5 Sales Nurturing Best Practices for IT Companies

Sales nurturing is a critical key to ensuring qualified leads continuously flow through your IT company’s sales pipeline. The strategy involves using marketing automation to nurture strong relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales cycle – engaging them, answering their questions, and providing them with the highly relevant content and targeted communications they need to ultimately make a purchasing decision.

It’s become a widely accepted strategy among IT companies of all sizes – which means if you’re not employing sales nurturing measures and preparing your qualified leads to become buyers, you run the very real risk of losing them to the competition. Many sales teams are underprepared for inbound qualified leads.

Today’s business buyers do not contact suppliers directly until 57 percent of the purchase process is complete.

With that said, here are the five sales nurturing best practices we recommend for IT companies:

1. Score leads for sales nurturing.

For sales nurturing to be most effective, you need to send the right information to the right leads at the right time. To do that, you need to identify where each lead is within the sales cycle – a process called lead scoring. To get started, look at indicators like the lead’s job title, company size, location, pages viewed, content downloaded, info submitted, indicated pain points, and budget to determine if they appear to be your company’s ideal prospect.

From there, look for cues that the lead is interested in your company. For example, are they spending a substantial amount of time on your site, engaging with social media, downloading gated content, and registering for webinars? These are all very clear indicators that the lead is interested in your products and services. Conversely, if the lead is reading your free blog content without taking higher level steps like downloading premium content or viewing your pricing sheets, it’s a sign that they need more time to be nurtured and would benefit from additional content based on their interests.

2. Segment your leads.

The most effective sales nurturing communications are the ones that are highly relevant to the individual’s interests. To that end, we recommend segmenting your audience as much as possible, based on where they currently are in the sales cycle and what content they’ve read or downloaded. Also, segment them based on their needs or pain points, job title, buying readiness, and industry.

3. Create personalized and engaging content.

Once you’ve segmented your leads, it’s time to communicate with them until they are ready to buy. To do this, you’ll need to create relevant content designed to engage your audience and move them through the sales cycle. To get started, update your blog regularly with fresh articles, infographics, and videos on topics your market will find interesting, such as the latest news, advancements, technology, and research in the IT industry. We also recommend creating in-depth resources that position your company as a market leader, such as white papers, how-to guides, e-books, and webinars. Create different levels of content so you have information that’s relevant to leads throughout every step of the sales cycle – whether they’re just getting to know your company or are almost ready to buy.

4. Communicate with your leads via email.

Email is still one of the best ways to reach your audience, with 74% of consumers preferring to receive commercial communications via email. Send relevant emails to your various audience segments on a regular basis, sharing the content, news, and updates they’ll appreciate the most based on their interests, demographics, and current stage in the sales cycle.

5. Track your effectiveness.

Testing and measuring your success is key to an effective sales nurturing program. Sales nurturing is critical for IT lead generation success.

To get started with tracking effectiveness of your sales nurturing program, we recommend tracking key metrics like your email conversion rate, customer acquisition cost, and click through rate. Focus on continuously tweaking and improving these metrics to most effectively nurture your prospects and prepare them to become buyers.

See also: Most Common IT Company Marketing Mistakes
SOURCE

HubSpot, 18 Email Marketing States That’ll Make You Better at Your Job, https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-marketing-stats-list

B2B’s Digital Evolution – https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/articles/b2b-digital-evolution.html