Lead generation is all well and good, but we’d be the first to admit that what you do with your leads once you’ve gathered them is just as important as how you gather them in the first place. After all, not all leads are ready to make a purchase, and trying to push them to do that is just going to put them off and destroy any hopes that you might have had of one day turning them into a customer.
That’s why many B2B companies switch things up and opt instead to deploy a lead nurturing programme or to add those leads that aren’t sales-ready into a customer relationship management (CRM) system. By using the right mixture of lead scoring and marketing automation, you can maintain an ongoing conversation with a potential customer and actually add some value to their lives by providing them with the kind of content that will entertain them or make it easier for them to do their job.
As time goes by, you can start to build up a fuller picture of what individual leads are interested in, and this will help you to further tailor your messaging towards them. Remember that different people need different things at different times, so you may find yourself picking up brand advocates who are never going to give you any money but who are going to help you to bring in other people through referrals.
A Lead is a Lead for Life
Too many marketers forget about their leads as soon as they’ve tried to score a sale, and that’s a mistake. Doing that is like being one of those companies that lures new customers in with special offers while short-changing existing customers or providing shoddy customer service. Don’t be that company.
Instead, you’ll want to play the long game, treating each of the leads that you gather as a lifelong friend. And, like a friend, you’ll want to be considerate – which means making it easy for them to manage how you contact them, what you contact them about and how often you do it. If they don’t want to hear from you anymore, that’s fine too – and if you make it hard for them to remove themselves from your CRM system, they’ll end up holding it against you and telling everyone and their dog to avoid you.
Your leads don’t owe you anything, but many marketers seem to forget that. If anything, it’s the marketers who owe the leads – after all, they’ve gone out of their way to somehow express their interest, and now it falls to the marketers to keep them interested. Done right, you can create lifelong brand advocates and lasting relationships. Done badly, you’ll waste your time and effort and come out of it all looking a little silly.
Conclusion
Here at Bant.io, we specialise in lead generation – but that doesn’t mean that we don’t know a little something or other about what to do with those leads after we gather them. Ultimately, the lead generation phase is just the start of it – but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t aim to get started with a bang. And that’s where we come in.
Need a little help with lead generation? Help is at hand. Request a demo of Bant.io to find out how we can help your company to grow by sending hot B2B leads directly to your inbox. You won’t regret it.
Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.