Lead Generation & Nurturing for Your Architectural Firm - Part Three

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Part three of four

This is the third installment in a four part series dedicated to lead generation and lead nurturing process. No business can be successful with new client development without a strong understanding of this phase in the sales cycle. You can read the initial installment which can be found here.

Here are a few areas to discover critical functionality indicators inside a lead nurturing marketing campaign:

• Engagement: Identify the email open and click-through rates. This data is a great starting point for your tracking efforts.
• Lead acceleration: Are leads moving according to expectation through the lead funnel?
• How does the time it takes to convert from lead to converting to a sell-ready state? Are leads attentive to your firm’s content strategy? Between nurturing campaign stages, how long does it take to move nurtured prospects into the sales cycle?
• Outcome metrics: What are the conversion rates? From initial contact (suspect) to lead, from lead to sales opportunity? How many leads begin the process? How many of them convert successfully through the entire process (closing rate)? What is your company average transaction amount (sales revenue average)? What is the entire length of the sales cycle in terms of time?

Once you establish a baseline with these and other key indicators, you can look for trouble
spots in your nurturing campaign, experiment with solutions and consider your next steps.

Going Forward From the Beginning

A fundamental lead nurturing strategy, utilizing a small amount of potential buyer user profiles, a restricted procedure flow, and some performance metrics, is an excellent place to begin. Like prospect scoring, on the other hand, direct nurturing is actually a stratagem that’s by no means concluded; there’s always room to fine-tune, improve and
expand your efforts.

In addition to incorporating improved and updated user profiles, fresh touch - points, content variety and communication avenues with your established activities, there are other tips on how to take advantage of lead nurturing, including:

• Brand Loyalty and Customer Retention: Utilize valid and current lead nurturing practices to produce more intense interactions with your current leads AND clients - including cross-sell and up sell possibilities influenced by engaging content.
• Relationship Building: Implement lead nurturing process to allow clients to get to know your firm better, provides you an opportunity to strengthen the relationship, and develop a bond so that you firm is “Top-Of-Mind,” and that your competitors become a distant memory. Assist and follow up with your customers concerning their newly purchased goods and services; supply them with help-desk support options, suggestions, provide consumer online groups for community information and facts, and various solutions.
• Remarketing: Re-evaluate each failed conversion to develop “come-back” strategies to take another pass for possible conversion. Sometimes, simple annoyances caused the prospect to fall out of the lead funnel.

This image displays another look at the sales funnel, and the lead nurturing process. The middle of the funnel is a critical area on which to focus, but as noted previously, doesn’t try to force your lead to a buying decision. There should be well focused energy in providing all of the information to a particular lead in this position, so that the buying decision formulates with you and the relationship you are building with them.

Lead Rating - How Lead Rating and Prospect Nurturing Interact

I would like you to understand the way in which prospect rating can help to increase your current marketing and sales campaigns. An essential prospect ranking principle - the warm lead - is additionally essential for any lead nurturing strategy.

“Warm qualified” prospects demonstrate an obvious affinity for your product or service and solutions, however, they typically do not score as significant as would the oh-so evident “sales-ready purchaser.” Identifying a warm lead using your own rating method is normally a question of time and experience. The efficacy of your system will be determined by various psychographic and demographic ranking considerations of your “ideal” prospect, coupled with your firm's practical experience going through a number of prospective buyers. Once you discover what your business’ lead scoring ceiling (the culmination of the factors compared to your ideal consumer), it’s not as difficult to be able to systemize the entire process of navigation directly to the sales staff. These folks, who are on the direct firing line of dealing with the prospective customer, must fully understand what makes the ideal time to work with the prospect. By the use of metrics (the rating system) and the prospect, they should know what stage of the buying process in which they find them. If sales intervenes too soon, there is a degree of probability that the prospect may back away, become frustrated, or seek further study with your competitors.

Timing is everything.

Lead Generation & Nurturing for Your Accounting Firm - Part Three

Tweet

 

Part three of four

This is the third installment in a four part series dedicated to lead generation and lead nurturing process. No business can be successful with new client development without a strong understanding of this phase in the sales cycle. You can read the initial installment which can be found here.

Here are a few areas to discover critical functionality indicators inside a lead nurturing marketing campaign:

• Engagement: Identify the email open and click-through rates. This data is a great starting point for your tracking efforts.
• Lead acceleration: Are leads moving according to expectation through the lead funnel?
• How does the time it takes to convert from lead to converting to a sell-ready state? Are leads attentive to your firm’s content strategy? Between nurturing campaign stages, how long does it take to move nurtured prospects into the sales cycle?
• Outcome metrics: What are the conversion rates? From initial contact (suspect) to lead, from lead to sales opportunity? How many leads begin the process? How many of them convert successfully through the entire process (closing rate)? What is your company average transaction amount (sales revenue average)? What is the entire length of the sales cycle in terms of time?

Once you establish a baseline with these and other key indicators, you can look for trouble
spots in your nurturing campaign, experiment with solutions and consider your next steps.

Going Forward From the Beginning

A fundamental lead nurturing strategy, utilizing a small amount of potential buyer user profiles, a restricted procedure flow, and some performance metrics, is an excellent place to begin. Like prospect scoring, on the other hand, direct nurturing is actually a stratagem that’s by no means concluded; there’s always room to fine-tune, improve and
expand your efforts.
In addition to incorporating improved and updated user profiles, fresh touch - points, content variety and communication avenues with your established activities, there are other tips on how to take advantage of lead nurturing, including:

• Brand Loyalty and Customer Retention: Utilize valid and current lead nurturing practices to produce more intense interactions with your current leads AND clients - including cross-sell and up sell possibilities influenced by engaging content.
• Relationship Building: Implement lead nurturing process to allow clients to get to know your firm better, provides you an opportunity to strengthen the relationship, and develop a bond so that you firm is “Top-Of-Mind,” and that your competitors become a distant memory. Assist and follow up with your customers concerning their newly purchased goods and services; supply them with help-desk support options, suggestions, provide consumer online groups for community information and facts, and various solutions.
• Remarketing: Re-evaluate each failed conversion to develop “come-back” strategies to take another pass for possible conversion. Sometimes, simple annoyances caused the prospect to fall out of the lead funnel.

This image displays another look at the sales funnel, and the lead nurturing process. The middle of the funnel is a critical area on which to focus, but as noted previously, doesn’t try to force your lead to a buying decision. There should be well focused energy in providing all of the information to a particular lead in this position, so that the buying decision formulates with you and the relationship you are building with them.

Lead Rating - How Lead Rating and Prospect Nurturing Interact

I would like you to understand the way in which prospect rating can help to increase your current marketing and sales campaigns. An essential prospect ranking principle - the warm lead - is additionally essential for any lead nurturing strategy.

“Warm qualified” prospects demonstrate an obvious affinity for your product or service and solutions, however, they typically do not score as significant as would the oh-so evident “sales-ready purchaser.” Identifying a warm lead using your own rating method is normally a question of time and experience. The efficacy of your system will be determined by various psychographic and demographic ranking considerations of your “ideal” prospect, coupled with your firm's practical experience going through a number of prospective buyers. Once you discover what your business’ lead scoring ceiling (the culmination of the factors compared to your ideal consumer), it’s not as difficult to be able to systemize the entire process of navigation directly to the sales staff. These folks, who are on the direct firing line of dealing with the prospective customer, must fully understand what makes the ideal time to work with the prospect. By the use of metrics (the rating system) and the prospect, they should know what stage of the buying process in which they find them. If sales intervenes too soon, there is a degree of probability that the prospect may back away, become frustrated, or seek further study with your competitors.

Timing is everything.

Lead Generation & Nurturing for Your Accounting Firm - Part Two

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This is the second installment in a four part series dedicated to lead generation and lead nurturing process. No accounting firm can be successful with new client development without a strong understanding of this phase in the sales cycle. You can read the initial installment by clicking here.

Obviously, trade shows are not the only venue for Accountants to generate suspects. Anyone that visits your website, or picks up one of your flyers, or holds a spot in your mailing list database is merely a suspect. A person walking in the door makes them a suspect. It is the conversion of those suspects to prospects, or leads, that are crucial to the sales process.

Suspects don’t turn into prospects until some form of communication occurs with a suspect and a member of your company. This sharing of information will let both parties mutually determine if there is genuine interest in your particular services, and that there is credibility in your promise to deliver it. Only then will they graduate to the position of lead. They are now at the top end of the sales funnel (see Figure 1, below).

Understanding the Lead Nurturing Concept

Lead nurturing is the approach marketers use to develop and “care for” individual relationships with these immature prospects – even while they’re not yet ready to purchase - in order to earn their particular business should they eventually ready themselves to purchase.

I’m sure you will notice that the sales funnel in figure 1 is specifically illustrated for inbound marketing, but the concept holds true for all approaches involving relationship or content marketing. The top of the funnel is where the suspects first convert into leads, and these leads make their way toward the sales end through lead nurturing. The process is the same regardless of what type of marketing you perform.

You begin finding suspects to turn into leads, to convert to customers. The further down the funnel improves their “qualification” rating, or rank if you will. This is where you provide the level of nurturing they require, by returning for additional information. They may either contact you or you may contact them. The choices are numerous, and they are yours to make. What is certain today is that today’s customer or decision maker, be it business to business or business to consumer, is performing a lot of online search prior to making a buying decision.

Your responsibility as a business professional is to provide individual leads an easy path to the information they require to reach a purchasing decision, to keep your brand name top of mind during this time, and to be there when they are eventually in a position to make a commitment.

Within this article, I will attempt to explain the fundamental actions your business should take to establish an efficient and effective lead nurturing system.

For instance, these aspects are important to the overall success of your lead nurturing system:

1. Knowing and understanding the fundamental principles associated with prospect nurturing
2. Creating an uncomplicated prospect nurturing process
3. Understanding how to perfect and broaden your current process
4. Evaluate the success of your company lead nurturing program
5. Understanding how to employ prospect nurturing to produce a greater, more productive connection involving the marketing and advertising and sales teams

 Suspects & Prospects

Figure 1.

People, especially those looking to select the right accountant, often produce an extended buying cycle; they may take weeks or even months (up to eighteen months for one of our clients) to make major purchasing decisions. While this may not be true for all individuals, most people will still take their time on any major selection decision (and selecting someone to oversee their financials usually falls into this thinking), unless of course, the issue is one of an emergency nature. When the clothes washer goes out, they may not perform all the research they would have like to because the pile of clothes keeps rapidly growing. But selecting a firm for a long term relationship, and supporting their vision for their business, always requires a lot of research and evaluation.

Remember, lead nurturing is a lot like creating a pathway for prospective buyers, specifically where your company marketing and advertising group serves as the ever-attentive instructor.

You can learn more about what buyers are researching or looking to purchase, which is determined by their particular actions and patterns. If the prospect has visited (revisited?) your website; your analytics will tell you how much time they spent on a particular page, or what information they downloaded. If you use more traditional marketing strategies, by keeping a record of their inquiries, communications and/or visits, you can nurture them accordingly. In either process, you can produce engaging, well-timed information and facts, in relation to those needs and wants. It may be an eBook, white paper, brochure, flyer or product cut sheet.

Today’s accounting prospects also spend far more time performing online and offline research - a situation that often brings the prospective buyer to the attention of a firm's  sales and marketing teams, long before they are prepared to make a buying decision. A particular concern, naturally, is the ability to isolate these “warm” potential customers - the ones that aren’t prepared to purchase at this time - from your “hot” sales opportunities, which characterize instant sales and profits possibilities. This is precisely why prospect rating resources tend to be ever more popular these days.

Another challenge is knowing the way to interact with individuals that display a “maybe now-maybe later” attitude. Potential customers gradually make their way down the sales funnel, and you nurture them by providing with the information they require without disturbing or perhaps offending them. Performing a rush to judgment by pushing the lead toward a sale is not a good idea, despite the sales person’s need to make their quota. We will cover conversion chaos in another segment of the article.

Lead nurturing might be overwhelming, and it can become a complicated challenge. Getting started with lead nurturing, on the other hand, could be a straightforward process, provided an efficient strategy is developed, together with clearly defined objectives.

Quantify and qualify leads and lead data, merged with a marketing automation solution.

Automation presents your company with the opportunity to monitor and evaluate the process efficacy of your marketing endeavors.

NEXT - Part Three of this four part article will cover dissecting a lead nurturing program, and how it works.  See you next time.

Lead Generation & Nurturing for Your Architectural Firm - Part Two

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This is the second installment in a four part series dedicated to lead generation and lead nurturing process. No architectural firm can be successful with new client development without a strong understanding of this phase in the sales cycle. You can also read  the initial installment by clicking here.

Obviously, trade shows are not the only venue for architects to generate suspects. Anyone that visits your website, or picks up one of your flyers, or holds a spot in your mailing list database is merely a suspect. A person walking in the door makes them a suspect. It is the conversion of those suspects to prospects, or leads, that are crucial to the sales process.

Suspects don’t turn into prospects until some form of communication occurs with a suspect and a member of your company. This sharing of information will let both parties mutually determine if there is genuine interest in your particular service, and that there is credibility in your promise to deliver it. Only then will they graduate to the position of lead. They are now at the top end of the sales funnel (see Figure 1, below).

Understanding the Lead Nurturing Concept

Lead nurturing is the approach marketers use to develop and “care for” individual relationships with these immature prospects – even while they’re not yet ready to purchase - in order to earn their particular business should they eventually ready themselves to purchase.

I’m sure you will notice that the sales funnel in figure 1 is specifically illustrated for inbound marketing, but the concept holds true for all approaches involving relationship or content marketing. The top of the funnel is where the suspects first convert into leads, and these leads make their way toward the sales end through lead nurturing. The process is the same regardless of what type of marketing you perform.

You begin finding suspects to turn into leads, to convert to customers. The further down the funnel improves their “qualification” rating, or rank if you will. This is where you provide the level of nurturing they require, by returning for additional information. They may either contact you or you may contact them. The choices are numerous, and they are yours to make. What is certain today is that today’s customer or decision maker, be it business to business or business to consumer, is performing a lot of online search prior to making a buying decision.

Your responsibility as a business professional is to provide individual leads an easy path to the information they require to reach a purchasing decision, to keep your brand name top of mind during this time, and to be there when they are eventually in a position to make a commitment.

Within this article, I will attempt to explain the fundamental actions your business should take to establish an efficient and effective lead nurturing system.

For instance, these aspects are important to the overall success of your lead nurturing system:

1. Knowing and understanding the fundamental principles associated with prospect nurturing
2. Creating an uncomplicated prospect nurturing process
3. Understanding how to perfect and broaden your current process
4. Evaluate the success of your company lead nurturing program
5. Understanding how to employ prospect nurturing to produce a greater, more productive connection involving the marketing and advertising and sales teams

 Suspects & Prospects

Figure 1.

People, especially those looking to select the right architect, often produce an extended buying cycle; they may take weeks or even months (up to eighteen months for one of our clients) to make major purchasing decisions. While this may not be true for all individuals, most people will still take their time on any major buying decision (and an architectural project usually falls into this thinking), unless of course, the issue is one of an emergency nature. When the clothes washer goes out, they may not perform all the research they would have like to because the pile of clothes keeps rapidly growing. But selecting a firm for a long term, capital-intensive project like building a home, a church, a school, or a commercial building... and capturing their vision for the project... requires a lot of research and evaluation.

Remember, lead nurturing is a lot like creating a pathway for prospective buyers, specifically where your company marketing and advertising group serves as the ever-attentive instructor.

You can learn more about what buyers are researching or looking to purchase, which is determined by their particular actions and patterns. If the prospect has visited (revisited?) your website; your analytics will tell you how much time they spent on a particular page, or what information they downloaded. If you use more traditional marketing strategies, by keeping a record of their inquiries, communications and/or visits, you can nurture them accordingly. In either process, you can produce engaging, well-timed information and facts, in relation to those needs and wants. It may be an eBook, white paper, brochure, flyer or product cut sheet.

Today’s architectual prospects also spend far more time performing online and offline research - a situation that often brings the prospective buyer to the attention of a firm's  sales and marketing teams, long before they are prepared to make a buying decision. A particular concern, naturally, is the ability to isolate these “warm” potential customers - the ones that aren’t prepared to purchase at this time - from your “hot” sales opportunities, which characterize instant sales and profits possibilities. This is precisely why prospect rating resources tend to be ever more popular these days.

Another challenge is knowing the way to interact with individuals that display a “maybe now-maybe later” attitude. Potential customers gradually make their way down the sales funnel, and you nurture them by providing with the information they require without disturbing or perhaps offending them. Performing a rush to judgment by pushing the lead toward a sale is not a good idea, despite the sales person’s need to make their quota. We will cover conversion chaos in another segment of the article.

Lead nurturing might be overwhelming, and it can become a complicated challenge. Getting started with lead nurturing, on the other hand, could be a straightforward process, provided an efficient strategy is developed, together with clearly defined objectives.

Quantify and qualify leads and lead data, merged with a marketing automation solution.

Automation presents your company with the opportunity to monitor and evaluate the process efficacy of your marketing endeavors.

NEXT - Part Three of this four part article will cover dissecting a lead nurturing program, and how it works.  See you next time.

Lead Generation & Nurturing for Your Architectural Firm

Tweet

 

This is the initial portion of a four part series dedicated to lead generation and lead nurturing process. No business can be successful with new client development without a strong understanding of this phase in the sales cycle.

Regardless of the methodology of lead generation you employ, in all probability your architectural firm will spend considerable time, energy and financial resources on lead generation. Some firms utilize direct mail, telemarketing, referral or customer-based marketing, trade shows, networking and a host of other strategies to generate leads and revenues. Others use their own particular formula for marketing and advertising. Lead generation and lead nurturing are top-of-the-funnel aspects of marketing and sales in every business; yours is no different.

This article is not about the strategy, it is about the process. As an inbound marketing agency our company, Zen Marketing, is in the business of teaching businesses how to generate more leads from their websites using content, but this is not a sales pitch today. Forget inbound marketing for the time being; let’s focus on the best approach to nurture the leads that you have generated.

One of the oldest clichés in the business world is “sales is a numbers game”. The number of customer sales transactions is the direct result of the number of “touches” the suspect experiences to convert to a prospect, to a qualified lead, to a sale. A touch might be an ad in the newspaper, meeting at a trade show, phone call, direct mail piece, or article found on the website. Every business is different; every marketing campaign is different. The sales cycle is what it is for your business; you know best the period of which we are referring to.

Those attempting to generate qualified leads, or prospects, if you will, will quickly learn precisely how long and what number of those suspects and prospects result in completed transactions (aka closed sales). In measuring this, a hard truth is exposed: there is major difference concerning “qualified” as opposed to “ready to purchase.”

Here is another truth. There will always be a percentage of “qualified” leads in the lead nurturing process that simply fail to generate a sale, just as there are those that make it all the way through the sales funnel, having received all of the lead nurturing they could ever hope for, and yet fall completely out of the pool of “sales-ready” prospective purchasers.

Statistics reveal that any architectural firm can consider approximately eighty percent of qualified prospects will ultimately make a purchase; however, there is no guarantee the transaction will hit your revenue report.

Lead Generation

We won’t be spending a lot of time on lead generation, because there are so much varied approaches that there are hundreds of books on the subject available for download on Amazon. The trick is realizing the difference between a suspect from a prospect; between a “lead” and a “qualified lead.”

Successful business-to-business marketing tactics include a broad and diverse range of tactics. Some of the most widely utilized include:

• Relationship marketing
• Content or Inbound marketing
• Direct or outbound marketing
• Online marketing
• Events 
• Tradeshows
• Educational workshops

When it comes to lead generation each tactic yields some amount of leads; but at what cost? And how efficiently are the leads created? The graph below, courtesy of our partner Hubspot®, reflects the sliding scale of the costs per lead. I provide this for information only, and won’t be discussing the benefits of one over the other, as it is for your firm to decide what strategies will be effective.

That said, nearly every any business card collected at a trade show is nothing more than a link to a suspect. Chances are that the person providing the card had a fanciful notion to share it because he or she:

• Behaviorally averse to confrontation- it’s easier and safer for them to simply string you along
• Was too bashful to say that something about your product or service caught their eye and nothing more
• Something from their past was brought to mind as a result of seeing your booth
• They love collecting business cards (you wouldn’t believe the number of cards that are given out and then thrown away when the person gets home)
• They ask for more information, only to gather further information to compare with your competitors

IN OUR NEXT POST ..... we take a serious look at lead nurturing.

Lead Generation & Nurturing for Your Accounting Firm

Tweet

 

This is the initial portion of a four part series dedicated to lead generation and lead nurturing process. No business can be successful with new client development without a strong understanding of this phase in the sales cycle.

Regardless of the methodology of lead generation you employ, in all probability your accounting firm will spend considerable time, energy and financial resources on lead generation. Some firms utilize direct mail, telemarketing, referral or customer-based marketing, trade shows, networking and a host of other strategies to generate leads and revenues. Others use their own particular formula for marketing and advertising. Lead generation and lead nurturing are top-of-the-funnel aspects of marketing and sales in every business; yours is no different.

This article is not about the strategy, it is about the process. As an inbound marketing agency our company, Zen Marketing, is in the business of teaching businesses how to generate more leads from their websites using content, but this is not a sales pitch today. Forget inbound marketing for the time being; let’s focus on the best approach to nurture the leads that you have generated.

One of the oldest clichés in the business world is “sales is a numbers game”. The number of customer sales transactions is the direct result of the number of “touches” the suspect experiences to convert to a prospect, to a qualified lead, to a sale. A touch might be an ad in the newspaper, meeting at a trade show, phone call, direct mail piece, or article found on the website. Every business is different; every marketing campaign is different. The sales cycle is what it is for your business; you know best the period of which we are referring to.

Those attempting to generate qualified leads, or prospects, if you will, will quickly learn precisely how long and what number of those suspects and prospects result in completed transactions (aka closed sales). In measuring this a hard truth is exposed: there is major difference concerning “qualified” as opposed to “ready to purchase.”

Here is another truth. There will always be a percentage of “qualified” leads in the lead nurturing process that simply fail to generate a sale, just as there are those that make it all the way through the sales funnel, having received all of the lead nurturing they could ever hope for, and yet fall completely out of the pool of “sales-ready” prospective purchasers.

Statistics reveal that any accounting firm can consider approximately eighty percent of qualified prospects will ultimately make a purchase; however, there is no guarantee the transaction will hit your revenue report.

Lead Generation

We won’t be spending a lot of time on lead generation, because there are so much varied approaches that there are hundreds of books on the subject available for download on Amazon. The trick is realizing the difference between a suspect from a prospect; between a “lead” and a “qualified lead.”

Successful business-to-business marketing tactics include a broad and diverse range of tactics. Some of the most widely utilized include:

• Relationship marketing
• Content or Inbound marketing
• Direct or outbound marketing
• Online marketing
• Events 
• Tradeshows
• Educational workshops

When it comes to lead generation each tactic yields some amount of leads; but at what cost? And how efficiently are the leads created? The graph below, courtesy of our partner Hubspot®, reflects the sliding scale of the costs per lead. I provide this for information only, and won’t be discussing the benefits of one over the other, as it is for your firm to decide what strategies will be effective.

That said, nearly every any business card collected at a trade show is nothing more than a link to a suspect. Chances are that the person providing the card had a fanciful notion to share it because he or she:

• Behaviorally averse to confrontation- it’s easier and safer for them to simply string you along
• Was too bashful to say that something about your product or service caught their eye and nothing more
• Something from their past was brought to mind as a result of seeing your booth
• They love collecting business cards (you wouldn’t believe the number of cards that are given out and then thrown away when the person gets home)
• They ask for more information, only to gather further information to compare with your competitors

IN OUR NEXT POST ..... we take a serious look at lead nurturing.