Lead Nurturing Campaigns
I write email follow-up campaigns that B2B technology sales teams use to nurture leads until they’re ready for a sales conversation.
Only 2% of sales happen at the first meeting
Sixty-three percent of people requesting information on your company today will not purchase for at least three months. Another 20% will take more than 12 months to buy.
Which means you don’t have a lead-generation problem. You have a lead-nurture problem.
Why? Because sales reps typically ignore leads that aren’t sales ready. Or follow up with them in half-hearted, inconsistent ways that produce the same result—the leads get neglected and never convert to customers.
Because 50% of sales happen after the 5th touch (InsideSales.com), what you need is a way to follow up with leads, nurturing them until they are ready to meet. You need a proven, systematic method of staying in touch with leads over time in a way that educates, answers questions, addresses concerns, adds value and moves them along your pipeline towards a sales conversation.
This is the service I deliver.
Hi, I’m Alan Sharpe
B2B lead-nurture copywriter
I write lead-nurture campaigns for B2B technology firms. I’m talking helpful, educational, differentiated content that educates buyers and adds value. In other words, lead-nurturing content that moves them to the next step in your pipeline.
A plan
We start with a plan. I work with you to create a campaign that touches each lead roughly 12 times over one month (your results may differ). The plan includes a schedule of phone and email touches.
Email templates & call scripts
The workhorse of lead nurturing is email. So I write a series of follow-up email templates that your sales reps personalize and schedule for each lead they are nurturing. These templates increase the quality and consistency of your follow up while reducing the level of effort and creativity your reps require to stay in touch. I also write your sales team’s call scripts.
Sales enablement content
Every touch in the lead-nurturing campaign includes an offer of new information or resources. This way, your sales reps always have a buyer-focused reason for reaching out. Goodbye, “Hey, I’m just following up” calls, voicemails and emails. Hello, helpful offers of case studies, buying guides, answers to frequently asked questions and other assets that buyers need during their buyer journey. Content leads to contracts.
Nurture your leads. Watch what happens.
%
more sales-ready leads to have sales conversations with.
(Forrester Research)
%
more sales opportunities than non-nurtured leads.
(DemandGen Report)
%
more of your sales reps making quota.
(CSO Insights)
%
lower cost of generating sales-ready leads.
(Forrester Research)
How my lead-nurture service works
We start with your buyer
You and I hop on a video conference call and I ask you all manner of intelligent questions about your buyers. Their industry, job title, roles, top priorities, goals, pain points, challenges, drivers, success factors, perceived benefits, perceived barriers and objections, decision criteria, common questions and more. If you have all this information distilled already in the form of buyer personas, bonus.
We look at the buyer journey
We discuss the typical stages that your ideal buyer goes through when looking for a software solution like yours. We start at the awareness stage, move through the consideration stage and end up at the decision stage. Textbook stuff.
We discuss your pipeline
We talk about how leads enter your marketing funnel. We examine when and how the folks in marketing typically hand off leads to your sales team. We look at the lead score or other criteria that leads must reach to be considered sales-qualified. Most importantly, you and I discuss what typically must happen for a lead to move from one stage in your pipeline to the next.
I look at what you're doing now
I review the follow-up email sequences, content offers, calls to action and other things that constitute your current lead-nurturing efforts. We discuss KPIs, what’s working, what’s not working, where you have gaps and so on.
I scope out your lead-nurturing campaign
The key to success at lead nurturing is delivering timely, relevant, personalized content that your leads welcome receiving. So we decide how often your reps will reach out to your leads and over what period of time. We nail down the types of content that leads need at each stage of their buyer journey. And we look at ways that your reps can personalize and customize their follow-up messages.
I write your lead-nurturing campaign
I write the follow-up email sequences, call scripts and content assets you need for your campaign. If you need a case study, for example, I write it. If you need a buying guide and a landing page to offer it, I write those as well.
You measure the success of your campaign
Lead-nurturing campaigns deliver measurable results. So you and I discuss what you should measure and how. Common metrics include the percentage of leads who enter the follow-up sequence who convert to sales conversations, the percentage of those sales conversations who convert to customers, the average open rate of follow-up emails and the average clickthrough rate of follow-up emails. Wherever possible, we nail down benchmark numbers for each of these KPIs so that you can compare future results with where you are today. And hold my feet to the fire.
The Deliverables
At the end of our engagement, you will have a complete lead-nurturing campaign that’s customized to your buyer personas and their buyer journey. Just personalize and hit send.
Schedule
You get a step-by-step lead-nurturing plan that includes a schedule describing when to follow up, and how.
Email Templates
You get a series of relevant and valuable follow-up email messages that your reps personalize.
Call Scripts
You get a set of call and voicemail scripts that your sales reps use over the phone at each stage of their follow up.
Sales Content
You get a set of content assets, such as case studies, buying guides and FAQs that your reps offer with each touch.
KPIs
You get a set of Key Performance Indicators that you use to track and measure the success of your campaign.
Sample lead-nurture campaign email sequences
Sample lead-nurture campaign content assets
Your sales reps offer assets like these by phone and email during the lead-nurture campaign to educate leads, differentiate your offering, add value and move leads along your pipeline towards a sales meeting
White Paper
Arubasense
Case Study
VirtualWall
Buying Guide
Fortuitas
Pillar Page
Cogeco Peer 1
Blog Post
Capgemini
Let's Start a Conversation
Are you a sales-driven, B2B technology firm that needs sales content that leads to contracts? Let's talk.