Meta: ABM is often misunderstood. It’s touted as a magic wand. It’s not. It’s so much more.
You’ve heard ABM campaigns work and that they’ll fix your pipeline problems.
Gartner reported in 2021 that programs that assign 32% of their budget to ABM campaigns had a high-quality pipeline.
Yet, many have found that their ABM campaigns are not working. And you’ve done all of it— identified accounts interested in offers similar to yours, accounts with intent, and everything a good ABM practice should entail.
But it just doesn’t work. Where are the high-quality pipelines that the statistics had promised you?
Leads are still down.
Marketing campaigns are still not reaching their audience. But trust in ABM is at an all-time high.
Why wouldn’t it be? It’s an effective way. But only when done right.
Businesses are missing a vital piece of the ABM puzzle: the multiple stakeholders.
Stakeholders and decision-makers have a list. And perhaps, you’re not on it.
The accounts you’re targeting have a committee of around 11 buyers (on average). These decision-makers, like most people, have vested interests that they wish to achieve from the sale. Maybe the CSO wants a tool with better security and integration. The CTO wants a tool that seamlessly collects and collates data.
There are many cases where the committee will want different things. But they’re working for one common goal: The organization’s profits.
To keep their vested interests protected and ensure organizational growth, the buyers come to a compromise— they create a list of vendors they would want to work with. This list is a shared one.
And as HBR puts it, 90% of the buyers buy from this list.
Even if you use ABM, if you’re not on the list, your tactics are going to be futile.
The solution is straightforward.
Multi-stakeholder engagement is the secret recipe to ABM.
Now that the secret’s out. What can you do about it?
ABM is not easy.
It’s resource-intensive, requires personalization, and a molecular understanding of the buyers. This is where most teams mess up.
ABM is not what the blogs are telling you— they lack depth and nuance to explain a complex process. And the fulcrum of this process lies in multi-stakeholder engagement.
Your first step for ABM is to understand if your budget allows for it. A chat with your finance team comes way before strategy and planning.
If yes, then
Identification
You must discover your high-value accounts.
What problem is your product solving?
Why is it solving it?
How?
When you answer simple (yet multi-faceted) questions like these, you understand what market you’re catering to and the specific gaps you solve.
Once you have that, you have your high-value accounts.
In comes intent.
You can either use tools like 6Sense, Bombora, or an agency like your very own Ciente to discover the intent behind these accounts.
Are they actively looking for solutions?
Why?
But now comes the tricky part— competition and the list play a huge part in this.
Whatever solution you’re solving probably has industry leaders or a fair amount of competition. Your accounts/buyers are so self-aware that they know about the risks in their industry before even knowing about your solution.
That list helps them narrow down the options. And it is this list that you must influence.
There are a lot of conversations regarding ABM, but the one mistake everyone seems to make is not understanding that it isn’t a plan but a strategy to create a ripple effect. And that takes time. Quite a lot of it. For a successful ABM campaign, you have to start by engaging the buying committee. And how will you know who’s on it?
Spray and pray?
Two Methods
In a conversation with our CMO, the marketing team asked her: What actually runs the ABM campaign? Can you identify the stakeholders without talking to someone in the organization?
The answer she gave drives our conversations here. She said, “It’s not the person who visits the website a few times. That’s just interest. But if you see a whole group of people on your website or product listing and they’re from the same organization, you can bet some of those are going to be decision-makers or at least people in the know-how. We can start there.”
That’s the first one. The second one is a bit simpler but a bit on the expensive side.
Essentially, you will be running a campaign on your account. To everyone. The C-suites. The directors. The board.
This data is public knowledge. But that does not mean you just start blasting them with messages; your campaigns should reflect the role of the people involved and the specific problem you solve for them. From your email marketing campaigns and ads to informational content, all of it will be focused, in some way, to cater to your accounts’ needs.
This is resource-heavy because it requires hyper-personalization. This is what the successful ABM campaigns you hear about are doing.
Sales’ Role
Without your sales team’s active involvement, your engagement strategy is bound to fail. At the end of the day, no matter what the ABM campaign does, your SDRs must convey the same energy.
The faltering of your promise or over-promising something that does not exist will not be good for your sales teams. Ideally, after an ABM campaign, you would want them to call you.
But, ideal scenarios rarely pan out; there will be moments where your SDRs will have to call multiple people at the same time. They will have to ensure brand voice and understand the problem.
And they have to be savvy enough to have a conversation with them instead of pushing for an aggressive sell. As they will be engaging people who share common information and communication space, their job would be to: –
Create goodwill and trust.
Foster relationships
Act as consultants
The great news is that your sales teams know buyers better than marketing teams. All the marketing department needs to do is give them brand guidelines— the perception you want to display.
The rest is up to them. And seldom sales team fail at that.
As their support, you will have to: –
Craft sales enablement
Create brand guidelines – think TOV but personalized for the sales team.
Highlights of the product
Product demos and all relevant material.
As you work your way through ABM, you will realize.
ABM will not be a fix if you get stuck in rigidity.
There are a lot of ABM playbooks out there. The marketing noise, as the industry calls it. From ABA to personalization-at-scale, there are a lot of plays marketers are vying for.
But the industry needs to wake up to reality— the rigidity is not working. Either marketing is high art or it’s a thing to over-optimize.
Some traditional methods still work irrespective of what gurus say, and the converse is also true. But what’s not working is playing it safe.
And ABM does not work on safety. It is risk and wallet-intensive. ABM is the hunt, and make no mistake, the multiple stakeholders of any given account are your trophies.
Lead Nurturing Strategies: The Dialogue Between Businesses and Their Customers
Customers want to feel brands care about them, but brands are stuck in a catacomb of run-of-the-mill strategies. How can they escape this stagnancy?
Relationships are managed, not marketed.
Today, savvy marketers tightly hold on to this modern philosophy. But it wasn’t the actual state of marketing in the 1950s.
The so-called traditional marketing took a more transactional approach, driven by valueless gimmicks and promotions. Marketing was perceived as an entirely separate segment.
The customer-centric philosophy branching across the organization didn’t expand to the marketing department. This means its sole purpose was to drive sales towards its goals rather than focusing on a continuous buyer-seller relationship.
The transactional purview of marketing rampant in the 1950s doesn’t offer the whole picture. When a contact is established between marketers and customers, exchange is only one of the components.
There’s so much that goes unacknowledged here. Oversimplifying customers’ decision-making under the want/need orientation is limiting. Customers are more than mere buyers, and their purchases entail nuances that traditional marketing often misses out on.
So, modern marketing has rewritten the old playbooks.
It’s focused more on customers and delivering quality than ever before. Marketing solutions aren’t about offering a quick fix anymore, but more of what the prospective buyer wants from you.
“It is not just that once you get a customer, you want to keep him. It is more a matter of what the buyer wants.”
By warranting this in your marketing strategies, the business deal becomes a promise of a valuable and mutually beneficial relationship between both parties. Among the relational dimensions of B2B deals, capturing and retaining customers are equally crucial.
Owing to this, marketing has made a 180-degree shift. It’s gradually evolving instead of remaining a static segue into closing deals.
In this landscape, lead nurturing has become imperative.
It’s an instrument for building and retaining long-term relationships, an implication of loyalty – a key fuel of business profitability and longevity. This marketing function’s significance has sneaked up on marketers to become the driver of a better bottom line for most businesses.
However, this isn’t the only reason why a more relationship-focused approach is paramount.
Nurturing relationships with leads accommodates customer diversity and tackles their skepticism. The prospective buyer only moves towards brands that deliver, not perform a charade.
The underlying practice? – Transform customers into more active recipients of marketing campaigns, rather than passive ones. And the key component here is personalized marketing functions. This way, both parties obtain value and benefits.
But this paradigm shift isn’t as straightforward as it sounds.
Marketing is no longer a subfunction of your organization. It’s a philosophy of doing business. Before diving into how lead nurturing elevates value delivery through your campaigns, let’s spotlight the lead-nurturing challenges.
Lead-nurturing challenges
Not every marketing technique works perfectly.
Across this landscape, experimentation could lead to more harm than good, resulting in a negative reputation. This is merely one obstacle marketers face.
With marketing being so dense and dynamic, each strategy doesn’t come into fruition overnight. It requires consistency and patience.
The same applies to your lead-nurturing campaigns. Its challenges are plenty. And ignoring any major ones could result in opportunities slipping through the cracks, costing your business a great deal:
1. The right time: Timing remains at the heart of marketing. It’s the one motto – sending the right message to the right audience at the right time.
Here, timing doesn’t signify a specific round figure. Time is about knowing when to communicate with a prospect in lead-nurturing and adjacent marketing functions. It’s crucially about the timeframe – give too much and you seem desperate, whereas interacting too little makes you seem uninterested. Both sides of the coin influence customer choices.
The simple idea – find a balance. There’s no rulebook or cookie-cutter approach, but you can study your customers for everything you require to build a working timeframe. Begin with the average time it takes for a lead on TOFU to become an active customer.
No marketer is all-knowing, but we all start somewhere.
2. The right frequency: Just like the right time, there’s no singular number stating the times a lead should or can be contacted. But this metric is where marketing struggles the most – it makes or breaks a sale.
Too many emails can overwhelm your buyers, and too few can make them go cold. Where exactly is the middle ground?
It’s your marketing team that decides it.
At a decent pace, leads appreciate and welcome relevant content, especially emails. But this depends on the quality, too. Email marketing has observed a significant dip in quality, even though it’s one of the most crucial marketing channels.
Three crucial but lacking components are effort, innovation, and research. Start from there.
3. The right content: Marketing has built its ship on resonance and relevance. Prospects gravitate towards solutions and content that understands them, why personalization has come to carry enormous weight.
Content marketing is one of the most effective channels of lead generation. It’s cost-efficient and promises to deliver value.
But not all content works. Each buyer is different, and at a different stage in the sales cycle, necessitating targeted content specific to their buying stage.
However, over 71% of marketers believe that curating targeted content is one of the most demanding aspects of lead nurturing. Informative content for developing brand awareness will never deeply engage the leads in the MOFU or BOFU.
How do they navigate this?
Start from the bottom and what is accessible: customers.
To create targeted and resonating content, understanding the prospective customer is paramount. It begins with outlining the buyer persona to accurately identify their desires.
These three components are where marketers face the most dilemma. At the nucleus of every well-designed lead-nurturing strategy, time, frequency, and content take priority.
Getting this right creates a seamless roadmap to building effective, ironclad lead-nurturing strategies. This is crucial to spotlight because customer relationships are multi-dimensional, consisting of positive and negative feelings. Just as it’s possible for customers to have a love-hate relationship with a brand.
So, conventional lead-nurturing processes might not be enough.
Its underlying strategies should be revisited regularly to fit customer requirements, especially if they want a particular relationship type with you.
Lead nurturing strategies to engage leads at every touchpoint
To begin with, nurturing leads requires not merely a strategy, but a clear vision. How can you convert leads without engaging with the same old tactics? Of course, it has to answer:
What are you trying to achieve?
What do these strategies mean to your department?
Do they highlight the what, how, and when?
How effectively can your plan be translated into actions?
If not outlined meticulously, strategies can be mistranslated, and failure to implement them could land the blame on you.
So, your lead nurturing strategies should invite cross-departmental collaborations and support necessary changes, from offering a valuable competitive edge to elevated efficiency.
1. Understand your potential customers
Personalization has become a significant tool in marketing campaigns. But how to execute it, doesn’t just come out of the top of one’s head.
It requires understanding your potential customers. And this starts with segmenting them according to their website behavior and demographics. Doing so will easily highlight their particular needs and preferences.
But segmentation has to be multi-layered. Merely segmenting leads based on their demographics wouldn’t offer jack-squat. So, move ahead – establish a three-step system:
Demographic (larger groups)
Customer psychology and behavior
Customer need (underlying motive for their engagement)
This multi-step segmentation technique is crucial for your business because the more you segment your lists, the more distilled view you’ve of your customers. So, while direct communication is still further down in the funnel, you get an idea about what they’re looking for.
Knowing this will help you understand whether both of you fit each other’s requirements – instead of wasting time and resources on a prospect that doesn’t lead anywhere.
Moreover, highlighting different customer profiles that fit into your business model will offer a more comprehensive view of your marketing functions. And how it aligns with the broader organization.
2. Personalize your communications
In 2021, McKinsey & Company published a report stating that organizations building customer intimacy robustly witness faster revenue growth.
And this echoes true even in the current market-scape. For brands to demonstrate that they really understand their customers, they must offer a relationship that suits the latter’s needs.
Not every buyer is the same – their preferences gravely differ. So, brands cannot bundle the same techniques and offer them to every segment.
Segmentation is vital, and every marketer realizes that, but when it comes to actually applying it? Marketing falls flat. This begins a long road towards unfulfilled promises and customer frustration.
Personalization has not just become a necessary tool but the default standard of engagement. Customers don’t just desire but demand it. So, it’s all embodied in the experience you offer them because if your brand doesn’t, they move on to one that will.
To strengthen your lead nurturing, demonstrate that, as a brand, you value and prioritize the relationship, not the final transaction.
Some of the ways to ascertain this include:
Offering relevant and customized service recommendations
Tailoring marketing messages and communication
Timely promotions or discounts tied to key moments
Celebrating significant milestones
Sending surveys and follow-up emails after a successful purchase
Personally addressed emails are sent periodically to keep them engaged
When the customers feel that you know them on a personal level, the positive experiences build a positive brand reputation.
3. Develop resonating content for hyper-focused targeting
Quality content can be a tool of persuasion when done correctly.
Imagine the different kinds of books available in the world – there are hundreds of genres. But not every genre resonates with readers. Some readers are more into fiction and others into non-fiction. Even when it comes to fiction, others prefer contemporary over classics.
It’s the same with the B2B audience. Your meticulously and well-crafted content wouldn’t serve much purpose if it’s not what your prospects are looking for. At the TOFU, the prospect seeks informative content, but offering them pricing charts and e-Guides might overwhelm them. Start with content that informs them who you are and what your brand does.
While content types depend on where they are in their buyer’s journey, it’s also based on the segment’s pain points and needs.
But this requires marketers to undertake a hyper-targeting approach. Generic content, just like generic techniques, doesn’t pack any punch – it sounds like your competitors’ messages recycled and packed in a different wrapper.
Or, in other words, “copy-paste” content that offers no real value, and is just an arrangement of hollow words that happen to make sense.
It won’t do the prospects any good. Each has different needs and challenges they want addressed. While marketing and sales can ensure the messages are targeted, the solutions should back these promises.
Your curated content has to resonate with this.
So, it’s paramount to ensure targeted and dynamic content takes precedence in your lead-nurturing strategies.
4. Leverage email marketing automation
Doing content marketing right isn’t merely about content. If it were, marketing teams would assemble sub-teams and bombard their prospects incessantly. Something has to stick, right?
But content marketing isn’t just about content. It’s really about the right message sent to the right person at the right time.
However, marketing takes this too casually. Most still believe that integrating any trending tech into existing infrastructure will work wonders. Strategizing has really taken a backseat in the age of advanced tech. But email blasts aren’t the craze anymore.
Because its cons outweigh the potential pros. Your messages might not even reach a majority of your audience – bad timing or spam folder.
Amidst this rings the significance of email marketing continues to play in lead nurturing. And when paired with automated campaigns, this has proved to be quite fruitful.
Marketing has found a solution to traditional email marketing challenges – drip campaigns. Through these, it’s easy to stay on top of prospects’ minds and churn out long-term benefits.
But done manually, this can be really time-consuming. So:
Automate them with the right triggers based on the prospect’s behavior and ensure it aligns with your marketing and sales CRM.
Set up clear campaign objectives and time frames.
Write pre-written personalized messages for different segments present in your CRM.
Set the actions triggered by the specific behaviors and demographic data.
These are just the core elements available in all email drip campaigns. To curate an effective one, you’ll have to step into your customer’s shoes.
Your campaign is really a journey – realizing this will help you build a drip campaign that aligns with your customers, and not just what you believe is right. You’re looking to nurture and cultivate the customer lifecycle, not just engage them.
5. Align marketing and sales
Marketing and sales alignment is an integral component from TOFU to BOFU. Without their synergy, opportunities can easily slip through the cracks.
It’s not just that. Processes such as lead nurturing require marketing and sales to collaborate on almost every aspect, even definitions of what they think MQLs and SQLs are.
Because tailoring messages and strategies depends on these definitions. An agreed-upon definition spotlights where the leads really are in the sales funnel, elevating marketers’ and SDRs’ understanding.
Any lingering misalignment can result in a lack of trust and both departments working more slowly.
However, if they are accurately aligned, it could afford the business particular benefits:
Seamless and quick execution of changes.
Different perspectives contribute creatively to problem-solving.
Elevated respect and trust between departments lead to employee retention.
In simple terms, aligning marketing and sales technically means agreement, communication, and consistent feedback loops. Rather than working in isolation and as separate entities, both teams need to realize the extent to which their efforts are intertwined.
Marketing should support sales efforts and have shared objectives. Because even if their functional nuances differ, their goal is ultimately the same – ensuring consistent revenue and growth for the business.
These lead-nurturing strategies must work in unison.
Lead nurturing has many challenges, such as not getting the timing right. However, some key aspects can help marketers navigate this quagmire and start on the right foot.
At the end, handling leads and nurturing relationships isn’t as easy as it sounds. Its multi-dimensionality has demanded that marketing transcend from its traditional playbooks and innovate.
Maybe marketers have grown too comfortable and refuse to budge. But modern buyers have moved the needle.
They need to see the efforts from the get-go and not just be offered empty promises. To tackle this, marketers are moving deeply towards lead nurturing. With this, modern marketers hope they know what customers really want.
So, they have boiled down the priority from being focused on the ultimate transaction to building relationships that matter. And unearthed that at the heart of each customer’s need is the need for value.
5 Best Lead Nurturing Tools to Enhance Customer Engagement
B2B industries want long-term relationships, yet they fail to move their buyers to action. Impatience? Yes. And an underinvestment in the necessary tools.
“People are moved to action by how a speaker makes them feel.”
HBR, The Art of Persuasion Hasn’t Changed in 2,000 Years.
Whether one’s selling a service or putting forth their point of view, influencing others has become a business imperative. And it’s become rooted in our daily lives.
Beneath the mechanical blocks of the B2B marketing processes, marketers are talking to people – those with their ambitions and fears. So, what moves them a step ahead isn’t just logic, it’s resonance – what they feel.
Lead nurturing is a significant driver for this.
The sales cycle can be looked at as an emotional arc. At every touchpoint, brands must build familiarity and reduce friction through emotional appeal. This is why across B2B buying, every marketing and sales role involves convincing prospects to take a desired action – one that’ll push them closer to the purchase.
But the modern buyer is skeptical and ridden with hesitation. This stems from years of unmet promises and recycled messages.
It’s one of the crucial reasons personalization has become paramount. The prospective buyer needs to believe in the brand – you’ll back your words with action. And if a brand fails to do this, it loses credibility and weakens the proposal.
So, for a buyer to actually consider purchasing your solutions, you need to keep this modular framework in mind:
Illustrate credibility: Why should the customers trust you?
Deliver a logic (data and evidence): Why should your audience care about your marketing messages?
Leverage the art of storytelling: Move prospects through emotions.
Turn the intangible value into tangible benefits: How will your solutions help the brand?
Start with your strongest point: What does your brand do differently?
In marketing and sales, remember that less is always more. In this economy of snackable content, attention slackens almost everywhere but at the beginning. So, your teams have minimal time to grab the prospect’s attention and consequently, transform their perspective.
As much as marketing is about persuading prospects to buy, it’s also about changing their perception of your brand. Once the lead is captured, these processes follow until the final conversion.
But there’s one nurturing mistake even modern marketers continue to make: Not analyzing prospect behavior across multiple touchpoints. Most leads are tech-savvy and intelligent, so they conduct their research and study solutions across several online platforms.
Although a rampant disjuncture, savvy marketing teams are determined to learn and innovate. So, they’ve embraced one solution – lead-nurturing tools.
What are Lead Nurturing Tools?
These tools help marketers guide leads along the buyer’s journey and convert them into active buyers. While this is something lead nurturing actually tackles, software solutions focus on the intricacies.
Most often, there’s a vital lack of a lead-nurturing strategy. How does the nitty-gritty work efficiently without a strategic implementation plan?
So, lead-nurturing tools instill a framework around free-floating ideas. While the original ideas around nurturing leads are retained, the tools help marketing teams curate a strategy. There has to be an in-and-out map for building and maintaining client relationships for a long, consistent period.
What is implementation without a strategy? A failed attempt.
So, lead-nurturing software helps. They monitor leads, examine their behavior, and cultivate a relationship with leads, functioning irrespective of where the leads are in the funnel. This allows leads to move through the buying journey at their own pace, while SDRs work on trimming unnecessary steps in the sales cycle.
This only becomes successful through underlying instruments to drive marketing and sales, lead-nurturing tools, and strategies.
Necessary Features of Lead-Nurturing Tools for Informed Consideration
While there are particular trends that even marketers aren’t exempt from, investing in these tools should prove valuable for your business.
Given the significance of this step, the software you adopt has to entail features that enhance and support your strategies. Remember, not everything works or is one-size-fits-all.
1. Email Marketing Automation: For creating drip campaigns that send emails (targeted content) to leads based on where they are in the funnel. Then, depending on their engagement (response), moves them up or down a stage.
The emails are sent periodically to retain lead interest. Like, when someone subscribes to your newsletter, marketing automation tools ensure they receive a welcome email on time.
This elevates engagement with existing customers and establishes brand awareness for new visitors in the long run.
2. Lead segmentation: Segmenting your contact list based on particular factors affords a structure to your strategies. When the accounts are segregated based on their interests, preferences, pain points, demographics, etc., it’s easier to engage with them.
This simplifies the process for your marketing team – tailoring and delivering content becomes straightforward. A commonplace marketing principle is underscoring how to send the right message to the right audience at the right time.
Your ICP wants content that resonates with, not recycled messages that seem like a template.
3. Lead scoring: Assigning scores has become an efficient way to qualify leads. This process gauges their purchasing intent and spotlights the relevant ones.
However, lead scoring has become too static. Businesses adopt scoring systems that don’t fit their requirement or overall working model. If scoring is done right, it can bring several benefits to your sales teams.
If your SDRs are aware of which leads should be prioritized, they can appropriately streamline their nurturing and communication tactics. Colder leads may require more persuasion, while hot ones may need resources that push them to the final stage.
So, lead scoring facilitates more personalized interaction between your team and potential buyers.
4. Behavior tracking: The modern buyer spends the majority of their time researching potential solutions to their pain points.
Think of the B2B buying committee. You cannot factor in the engagement patterns of just one decision-maker in the group. It signifies nothing. So, with the evolving consumer behavior, it’s become necessary to track the behavior of the entire committee, especially across multiple touchpoints.
The collected data from multiple touchpoints offers a more accurate idea of the lead’s intent level. This helps develop a basis for your strategies and highlights the most effective communication channels.
5. Integration with CRM: Lead-nurturing tools don’t function in isolated environments. To gauge its maximum potential, the software is integrated with CRM systems.
Lead-nurturing tools that allow seamless integration also facilitate more space for your business’s expansion. It works in synergy with existing infrastructure (not replacing it), improving lead management.
So, before executing the tool, ensure it has agile integration capabilities and can work in synergy with existing marketing and sales platforms. If correctly done, it can streamline and magnify lead data to better align marketing and sales.
6. Campaign performance: An effective lead-nurturing tool should offer a comprehensive set of functions around leads.
There are multiple channels and leads with different intent levels – how will you know what works and what doesn’t? With campaign management features in your lead-nurturing software, you can outline this.
Lead-nurturing tools offer a comprehensive view of your campaigns, helping you monitor and track them.
The nurtured leads must move through the funnel – either they drop off, move ahead, or stay stuck. This spotlights the communication strategies and channels that are actually working for you and that aren’t. The campaign’s performance analysis also affords you an answer – whether this tool is working for you.
Top 5 Lead-Nurturing Tools for Any Business
Each business has distinct working models and objectives. Following the trend will get you nowhere, but with the right software, you can reach the stars – leads nurtured to become active customers.
But how do marketers gauge which ones are the best in the market, and do they actually work?
This depends on your brand and its requirements.
But according to us, there are 5 lead-nurturing tools that have proved their worth across the marketplace, and irrespective of your nuances, can deliver optimal results for you.
1. HubSpot
Pricing: Free for up to 5 users. Paid subscription begins at $15 for every user/month and is billed annually.
HubSpot’s lead-nurturing software solution has one crucial edge: cross-departmental alignment.
To an extent, sales, marketing, and customer service indeed rely on each other. And HubSpot’s tool makes it possible to streamline this practice. It allows the teams to collate customer data and curate hyper-personalized and targeted experiences.
It helps teams focus on what actually matters by automating routine tasks and saving email templates for the future. The platform entails autoresponders, offers personalized email sequences, and holds robust integration capabilities.
Through this, you can track the campaign’s effectiveness and monitor the conversion rates.
Moreover, one of HubSpot’s top features is its intuitive interface. So, it can be seamlessly adopted across sales, marketing, and customer service, simplifying customer management.
Brevo, an email marketing and CRM solution, is adept at running and managing multichannel campaigns. It allows marketers to automate emails to deliver them to the right audience at the right time.
Teams can streamline and manage SMS, email, and transactional messaging with a single account. The organization’s platform efficiently handles automation, lead segmentation, and third-party app integration.
Brevo’s lead-nurturing platform allows 24*7 connection with prospective customers – track, automate, and schedule meetings.
The platform also facilitates seamless lead management, offering a comprehensive view into marketing and sales interactions with potential customers. This decreases the need for additional apps, allowing you to engage prospects in real-time.
Pipedrive’s automation platform has one objective: to help sales close more sales. It entails customizable sales pipelines and real-time insights into ongoing deals.
The platform helps marketing and sales streamline and visualize leads’ progression through the pipeline. This way, it’s easier to track leads and optimize workflows, ensuring each lead is given the appropriate priority.
Additionally, it allows SDRs to refine their nurturing strategies through its unique and intuitive reporting features – lead segmentation and activity reminders. The intelligence interface with drag-and-drop options makes organizing and updating deal status straightforward.
Different departments can sync their data through robust integration and enhance their productivity.
The best feature? Pipedrive’s app integration works across all funnel stages. For example, once the deal is won, sales can use the tool to curate an engaging email instantly and send it off as a follow-up.
Omnisend‘s marketing platforms are popular for their minimalistic interface. It’s built for experts and beginners alike with easy-to-use features that require no learning curve.
Its lead-nurturing platform allows marketers to create aesthetically pleasing and compelling marketing campaigns and personalize the message. The tool hosts all the required features to nurture relationships with potential clients – track engagement, timely follow-ups, advanced segmentation, and automated workflows.
Omnisend has a partner program in place that allows freelancers and marketing agencies to close more deals and enhance their retention rate. It doesn’t require much focus and enables sales to automate most of their tasks, from post-sales follow-ups to reactivation emails.
Additionally, it aids in developing email newsletters by leveraging a drag-and-drop email builder, ready-made templates, and a built-in email list cleaner feature.
Omnisend is a simple choice for lead nurturing. Its best feature? In-depth analytics with heat maps and intelligent segmentation.
EngageBay CRM is a comprehensive marketing, sales, and customer support software solution. It integrates email automation, lead generation, CRM, and social media engagement.
This platform allows users to acquire, nurture, and close potential clients through:
Automating the distribution of email newsletters
Maintaining client relationships through the in-built CRM system
Design, execute, and manage marketing campaigns
Comprehensive customer segmentation for hyper-focused targeting
Creating custom web forms and landing pages for client websites
Maintain contact lists and store engagement history
Offer visibility into the pipeline and track leads
EngageBay allows marketing and sales to manage relationships and guide them seamlessly through the pipeline – all of this through a single platform.
The marketing tool considers your brand’s requirements and extracts meaningful insights from each client communication. This helps businesses seamlessly convert website visitors into active buyers.
Lead Nurturing Tools Add an Edge to Your Communication Efforts
Nurturing leads is a crucial but easily ignored component of the conversion process. Most marketers who struggle with increasing their conversion rates often skip this step or don’t offer it much significance.
It’s an error that could cost them a punch.
Not gauging the full potential of lead-nurturing strategies can be detrimental to your marketing efforts. So, if you haven’t climbed aboard yet, it’s time.
Lead-nurturing tools offer the right channel to hook your potential customers and communicate your brand’s value. It’s a true marketing treasure trove, allowing you to keep the leads engaged until they are persuaded enough.
These software solutions aren’t merely a way to streamline your nurturing processes, but an instrument to deepen customer relationships. What actually matters is – a value-driven connection with buyers, keeping your pipeline hot, and brand growth consistent.
Business deals are all about relationships. And developing long-term loyal ones requires spearheaded attention and a lot of patience.
“Lead nurturing is about building authentic connections,” states Salesforce.
A marketer’s pathway to generating leads shouldn’t be hyper-focused on the transactional value. Your clients aren’t just revenue reservoirs. They are the nay-sayers of how your brand is perceived, influencing its reputation and marketing positioning.
It’s a two-way relationship.
While they need your solutions, you need them, too, to improve your standing.
However, the increased marketplace contention has elevated the dilemma for businesses operating within the same industry and target market: Why would they choose us?
The truth is, if the prospective clients don’t deem your brand credible and reputable, they’ll rarely look back. This is far from each business’s actual goal: to convert prospects into active customers.
But modern marketers must do things differently.
Approach the ‘conversion’ process as more than just ‘closing a deal.’ And undertaking a value-centric approach, targeting potential customers at every step of their buying journey.
The only schism here is an innovative understanding of what exactly a “value-centric” approach is. And not just a conventional reading of the benefits you offer.
Marketing has to move beyond promoting the same services and products. This old playbook doesn’t work anymore. Instead, it should be about rethinking and engineering an agile marketing method for buyers.
The reality has reminded marketers that originality comes in waves, but being unique isn’t always about being original. In marketing, it’s about taking what exists and molding it in a way that facilitates your business to prove its value in ways different from traditional ones.
But to deliver this value and prove its worth, businesses must relinquish the presumption that clients are mere buyers.
Even marketing at large omits that customers aren’t just consumers.
In B2B, the decision-makers in a buying committee are also creators and developers, trying their best to navigate familiar business challenges.
So, marketing’s customer-first approach can only take root when it offers an end-to-end partnership. This means working ‘with’ the clients from the beginning till the end to ensure their experiences seamlessly integrate with the marketing solutions.
HBR’s assertion that “people are the new channel” can work as the underlying basis of your customer-first value-driven strategies.
This thinking underscores that your marketing team isn’t just a solution, or the customers aren’t mere numbers – both parties are extensions of each other.
This is what lead nurturing is about.
Lead nurturing means building and communicating value to prospective clients.
To offer you the general purview of how lead nurturing works:
What is lead nurturing?
Fundamentally, this marketing strategy entails offering valuable resources to leads, persuading them to advance further into the sales funnel.
First, marketers focus on capturing or grabbing leads’ interest through compelling and personalized assets. Then, the efforts are directed at deepening the relationship by addressing critical pain points and positioning your brand as the go-to solution.
During this conversation, your brand is centered as a friend and a consultant. You hear the potential buyer’s challenges and offer advice as the subject-matter experts. At the nucleus is the unique value proposition and the tangible value you can offer them.
Through the nurturing process, you’re making a promise: to be their end-to-end partner, not just a one-off deal.
And this is why the tone of communication takes much precedence. There’s much to do even before your brand moves to its sales pitch. Lead nurturing earns you the right to pitch your proposal.
Outlining the lead-nurturing process this way makes it seem demanding. And the truth is, in the modern B2B buying landscape, it is.
Why is nurturing leads vital for conversion in the first place?
The expansion and emergence of B2B businesses have saturated and overwhelmed the client with analysis paralysis. And even when buyers end up making a deal, lackluster solutions and unmet promises have only ensued distrust. It has led to a generic hesitance when leads first enter the sales funnel.
They cannot progress down the funnel on their own. But a little guidance can help them. In this case, lead nurturing functions as a guide to those who already illustrate purchasing intent.
But, for curious onlookers, the nurturing process might be an informative session for getting to know the brand. It all boils down to active and ongoing communication across all active channels.
And, most crucially, making an impression.
It’s imperative to your brand’s success. Not everyone who enters your funnel holds purchasing intent or purchases right away. With B2B buying going digital, it’s likely the buyer found you through an online search. And even though most buyers have become self-directed and make decisions even before talking to an SDR, they need convincing to move in the right direction.
So, once the lead’s been captured, it’s time to cultivate it.
It’s likely that the lead is researching alternate options at this stage. And any small active interaction with your brand is a win. Every touchpoint gives you the opportunity to nurture that lead, and that’s how it should be.
Once the lead has entered the funnel, they shouldn’t feel ghosted, or else they get easily siphoned off by your competitors.
Lead nurturing illustrates how valuable a customer’s time is to you and that you’re with them at every step of the funnel.
The customer should believe in your brand’s capability to cater to them. Ideally, the lead-nurturing process should assure the buyer that you won’t waste their time.
If you look at the bigger picture, lead nurture is paramount to:
Educate your buyers
Elevate brand recognition and recall
Develop an external relationship with your brand
Improve conversion rates
Now that we have outlined why lead nurturing is a requisite for each business, we move on to its working model. The process sounds easy in theory, but the practical execution is where marketers miss their mark.
To navigate this, marketers must focus on the basic structure and strategic approach.
But before diving into the strategy, let’s get into the generic framework. What does the lead-nurturing process look like?
Lead nurturing process: the basic structure.
Primarily, there are the underlying factors required to kickstart your lead-nurturing efforts:
1. Segmentation
Personalization has become the heart of marketing communications. From AI to automation tools, every resource is used to curate targeted campaigns and messages.
To ascertain whether these efforts are successful, start by segmenting your customer list. It will straighten the tailoring and customization of your communication strategies. While not all customers resonate with the same idea and message, some do.
Segmentation will ensure that your marketing team isn’t blasting the same email to each potential customer. The segments with similar pain points and interests will obviously resonate with the same type of messages.
This will assist you in streamlining the marketing efforts and creating content that actually engages the audience.
2. The right content
Your ICP is diverse. And even the decision-makers within a single buying committee have distinct tastes. Not all can resonate with the same piece of content.
The first ingredient is targeted content. Find out where your leads are in their buying journey and curate content that aligns with the buyer persona. This is crucial and includes the multiple touchpoints each customer interacts with.
Imagine firing off messages that are known to every business in the vicinity. Most brands do this by taking a single generic message and reshaping it to sound different.
Certainly, you don’t wish to be one of them.
Underscore what works best for your brand, personalize, and experiment because what works for you might not work for your customer. And to make it easier to reach them, expand it through diverse marketing channels.
From podcasts to SMS, cover all bases to find the line that works for you. Uncover the cadence and frequency of messages to ascertain you don’t overwhelm the potential buyers.
And most of all, find the resonating sweet spot that intrigues your audience.
3. Unique buyer persona
How well do you know your ideal buyer? – A question that entails the building block of each marketing campaign.
Knowing what your best customer looks like is fundamental to creating these campaigns from the tiniest nub.
Demographic details
Common pain points
Interests
Preferred communication channels
Underlying motivations
Identifying your buyer and creating a persona will help you optimize your strategy and build the process around it. Simply, you can ensure your nurturing efforts are more tailored and customized.
4. The journey
From a broader perspective, B2B sales cycles are lengthy, complex, and time-consuming. However, as a marketer hoping to improve the hand-off with sales and influence conversion, you need to narrow down your understanding.
Outline how long your business’s sales cycle is: What is the typical timeframe for a lead to move from the initial contact to the deal closing?
Every single touchpoint adds to this. Understanding the sales cycle length can help gauge when the customers actually get ready to buy, along with a brownie point: how your customers move through.
This helps study the buyer and their patterns better.
Lead nurturing remains the same across businesses. However, some details in your customer journey might influence the particularities.
5. Brand building
Your customers don’t want to communicate with or buy from an organization. They want to interact with a person. Rather than communicating with a concrete corporate entity, they want to gauge the brand’s personality.
That’s what makes the first impression – the personal brand.
This is why it’s so crucial for your business to have this front – a story and a narrative. Storytelling is vital in sales, and a story with intent can work wonders. This begins with positioning your business as a credible thought leader in the market.
But it’s crucial to showcase your knowledge and expertise to build this credibility. If your brand’s broader market perspective is positive, it’s easier for potential customers to catch up.
Here, lead nurturing becomes simple.
So, when creativity is a constant at the nucleus of the road mapping process, don’t think of it only blooming in ad campaigns or personalized messages. It should rather be a driving force, encouraging creation and reiteration in your buyer’s imagination.
Beyond these underlying factors embedded at the crux of every nurturing process, there’s a framework to it. You amalgamate all these aspects into a mix and then hope for the best.
Lead nurturing doesn’t work this way.
It’s about supporting your customers through their business challenges and delighting them. The lead-nurturing campaigns should ‘wow’ potential buyers and excite them to get in touch with you.
Without the slightest intrigue, the prospect fails to see the unique value in your solutions, becoming one with the cacophony of market noise.
So, what are some of the lead-nurturing best practices?
While progressing through the funnel, we understand that leads are at different stages of the purchasing journey – some have made up their minds, and some are still hesitant.
This is where lead nurturing grows into different branches, each for a different stage in the funnel:
1. In the awareness stage (Top of the funnel), the lead is cold, cautious, and hesitant. So, the initial contact should offer them value that urges them to take action.
What can you do? – send emails and newsletters, publish blogs on relevant topics that address their pain points, and run targeted ads.
2. The next stage is interest (middle of the funnel), where the lead has undertaken substantial steps to understand who you are and what you offer. Most often, this turns out to be curiosity rather than actual purchasing intent. But now that the lead is captured, intent can be built.
What can you do? – Guide them towards downloading more services-specific content, such as e-Guides and whitepapers, or initiate a discovery call to gauge their pain points.
3. The consideration stage is paramount. At this stage, the lead compares your solutions with the competitors’ – pricing models, tangible benefits, agility, and integration capabilities.
Once potential customers become aware of the brand’s services and agree with you, your brand becomes one of the many. So, now walk them through the nitty-gritty (features) and dive further into how they’ll solve their pain points and help drive results.
What can you do? – Offer detailed content such as demos, pricing sheets, a customized sales presentation, and relevant case studies.
4. Interacting with a lead in the evaluation stage signifies that they hold serious buying intent. For this, you get into the USP – brand differentiators. To further establish this, offer a sales proposal highlighting personalized solutions relevant to their business requirements and pain points.
But it doesn’t end with closing the deal. Follow-ups are necessary, even with existing customers. Closing a purchase with a first-time buyer doesn’t automatically mean trust or loyalty. It’s the second purchase from the same buyer that actually holds prominence.
It means they trust you. And this is what lead nurturing promises to achieve.
These techniques directly impact a customer’s decision to purchase or not. This is why nurturing holds such an imperative space in the funnel. But without the right strategy, marketers lose their way to convert even the most active leads.
An efficient nurturing approach requires a synergy between innovative marketing and sales strategies. It has to be smart and move beyond the generic.
But reaching this mountain top requires taking the first step. This means underscoring some of the best lead-nurturing strategies.
The lead-nurturing strategies to earn customer loyalty.
1. Leverage multiple channels in your campaign.
In the highly digital landscape, customers can be reached through more than a single channel, whether it’s through ads, social media, or emails – each of them is paramount. The more channels, the easier it is to interact with potential buyers.
Digital transformation has made customer communication straightforward. While many nuances are involved, modern lead nurturing has to transcend generic email drip campaigns. It’s just one of the many in this digital age.
Generic emails don’t do it anymore.
It gets lost amidst the same recycled messages with no value or impact. But now, marketing automation tools can help you set up multichannel campaigns.
An effective and robust nurturing campaign includes retargeting ads, social media, email marketing, sales outreach, and tailored website content. And a framework that allows these to perform effectively and cohesively.
2. Conduct periodic and timely follow-ups.
Most businesses let the interaction soak in, but sometimes, this results in a significant gap between communications. This error can cost them a customer, but most SDRs still fail to acknowledge this.
Automated lead nurturing focuses on the quantity, but periodic follow-ups demonstrate that you care about them. They are still as valuable to you as they were beforehand. Because, as HubSpot asserts,
“The odds of converting a lead into a sales opportunity are exponentially higher when the lead is contacted immediately following a website conversion.”
Your team already has information regarding the prospect – you know what they are researching and their intent. This can help lead a really informative and in-depth call that isn’t as disconnected as cold calling.
You know the prospect’s current behavior, and a timely follow-up is one of the best ways to convert inbound leads.
3. Leverage aligned lead-scoring tactics.
Lead scoring is one of the best pathways to optimize your lead-nurturing strategies. Once aligned with the brand guidelines, the only thing left is utilizing these scores to focus on what actually matters.
Lead nurturing takes ample time – sometimes, it works, and then, it doesn’t. So, marketing and sales cannot just spend most of their time nurturing a cold lead. Here, lead scores play an integral role.
It helps segregate how much time and resources should be spent on each lead and which are relevant and must be prioritized. Not only will leveraging lead-scoring techniques simultaneously help you prioritize hot leads, but highlight the channels that work best for your nurturing processes.
4. Personalize the process.
A customer’s behavior illustrates their needs, interests, and preferences. And this matters to marketers, too. And truthfully, if the communications are tailored according to these, the engagement and conversion rates are higher.
It makes the customers feel heard and understood.
So, savvy marketers are meeting their digital buyers halfway. They use data and analytics to curate personalized and compelling strategies that hit the mark. It could include anything from customized email content based on past purchases and recommendations to the frequency of communications.
There’s another facet – dynamic content that targets buyers based on their position in the funnel, industry, or job. All of this boils down to a single aspect – experiences that feel unique to the situation and need.
The bottom line is that the customer needs to feel valued.
Marketing’s solution was to establish a relationship-driven, nurturing technique, not a transactional one. At the heart of this is engagement and communication.
There are innovative ways to carry this out, but not entirely original ones. What’s impactful is how your marketing creativity approaches lead nurturing without straying from the brand vision and motto.
Building a lasting relationship, loyalty, and trust isn’t built in the blink of an eye. It requires patience, and with the nurturing process, this is what takes the front seat – to see what works and what doesn’t.
There’s no hard and fast rule for any marketing strategy, just experimentation. The only play here is to recognize the core: customers and value.
In an intensely competitive marketplace, buyers also need assurance that their demands and challenges are pinpointed. Nurturing remains a sure-shot way to highlight less intrusive methods for showcasing that your buyers matter to you.
MQLs vs SQLs: Significance of Gauging Intent for Your Brand Growth
Lead generation doesn’t end at capturing leads but converting them into repeat buyers. And only a clear understanding of MQLs vs SQLs can spotlight how.
Buyers have chosen to become self-directed after never-ending cycles of analysis paralysis.
They are widely aware of recycled messages being reinforced through multiple channels, merely in a different tone. And they reeked of false promises.
To avoid it firsthand, doing all the work themselves was a simple choice and less of a hassle.
In return, marketing is aware of these changing patterns. So, their initial response – sending all leads from the organic interactions – turned out to be a dead end.
This realization gradually hit the marketing landscape: not every organic interaction cloaks a potential buyer with actual interest. So, another strategic framework has to take root.
While abandoning the old playbook is the primary step, marketing needs to adapt to the changing needs of the buyers and their role in it.
So, marketing’s working model has become more intent-driven than ever.
Amidst all available data, the intent to buy takes priority in segregating potential buyers and casual browsers. But intent isn’t all tangible data. It’s an amalgamation of intangible and tangible factors.
With many underlying motivations and desires driving prospects, marketers have little space for certainty.
But they can create it. With a simple addition, the addition of an umbrella.
The umbrella: a much-needed synergy between marketing and sales because –
Converting leads into active buyers is a relay race.
Turning prospects into customers includes passing the baton from marketing to sales. Marketing is the first runner, and sales is the second. See how crucial it is for each team to perform their best and pass the baton efficiently.
The marketing team focuses on engaging the prospect and instilling brand awareness – it’s all about making the initial contact. It requires a lot of patience and precision because the prospect they interact with should also fit the ICP.
There’s a significant nurturing process where the interest is generated to an extent.
For the sales team, the baton is the purchase intent. Once marketing has captured and nurtured even the tiniest interest, it’s time to pass on the baton. It’s the SDR’s responsibility to ensure this baton (the warm lead) crosses the finish line.
Handing off leads is a huge responsibility.
There’s no point in finishing the race without it – the lead is the priority.
Then, what if it slips through the fingers? Your brand loses potential clients.
This is crucially why getting marketing’s handoff to sales is paramount, and so is strategically converting an MQL into an SQL. But doing so requires getting the basics down – from underscoring what an MQL and an SQL are and their inherent differences.
What are marketing-qualified leads?
A Marketing-Qualified Lead has shown significant interest in your brand and has a higher conversion potential. These leads have interacted with your brand assets but aren’t ready to purchase yet.
So, they exist at the top of the funnel (TOFU), where the leads are captured and nurtured. Marketing teams ascertain this through curated and personalized content, targeted campaigns, and customized follow-ups.
Every little effort is directed towards moving the prospect towards the funnel. Before that, marketers underscore what their most promising leads look like.
This is discerned through specific preset behaviors and criteria that the prospect fits into. For example, traditional marketers segmented organic interactions as MQLs, but savvy modern ones have reiterated this. But today, this predefined set of criteria is more intricate:
An ideal demographic fit
The apt engagement level
Past behaviors
Lead scoring that aligns with brand objectives
And lastly, a crucial element in the modern marketing landscape – the MQLs need to illustrate purchase intent, not just engage with the brand. This has helped savvy marketers navigate market uncertainty and focus their efforts on prospects who actually want to buy from them.
The buyer behavior is so nuanced that marketers have tried their best to keep up. This is why MQLs existed in the first place – to bridge the gap between casual interest and sales-readiness. It made the marketing funnel smoother and wrinkle-free.
Marketing-qualified leads helped marketers spotlight which leads require further nurturing and are relevant for the brand.
Marketing’s gravitation towards quantity rather than quality caused the initial turbulence. When it sent MQLs further down the funnel, sales realized that most leads weren’t interested in a purchase.
The quality dipped.
And MQLs became rooted in a crucial marketing conversation: are they dead, or do they merely require reshaping?
However, the truth is that several traditional marketing tactics still rely on MQLs. They have their cons, but it’s only a matter of getting the crux right – to reiterate the very definition of MQLs, not erasing it from your strategies entirely.
Through a modified perspective, MQLs aren’t just the leads downloading your whitepapers. They must showcase interest in your offerings and be open to hearing from your marketing team.
A reliable lead generation service can help identify and qualify these prospects more effectively.
If not, they are not an MQL – this is the most basic understanding. With the ideal MQLs (who actually engage and illustrate the smallest of intent), your marketing strategies can work wonders. Quite seamlessly, personalized nurturing can take them to the next step to becoming Sales-Qualified Leads (SQLs).
What are sales-qualified leads?
An SQL is a sales-ready account illustrating significant interest in your brand and wants to talk numbers with your sales team. They’ve interacted with your brand and communicated with marketing materials such as pricing models and case studies multiple times.
An SQL isn’t just interested in the top-of-the-funnel content but also the ones that may help them consider your brand as a potential vendor. Their purchase intent is significantly high.
However, this depends on whether these leads have been carefully evaluated by marketing and deemed the right fit for sales engagement. Last year, SDRs had one crucial concern – the lack of quality leads.
Ill-fitting MQLs handed off to sales waste SDRs’ time and resources, and don’t actually end up converting. This could clog up the sales pipeline with irrelevant leads, hampering the business and brand reputation.
So, sales possess their own qualified methodology. They must:
Fit the buyer persona
Illustrate greater interest and a specific need
Pass the BANT qualification framework
Showcase purchase readiness
And lastly, have executive buy-in
Once the account fits the ideal framework and is categorized as an SQL, SDRs focus on personalized outreach, address objections and pain points, and offer detailed information. This also includes proposals, negotiations, product demos, and offering additional pricing charts.
Nurturing isn’t the intent here, but closing the sale is. So, the SQL is vetted further, successfully converting into an active client. Hence, they are positioned in the later stages, i.e., at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU).
The end goal is building a relationship and finalizing the purchase after handling significant objections. This is what sales focuses on by leveraging data gathered by marketing in the MQL stage.
While we have underlined the fundamentals of what MQLs and SQLs are, understanding their differences is crucial, too.
Then how else will the marketing’s handoff to sales be smooth?
By gauging how MQLs and SQLs inherently differ.
Conferring from the detailed discussion on what MQLs and SQLs are points to one crucial difference: the intent to buy.
An MQL is a curious contact who has just warmed up to your brand. Meanwhile, an SQL is a committed and engaged account in the decision-making phase.
Let’s dive into some of the salient differences between MQLs and SQLs that one should remember:
Transitioning from MQL to SQL: The important metrics
Gartner’s research asserts that a mere 21% of MQLs actually convert into SQLs. It’s demanding because most self-directed buyers aren’t gravitating toward lackluster solutions anymore.
MQLs convert to SQLs through meticulous nurturing, i.e., building trust and providing value. The spectrum moves from initial (passive) interest (curiosity/engagement) to high purchasing intent.
Understanding this progression from an MQL to SQL is crucial for better allocation of resources and alignment of marketing and sales.
Even segmenting leads into these distinct classes is vital for the teams to operate efficiently. MQLs and SQLs are at different stages of the buyer’s journey – they require fundamentally different qualifying frameworks.
Whether it’s a lead scoring system or a benchmark, it’s crucial to make the right distinctions.
At the nucleus of this lies a strategic alignment between marketing and sales, significantly impacting conversion rates. This saves ample time for your sales team to direct their communications toward the right leads at the right time.
To ascertain that the transition from MQL to SQL is seamless and ends up drastically improving your sales outcomes, begin by keeping the following elements in mind:
1. Lead Behavior
Tracking the prospect’s actions is paramount to correctly differentiating between MQLs and SQLs. These behaviors should indicate a genuine interest in your brand’s offerings.
It must also offer observable metrics signifying that the lead is interacting with your website and social media channels and frequently visiting the brand’s pricing pages.
Are they discussing pricing and negotiating with your SDRs? Which pages did they visit, and in which order? How long did they spend on a single page? Are there any forms they’ve filled out? Did they sign up for your email newsletters?
Each action is necessary to understand where the leads are in the funnel and what their intentions are. If they partake in these actions actively, they turn into strong signs of a high buying intent.
2. Lead score
Lead scoring involves assigning numbers and points to a lead based on their online behavior, past purchases, and demographic elements. It includes interactions with your brand and the likelihood that they will make a purchase.
But remember, in modern marketing’s complex landscape, lead scoring isn’t just about tracking email opens or website clicks. It’s about gauging real intent. So, the scoring should be based on three crucial aspects:
Interaction with the brand (likes, clicks, comments, signups)
The total lead score crossing a preset threshold signifies the lead is ready for a sales conversation, indicating they are closer to a purchase.
3. Focusing on the BANT questions
Asking the right question is paramount. Irrespective of the department, your strategies and campaigns should be designed to qualify the relevant leads, pushing them through the sales funnel.
The budget, authority, need, and timeline will eventually define how ready your SQL is. And it’s based on these questionnaires that SDRs modify their sales pitches, which is crucial in building a meaningful relationship with the client.
It helps sales understand:
If the client can afford the solutions
Does the person in contact hold the authority to buy?
The specific requirements of the organization
Do the needs match the urgency and timeframes of both organizations?
BANT is both the oldest qualifier and the gold standard for every organization. And with every new framework being a variant of BANT, it continues to be an efficient tool for lead qualification.
4. Marketing and sales alignment
While this aspect is crucial to orchestrate the customer experience across marketing channels, it’s also significant to gauge prospect intent.
Marketing and sales cannot work in silos anymore. And it’s why marketing and sales alignment has become such a buzzword. So, marketing must also join sales in listening to the buyer – what actually matters?
The answer will only come when your teams have learned the ICPs inside-out and understand who they are selling to. So, it all boils down to listening to your buyers’ needs.
The bottom line? Lead management can streamline business outcomes.
A significant portion, if not all, of the B2B buyer is carrying out their communications digitally.
And as market competition intensifies, brands seek a different route. They don’t wait for customers to step within their threshold anymore.
Instead, organizations have amped up their digital communications tactics in this buyer-centric age. By doing so, organizations wish to reach 90% of those who start their buying journey online.
Of course, marketing teams must choose to move beyond the obvious. And meet their prospects halfway.
Because let’s face it –
The buyer attitude has drastically transformed and now entails certain intrinsic qualities that concern marketing teams: self-awareness and cautiousness.
5 Examples of Well-Designed Lead Generation Landing Pages: What Convinces Visitors?
What works for others can work for your business, too. But why grasp on to the mundane? Design a landing page that echoes the distinctness of your brand.
The modern buyer prefers a contactless buying experience. Everything’s simple, self-directed, and hassle-free.
But this doesn’t mean the buyer isn’t reliant on a brand. Their expectation boils down to a single atom: obstacle-free and compelling digital experiences. So, it’s quite obvious that marketing’s response is to meet their prospects halfway.
And in the current landscape, marketers have gravitated towards a single solution – adopting technology into existing infrastructure.
Truthfully, this solution is half-baked. Businesses have either chosen to deliver simple and generic experiences or are so hyper-focused on adopting newer tech models that they lose their focus.
The disconnect is significant. Brands are left in a pickle while attempting to bind innovation with the buying experience.
This yields a question: How do you develop closeness with customers and deliver unique experiences?
After COVID-19 hit the marketplace, decision-makers and stakeholders have realized what customer experience is actually worth and how it can create value.
Thus, the modus operandi is reimagining customer experience through experimentation.
The primary step to linking value with experience is defining customer behavior that generates quantifiable value for the business. The next step is gauging customer satisfaction to measure the tangible outcomes of each experience.
For B2B, This Means Developing High-Quality Landing Pages.
It’s one of the most necessary and integral components of ensuring a compelling and value-driven experience for potential buyers.
Landing pages follow an acute balance between the value given and the value taken, one that resonates benefits and is enrapturing, simultaneously.
Whenever a user searches the Internet, their queries are obscure. And most of the searches may not even address the pain point, let alone solve it. However, even if some do, it turns out to be a sales pitch that doesn’t even understand them.
What users require is understanding – they want to be heard.
This is where a landing page becomes one of the most appealing aspects of a brand.
It draws visitors in to collect their information and, in return, offers value in the form of solutions. This launching pad takes the user wherever they wish to land – it’s spearheaded, specific, and focuses on achieving a short-term goal.
Landing pages also persuade users that a brand’s website is worth their time.
It’s a whole different ball game for capturing leads.
What is a lead generation landing page?
Lead generation is significant for business growth, irrespective of its size. And when your landing pages are well-optimized and streamlined, it’s simpler to turn mere visitors into leads.
This webpage, designed to gauge visitor details for a single marketing or advertising campaign, is the B2B lead generation landing page.
But don’t mistake it for a website’s homepage. A homepage is more comprehensive – it serves multiple purposes, offers a business overview, and is meant for a broad audience. Meanwhile, a lead capture landing page has a narrower purpose. It helps convert casual visitors into leads by convincing them to fill out a form (provide their contact information) in exchange for a valuable resource (like a whitepaper).
The landing page is often the primary and most essential step in your sales funnel. Instead of closing a purchase right away, it’s more focused on building a relationship first.
The purpose that it serves is directly entwined with its design. A well-designed B2B lead generation landing page doesn’t have any exit routes or navigation menus. Its sole objective is to guide visitors towards a specific action (which might be filling out a form)
The bottom line is that a landing page can make or break your ability to capture leads. So, why do some landing pages do this exponentially well and others don’t – where’s the lack?
The Nitty-Gritty of Designing Lead Generation Landing Pages
A B2B lead generation landing page isn’t about throwing together some catchy phrases and vibrant graphics. Rather, the laser focus is on maximizing conversion rates. To do so effectively, it necessitates:
An in-depth understanding of your audience
Following specific design principles
Regular optimization and tweaks
Remind yourself that marketing isn’t about following a rulebook but rather experimentation. Every strategy should hold space for agile practices and improvements. The same applies to designing B2B lead generation landing pages.
There’s no universal template that each brand should follow. But mere guiding principles that allow businesses to build a framework for their unique landing page that works for their clients.
Landing pages are about disseminating your brand’s story in a way that compels your visitors to take a specific action. You must be clear and professional and make the next step obvious (however, not a sales pitch).
Now, let’s dive into the six components that work as a guiding principle of a well-designed landing page:
Understand your audience base
The initial step in developing any marketing tactic is knowing the audience. Without this tidbit, your efforts are likely to fail because your strategies are just free-floating in a vast sea.
The “let’s see what sticks” formula doesn’t work everywhere.
An aesthetically beautiful landing page is a waste of time if it doesn’t resonate with your audience. So, the content cannot be generic. It has to be spearheaded. To ascertain this, start with:
The most crucial one – their pain points.
The language they feel most comfortable with (what would be engaging for them?)
Underlying motivations and desires that might compel them to take action
And, most importantly, the objections they might have
Your lead-capturing landing page is not about appealing to the broader market. It has to speak to the audience relevant to your business requirements.
A catchy and engaging headline
The first impression matters. We’ve all heard this before, whether in a personal or professional setting.
On your landing page, the headline creates the first impression. And you only have mere seconds to make it count. Remember that elevator pitches, where you only have a few minutes to sell your brand?
The landing page headline follows the same concept. They need to grasp your visitor’s attention and express something valuable – something that’s integral to your brand.
So, in simple words, an impactful headline delivers your unique value proposition while addressing the visitor’s pain points. It should highlight the benefit of downloading the whitepaper.
To-the-point copy and clear CTA
After you’ve grabbed the visitor’s attention through your headline, they will move on to the copy. This particular segment addresses what your brand will deliver differently from the competitors.
It’s all about offering insight into how your solutions work in practice- it’s your hero shot.
For example, Apple’s copy for its MacBook: “Light Years Ahead.” This spotlights the futuristic design and lightweight nature of the product.
The brand’s USP is underscored through a single sentence, which is clear and to the point. This could easily be the first thing that catches the visitor’s attention (after the headline) and becomes a successful copy for future ad campaigns.
Along with this element, the differentiating factor is also the CTA. From the headline to the copy and now on to the CTA – it’s the final moment of truth. Will the visitor take action or bounce off?
This CTA should stand apart on the page, instill a sense of urgency, and urge the visitor to take action. But it shouldn’t be too pushy. It should assert what happens next if the visitor clicks on it, ensuring the user they are on the right path.
Visual appeal – the graphics and design framework
While text is a crucial aspect of the B2B lead generation landing pages, images are another. What’s the point of relaying a story when no visuals are involved?
A picture is worth a thousand words. When the content is minimal and concise, the rest of the narrative can be delivered through appealing graphics. A quality landing page, in short, should sell your brand, services, and hidden ideas.
But remember not to be generic. Several organizations use stock images visible on other websites as well, hampering the webpage experience in one shot. So, be professional and unique.
Understand cinematography – which images tell your brand’s specific story.
The fancy and aesthetic design may work in countable cases, but minimalism has become significant, too. Because brands want potential customers to find their services easily. Rather than being a sloppy mess, the design framework should highlight the benefits.
Understanding how this click or form-filling benefits them will drive the visitors. The priority should be what the customers care about, making it more customer-centric.
Additionally, the landing page should also entail a hierarchy that helps the visitor progress toward conversion. This is only possible when the page:
It is less cluttered and clean, i.e., it leverages white space smartly.
The size, color, and contrast align with the brand and create a flow.
High-quality images reflect your brand messaging.
The branding is consistent throughout the page.
Ascertain that these aspects are also true for your page’s responsiveness across all devices. Because in this digital landscape, mobile responsiveness isn’t optional but imperative for brand building.
Lead-capturing elements that also spotlight the benefits
To ensure conversion, capturing leads is the primary function. This is possible only by persuading your website visitors to take action, which could include filling out a form.
However, how will visitors take this action if the steps are unclear?
This is why a B2B lead generation landing page requires a form that stands out. It must have a strategic placement with different background coloring and font so it doesn’t merge with the rest of the landing page. You can also put it in a box.
But this action has to entail a specific benefit (tangible value, such as a whitepaper or eBook that addresses their pain point) for the visitor. What value will they receive in return for filling out this form? It’s like a reward or incentive they get for attributing their time to the brand.
Social proofs
Social proofs are trust signals.
The online world has become a means to execute fraudulent practices, resulting in widespread skepticism. But with reliable and authentic proof, prospects understand that others have already benefited from your brand solutions.
It works just as word-of-mouth marketing, hence why including social proof in your B2B lead generation landing page is vital. These could potentially be:
Case studies
Client logos
Certifications and awards
Client testimonials
Ensure the proofs you include are honest because fake ones can do more harm than good. However, if done correctly, these trust signals can effortlessly build credibility and maximize conversions.
This section dove into the elements imperative to stand out from the mundanity of B2B landing pages. But make no mistake, because we’re not offering you landing page templates.
Our purpose is to assert that playing it safe will not get you those leads, and neither will a dull B2B lead generation landing page.
To understand this better, let’s take a glimpse at some of the B2B brands doing it right concerning their landing page designs.
5 Examples of Brilliantly Designed B2B Lead Generation Landing Pages
ActiveCampaign‘s landing page focuses on a significant aspect: addressing and solving the pain point your visitors care about.
Most often, if a decision-maker ends up on your landing page, they’re trying to find solutions for a particular business problem. So, if they end up on your landing page, they should know they’re in the correct place.
On ActiveCampaign’s landing page for the “marketing strategy template,” it’s discernible that the business is targeting a specific market segment. This messaging is for SMEs starting to develop a robust marketing roadmap.
Capturing leads and improving conversion rates are two of the most critical but demanding tasks. So, this targets the crowd facing difficulty in converting leads.
Also, observe how the headline “Want to grow your business and future-proof your career?” is focused and clear, instantly attracting the visitor’s attention. The landing page is clear and concise, with its value and benefits highlighted under the “what you get” section. The form is designed into a box and is easy to navigate, making it highly user-friendly.
Overall, ActiveCampaign’s landing page is easy to perceive. It’s clean, follows brand consistency, and is user-centric, elevating visitor experience.
The above trial landing page isn’t too cluttered with text. Through minimal bullet points, Shopify highlights the top-notch quality of its products to visitors, addressing the “Why should they start this free trial?”
Shopify gives users the answer – it’s an all-in-one platform and trustworthy.
Two significant reasons why this landing page works well: a clean interface and a to-the-point CTA. The headline is very user-friendly, concise, and catchy. The space around it has also been meticulously used to convey the free trial benefits and tidbits.
This landing page doesn’t steal much user attention, i.e., easy on the eyes. And uses a consistent color palette throughout, one that also aligns with their minimal graphics.
Additionally, the CTA is crystal clear and straightforward. Visitors (and potential customers) have to fill out their email addresses, and then they can start selling using Shopify’s features.
HubSpot‘s marketing automation landing page entails a winning edge.
It’s clear and concise but also comprehensive, outlining the tangible value in simple details. The visual appeal isn’t much different than its actual branding, but it relays what it needs to.
HubSpot, known for marketing software, knows its game.
But a visitor landing directly on the “automate your marketing” page might not exactly know what they do. So, HubSpot’s landing page has made it simpler. They have instilled a top-to-bottom flow into their landing page, which is strategic.
Rather than the visitors facing confusion on where to go, the landing page framework guides them through the crucial aspects of the services:
This is why we know HubSpot’s landing page gets the job done. They’ve laid their solutions bare and covered all the integral components of what goes into a well-designed landing page.
Salesforce believes in letting numbers do the talking. This landing page from the sales powerhouse illustrates that text and visuals aren’t everything.
They are all about no-nonsense. There’s a logo, benefits, a catchy headline, social proof, and a clear “Watch Now” CTA below a clean form. What more does a visitor need to tell them what they need to know?
This is designed to instill curiosity within the right audience – SDRs who are looking to close more deals and elevate the efficiency of their sales processes.
Salesforce, through this simple yet effective landing page, gives its potential customers a compelling case to watch the demo. Especially the headline: “How can you unleash growth now with the #1 AI CRM for Sales?”
The headline demonstrates Salesforce’s industry leadership and relays that it’s AI-driven, two birds with one stone. The copy is persuasive and builds trust and credibility, so the customers know they’re making the right decision.
Wise is a popular money exchange platform used across different countries and currencies. The best part of its landing page is that it’s divided into two customer bases: customer and business.
You’re directly notified which service is for you and which isn’t. And since the platform involves money, it offers a demo option and a video on its landing page. This helps customers from the get-go and improves the overall experience.
Two of the other essential features illustrating how Wise does landing pages right are its fundamental focus on the benefits and differentiators:
It highlights safety and security at the center in case a potential customer is hesitant. The message assures them that the platform is safe to send and receive money.
Through different types of content formats on the landing pages, Wise showcases its cost-efficiency compared to traditional methods and competitors.
This landing page, as observed, highlights safety and value, two significant facets of fintech.
Let Your B2B Lead Generation Landing Page Do the Talking
The truth is that in the current landscape, people are gravitating towards less. It could be creative and artsy, but minimalism continues to shine through.
A well-designed and optimized B2B lead generation landing page promises to transform prospects into long-term buyers. So, it has to be entirely user-centric – delight, cater to, and understand them.
However, marketers are conscious that consumer psychology behind decision-making is tricky to gauge. This is where A/B (or multivariate) testing sweeps in as a hero. A customer can surprise you in unimaginable ways.
Hence, it’s better to experiment with different types of landing pages – from form placements to CTAs. Doing so will give you a comprehensive idea regarding which landing page offers the most value: more lead capture and higher conversion rates.
From compelling aesthetics to social sharing options, remember, less is more. So, plan, design, and execute your landing page through a structured framework that aligns with brand guidelines.
Let it shine through the content noise and change how your potential customers perceive you.
