing this right.

When dealing with the sensitive lead nurturing process, timing is everything. The below analysis will describe the stages of a lead nurturing funnel and show you how to move contacts through this funnel. You’ll learn best practices for qualifying contacts through each stage of the cycle, best practices for nurturing contacts and tips on timing your interactions with leads.

 

Lead Nurturing Funnel Stage 1: Awareness

The first stage of your B2B funnel is “Awareness.” The goal in this stage is just to drive traffic to your site, through means like SEO, advertising, thought leadership, a company blog, etc.

As a lead generation marketer, you need to ask yourself: “Where is our awareness coming from?” The various sources of traffic (along with a general idea of “quality of visit”) can be found on your analytics. I use Webtrends and Google Analytics. Lots of people like Omniture or Coremetrics. It’s not so much about the tool, but about getting the right caliber of employee to derive business decisions from the tool.

The various sources of traffic to your site will include a mix of traffic from direct URL placement in a browser (direct traffic), organic search engines, social media sites, paid search engines, paid online advertising, referring sites, email marketing campaigns, and more. Once the traffic gets to your site you should have (many many) specific, targeted landing pages to capture and convert traffic into a prospect.

For a first bit of engagement, visitors shouldn’t have to register. If you require a form fill too early in the process, you’ll do two things:

  • You’ll scare away people you would want to nurture over time
  • You’ll cloud up your “engaged” contacts with people who are not truly very engaged

So, it’s great to offer content without requiring registration at first. Give them a video or articles at first, and when they want that next level of detail you can require a registration to move contacts into the “engaged” stage.

 

Lead Nurturing Funnel Stage 2: All Names

From that initial awareness stage you get site traffic, which is where people enter into the funnel. These aren’t leads (be very careful about that), these are just people whose names you’ve captured and you have permission to market to. This is the “New Names” part of the funnel.

 

Lead Nurturing Funnel Stage 3: Engaged

The “Engaged” step is someone who has responded to your company’s offer. For example, if you get a visitor to come to your site and fill out a form you can count them as “engaged,” but PLEASE for other new names (like a list of registrants at a tradeshow) don’t count them as “engaged” until they respond to a follow-up that you send out.

Now just because someone fills out a form—to watch a webinar on your website, for example—doesn’t make them a lead. At best they’re engaged. But just because you don’t want to call them yet doesn’t mean you don’t want to start to establish a relationship between them and the appropriate sales rep. So use some automation to start to do that. When someone gets an email follow up—if they’re new to the system (less than 1 day old)—I recommend waiting 2 hours, then automatically (through a Marketo or Eloqua trigger campaign) send them an email that looks like it comes from their sales rep.

It should be simple. Something that thanks the contact for taking whatever action they took, has an introduction from the rep, lets them know the rep will be sending some helpful guides and information over time, and includes a low-pressure call-to-action to have the contact call the sales rep if they’d like any specific information. What’s great about this is that if the contact really does want to talk with a sales rep, he or she can just hit reply and start the conversation. If not, it’s not very obtrusive.

 

Lead Nurturing Funnel Stage 4: Prospects

The next step is a bit tricky, and requires an automated and manual step to determine whether the new engaged person is a prospect. Most of this work can be automated through lead scoring—by, say, subtracting 100 points from all contact records whose occupation is “student.” However, there is an element of manual work determining if this new engaged person is a prospect.

A prospect is someone who is “in profile” who you think might be able to buy your product one day. So that might be determined by job title, budget, industry, company size or some other relevant factor defined in collaboration between marketing and sales.

Once a person becomes a prospect, that’s when you start the nurturing. According to SiriusDecisions there are 3 main ways to think about doing nurturing:

The majority of the time is spent on the Pre- Marketing Qualified Lead (Pre-MQL). That’s nurturing that core prospect database. The formal definition of this is “The process of building relationships with qualified prospects regardless of their timing to buy, with the goal of earning their business when they are ready.” Generally, this means maintaining permission to stay in from of your buyers as they educate themselves. You can’t make them buy faster, but you can stay relevant so that they call you up when they’re ready.
Recycled leads are leads that you’ve moved into the hands of sales (sales-qualified leads, opportunities) but for some reason the contact wasn’t appropriate to move forward in the process. If you can figure out why they were recycled (not the right time to buy, not the right person) you can customize how you nurture and develop that relationship.

A best practice here is to have the sales rep put a timeframe in when they recycle a lead and they can guarantee that a contact comes back to them in that amount of time. This is huge because in a lot of organizations salespeople feel the need to hang on to contacts, even if they’re just sitting there without nurturing and without being sold to.

This last category is really interesting to experiment with. These are your leads that have gone “inactive.” They haven’t done anything in a while, they’re just sitting around. Is this a problem? I like to see it as an opportunity to experiment with a new message since these contacts are basically dead and there’s really very little downside if you screw up. Try interesting offers, wacky ideas, and anything you might feel too reserved to try out on hot prospects. Customize and target your message based on where they were when they stalled out, send them messages fairly frequently and have fun.

 

Lead Nurturing Funnel Stage 5: Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)

These prospects are going to be your pool of interested people. It’s your job as a B2B marketer to nurture and develop the prospects in this pool over time. As you’re nurturing your prospect you need to be doing your lead scoring to determine when someone is a lead. Lead scoring allows you to set a point threshold so that only when the lead’s score reaches a certain value will a prospect become marketing qualified. It is at this point that marketing passes the lead to a sales development rep to contact (usually over the phone) to see if there’s a real qualified lead there.

 

Lead Nurturing Funnel Stage 6: Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)

If the sales development rep determines that, yes, this is a real lead, then they will turn it into a sales qualified lead and hand it off to an account executive. The account executive will then determine if this is something that they’re going to pursue as an opportunity.

A best practice that I strongly encourage for a B2B company is the strategy of No Lead Left Behind. When a sales qualified lead is created, you absolutely want sales to contact these people. Immediately. InsideSales.com’s research shows that their leads can get cold in as little as 10 minutes. No one wants that.

So, make sure to have a process that looks something like this:

  • Salesperson gets an alert when the SDR qualifies it. The lead goes on a “salesforce untouched” list until the salesperson calls.
  • If, in 24 hours, that lead is still on the “untouched” list the salesperson gets an alert.
  • In another 24 hours, if the lead is still on that list, an alert goes to the salesperson and the director of sales.
  • If that lead is still on the “salesforce untouched” list 24 hours after that, the salesperson, the director of sales, the VP of sales and the CEO get an alert. Believe me when I say, no salesperson wants to be part of that maelstrom.

This is a really great way to get everything flowing, making sure that there are no stale sales leads.

 

Lead Nurturing Funnel Stage 7: Opportunity


Sales opportunities happen when a salesperson sets up a meeting with a prospect. In general, marketing needs to track the revenue cycle from “engaged” contacts all the way through to “opportunities.” As a marketing organization, you need to be able to identify not just the cost per conversion or cost per lead, but really the cost per opportunity.

After a contact becomes an opportunity marketing can finally breathe a sigh of relief. From here on out, sales takes over (even though they’ve had a hand in the process since the lead qualification step). If they can’t close the sale, that’s largely a sales problem—just don’t expect sales to agree.

 

Recycling

At any of the above stages between prospect and opportunity sales can recycle (I prefer this term over “reject”) a contact back into marketing to be further nurtured. Many companies don’t have a strong post-recycling nurture program, and instead just feed these contacts back into a general pool of engaged contacts. I think this is a mistake. An advanced B2B marketing team will create specific nurturing paths for recycled leads based on their depth into the cycle before recycling.

 

A final takeaway: The key is that in no stage should a contact be sitting idle where they aren’t being nurtured by marketing or actively sold to. By recycling leads back to marketing, sales isn’t sitting on these contacts as they atrophy.

Are you looking for lead management consulting? Lead Lizard is a lead management consultancy with a specialty in lead scoring, lead qualification and lead nurturing. Let’s talk about how we can work together.