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Lead nurturing is essentially about handing leads over to sales at the right point - when the prospect is ready to buy.

Running a marketing campaign and pushing anyone you hear breathing over to sales is fraught with problems.  A successful sales person knows they should focus on qualified opportunities, so anything that's not at the ready to buy stage will inevitably be dropped.  That's not to say they would never be ready to buy, just that they aren't at this point in time.  Nonetheless, the result is that they may well never buy from your company.

Enable was established in 2000 to build custom software to meet specific business needs that off-the-shelf software cannot address.  Their work with companies like Procter & Gamble, Mitsubishi Electric, DHL and the BBC has been varied and largely bespoke in nature.

A couple of years ago, their work with a buying group and a building materials supplier unveiled a gap in the enterprise software market for those companies where rebate claims make up a significant proportion of their revenue.

As a result, the DealTrack Rebate Management System was born.

DealTrack is aimed at companies that have annual rebate claims in excess of £12.5m.  By preventing these companies from missing claims, DealTrack has been proven to add six figure sums to their net profit.

Intellegentia has been heavily involved in both the sales and marketing of DealTrack for over a year.  Here’s what we've done to drive significant revenue for this new software package:

When I was on territory selling big ticket ERP, Retail, and Supply Chain software solutions, I spent the best part of a 9 month sales cycle digging deep into a prospect's organisation, understanding the motivations, politics and pain points of the various buyers, decision makers, recommenders, and evaluation teams.

As a sales team, we worked to tried and tested sales methodologies, trying to find the ‘fox’ and nurturing all the players with different valuable information to meet their specific needs, countering competitive threats and answering objections.

It was a Solution Sale. It required patience, delivery of information at the right time, a game plan that all the sales and marketing team bought into, and a process to move them towards a decision.

A report published by Software Advice looked at reasons why companies are looking to invest in Marketing Automation Software. It found that a large percentage of businesses in the study were being overwhelmed with managing clients, contacts, and leads (nice problem to have) and are primarily seeking software to improve lead management.

The study looked at small companies in the US with a turnover less than $50 million, a majority of which had small staff teams. So, at least from these findings, it is clear that there is a growing need for lead management at the SME level. If the same research was carried out in the UK, I suspect the results wouldn't be too dissimilar.

But what about organisations that have a 'more defined business development/lead follow up' process? This is particularly true for companies in the technology sector, whose sales cycles tend to be lengthy and complex in nature. Are they any different to small companies with a high volume of leads and customers to process? In our experience, the answer is - NO!