Creating a Successful Lead-Nurturing Strategy, Part V: Most Companies Fall Far Short

If you’ve been fol­low­ing my blog­ging activ­i­ties in recent weeks, you should now have a good under­stand­ing of how you might imple­ment an auto­mated lead nur­tur­ing and response strategy.

I’ve walked you through cre­at­ing the per­fect lead nur­tur­ing email to recoup lost rev­enue for BtoC com­pa­nies and BtoB com­pa­nies. I’ve described in detail when, and how often, to con­tact leads. And I’ve talked about how to suc­cess­fully cre­ate a long-term strategy.

Now that you know exactly how a top-notch lead nur­tur­ing strat­egy is con­structed, I thought it would be inter­est­ing to share the results of a sur­vey that Insid​eSales​.com did in con­junc­tion with Omniture.

Insid​eSales​.com set up aliases, such as John@​xyzcompany.​com, and com­pleted the lead or request infor­ma­tion form of 700 dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies — rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the mar­ket — sev­eral dif­fer­ent times. Then kept track of their lead response and nur­tur­ing strate­gies and com­pared them to the strate­gies I’ve out­lined in recent weeks, to see how they stacked up.

How did they do?

• Aver­age email response time: 19 hours, 31 min­utes
  *Opti­mum response time should be within the first hour

• Aver­age phone response time: 36 hours, 57 min­utes
  *Opti­mum phone response time should be within the first five minutes

• How many com­pa­nies even responded?
  *Only 47.3 per­cent responded via email, and just 7.5 per­cent responded via phone!

Out of the 700 com­pa­nies, there was an aver­age of just 3.3 con­tacts per com­pany. Only 4.6 per­cent used a strat­egy involv­ing both phone and email, and less than 5 per­cent called within 24 hours.

When you con­sider that a suc­cess­ful long-term lead response strat­egy begins with a phone call and email within the first 24 hours, that there should be an attempt to con­tact leads up to 26 times until you reach them in the first two weeks, that there should be at least one email a month — fol­lowed by a phone call — on an ongo­ing basis there­after, these com­pa­nies fell far, far short of the ideal.

Sim­ply stated, com­pa­nies across the board are des­per­ately lack­ing in nur­tur­ing those impor­tant and hard-to-come-by prospects. Your com­peti­tors are drop­ping the ball, leav­ing an oppor­tu­nity wide open for you to step up to the plate. By imple­ment­ing a lead nur­tur­ing strat­egy now, you can be miles ahead of your competition.

I chal­lenge you, today, to begin. Step up your efforts to reach a lead in the days fol­low­ing their first con­tact with you. See if you can attempt to con­tact prospects up to 26 times until you reach them (this can be done using tech­nol­ogy from com­pa­nies like Insid​eSales​.com that can mask caller ID so it doesn’t look like you’re being a pest).

So try it. I guar­an­tee your sales will improve — even as your com­peti­tors’ stagnate.