Latest from the Intellegentia Blog

Lead Nurturing is a fundamental must-have for successful inbound marketing. Statistics show that only 56% of B2B organizations verify valid business leads before they are passed to Sales. (MarketingSherpa)

In the sales and marketing world, there are few issues that get more attention than at what point a lead becomes 'sales ready' and therefore be passed on to sales and when a lead should stay with marketing and be nurtured.

Gleanster Research estimates that 50% of leads who are qualified to buy are not ready to purchase immediately. If you call these leads up to try and hurry them along the buying process you will most likely lose them.  So what to do with those that are not ready to purchase immediately?  

Lead nurturing is all about understanding the nuances of your leads’ needs and providing them with relevant content at the right time. Getting these details right and being more scientific with your lead nurturing will help you to align your sales and marketing teams, make your sales teams happier as they receive better quality leads and improve ROI from your marketing efforts.

Take a look at some common lead nurturing mistakes to avoid:

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.

When a lead is ready to buy? How do we know when is the right time to hand them over to sales so that they can close them as a customer?  What happens if that contact isn't quite ready yet?

The key is to have tightly aligned sales and marketing processes and a trusting, open relationship between sales and marketing teams.  This involves executive "encouragement", visionary thinking and a two-way conversation between sales and marketing ... a surprisingly tough call for some companies. 

B2B organisations with tightly aligned sales and marketing operations achieved 24% faster three-year revenue growth, and 27% faster three-year profit growth (SiriusDecisions)

View our webinar to find out more>>

So why do so many companies admit to a difficult relationship between sales and marketing?

I don't believe it's about the people!

It's more about the data systems and processes..