Lead re-engagement is lead nurturing to rejuvenate old leads
The January sales push well on it’s way and most B2B marketers I know are looking more ways to generate leads faster. But here’s a question to ponder…
Do you have a process have a process for handing leads (from sales) back to marketing when they are not sales ready? If not, I recommend you consider at re-engaging the leads you already have in your database and pay special attention to the leads your sales team didn’t convert last year.
I’d like to share what we learned from a lead re-engagement test we just completed for a large communications company. We tested a lead nurturing program to re-engage the following types of “old” leads:
- Leads that were “open” but not touched by a sales person in 90+ days
- Leads worked by sales but marked as “closed – lost” meaning they didn’t buy
We started with a simple multi-touch lead nurturing program that included: a 3 touch email track, the emails connected to educational articles, and our teleprospecting team made follow-up calls (based on email engagement replies, clicks and opens).
The teleprospecting team was also equipped with one-to-one emails and relevant articles designed to progress and continue the conversation. Our strategy was pretty simple: be a resource for that prospect and offering relevant ideas—and not being a pest, and asking over and over, “Are you ready to buy yet?” If there was a need, we qualified them sales ready leads according to their universal lead definition.
After the 10-week test, we found the old leads (some were over two years old actually) had a 10% higher conversion rate than the more recent leads that were a few months old. Our client expected the more recent leads would have a higher conversion rate but it was actually the older leads that performed better.
What do you think about this idea of lead re-engagement? Is it something you do or would do in your company?
B2B Telemarketing, Email Marketing, Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Sales Leads
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This sounds like something we need to implement in our company.
I think this is a very effective technique when used in services companies as the customer who was originally cold may have run into issues with their project that they insourced or had trouble implementing the software they originally purchased.
When I used to be a prospect for Asia-Pacific telcos with new services to (for example) country ‘x’, the account reps got at least a listen (and even an on-site meeting) if they’d obviously done their homework beforehand and gone through their notes on our line of business.
Those that hadn’t, and wanted us to reveal all our problems from day 0 rarely got much serious interest. Nurturing leads takes time and effort and the “being a pest” school of sales was an instant turn off.
Great points. When we re-engage I think, relevance is the key. To do that requires effort and you’re story shows how sales people who focus on creating value for you were able to differentiate themselves from being vendor with a pitch. You actually considered they would be someone you’d consider listening too.
The statistics sure don’t lie! It is actually crazy that these leads perform 10% than new leads, after being “rested”. There is some irony here that I am missing, but I really have to take my hat off and salute the effectiveness of the lead rejuvenation process!
I agree – re-engagement strategies really are the core to lead nurturing. The trick is to find the best way to re-engage. Often, when you’re dealing with a large list of companies who have become “stale”… you’re faced with the prospect of reaching out to them all. Often this is too expensive because the list sizes are too large. We faced this scenario.
We ended up using Boxpilot to put together an integrated series of B2B guided voicemail campaigns to use voice to make the touch. We felt that we needed a voice contact to really break through the clutter but we didn’t have the budget to pay for live B2B telemarketing. Results were very good and the prospects who “put up their hands” were put on fast track with sales reps.
Also check out Greeler for a low-cost bare bones guided voicemail option. Some also use the term voicemail courier I think.