As technology permeates every aspect of our lives, we can lose sight of the importance of staying in touch with prospects. Customer relationships are at the core of sales. When you nurture relationships, you endear your customers to your brand and your business. Without this, your leads will go nowhere and sales will fall far short of goals.
Building a relationship and converting a prospect into a sales-ready lead, raises awareness and establishes a 1:1 personal relationship with each prospect. A successful lead generation campaign engages on many levels.
Keeps their attention. Engage and get the buyer’s attention through a multi-touch approach, routinely throughout the year. Response rates rise with each subsequent outreach attempt. But most sales pros give up after less than two touch points. In fact, on average, salespeople don’t even get to a second touch point when reaching out to a decision maker. This is such a lost opportunity!
Cultivates the relationship. B2B customer acquisition isn’t something that happens overnight. It takes time to develop a relationship. Cold calling fails when call campaigns are not given enough time to mature. Continuous one-on-one communication using various channels helps cultivate the relationship.
Maintains awareness for when they are ready to convert. A prospect may not convert to an appointment by the end of one call cycle or even four, but that doesn’t mean that the prospect won’t be interested at a later date. Repeat the cycle to keep you and your company top of mind for when they do want to take the next step.
Engages on multiple levels. Being top of mind is one of the best ways to reinforce your relationship and turn leads into appointments. A multi-level effort using calls, voicemail, email and LinkedIn, with sales and marketing working together can be very effective in raising awareness, keeping you top of mind and getting the prospect ready to make the commitment for an appointment and subsequently a sale. The multiple touches and the continuity of the effort are crucial components of lead nurturing. Touch points are opportunities to prepare leads for the final stage in the buying journey, the point of decision-making. The better the experience and the more valuable each of these touch points are to leads, the more likely they’ll be ready to make a buying decision and convert to paying customers.
A successful cold calling campaign is more complex than you may be able to develop yourself. Contact One of Kind Solutions to see how we can help.
