One of the most often ignored ways to increase sales is lead nurturing.  Lead nurturing is the process of using the web, e-mail, phone, social media, and other online and offline channels to build relationships with qualified prospects who are not yet sales ready.    Most businesses and websites go for the homerun (make a sale) with every pitch (potential prospect).  They aren’t patient enough to hit a single (generate a lead) and then manufacture some runs (produce some sales).  By doing something as simple as staying in contact with possible prospects, you can easily double and triple your sales.

50% of Sales are Completed in 14 Days and 50% are Completed After 14 Days

Do you understand the implication of that statement?  Most businesses don’t have to do much to get clients in the first 2 weeks.  These are the low-hanging fruit.  But most people don’t get the clients after the first 2 weeks.  This means that if you set up a good time-sequenced lead nurturing campaign, you could double your existing sales

This is one of the most important lessons that we learned from the Surfing Guru.  He drilled this into our head over and over when running a sales campaign since he’s seen it over and over for all of his campaigns. 

What does it mean?

Regardless of whether you spend $200, $2,000, or $20,000 on a marketing campaign to generate new leads, by far, the biggest investment is just generating the leads.  Following up is negligible. 

Let’s use this example:

• You run a $2,000 Direct Mail Campaign to reach 4,000 potential prospects
• You get a decent 2.0% response rate so you generate 80 qualified prospects
• 8 of those prospects sign up to be clients within 2 weeks at a value of $300 per new client

If you don’t follow up, you just break even with that campaign.  But if you nurture those leads and that costs just $10 per qualified prospect, here’s what happens:

• It costs you $800 to follow up for all the initial prospects
• You generate 8 additional clients over the next few months.
• Your $800 generate an additional $2400 in revenue

You now are making $4,800 on a $2,800, or a 71.4% return.  Without nurturing those leads, you have have gotten just a 20% return.  Now multiply all of that by 10 for a much bigger campaign and look at the $20,000 of profits gained versus $4,000. 

What is Lead Nurturing?

This is important.  Lead nurturing is NOT just sending a monthly email newsletter to your entire database, or calling prospects every few weeks to see if they are ready to buy yet.

It is your opportunity to build a relationship with a real person and progressively understand more about his needs. It is about demonstrating the value your company can provide by showing the prospect how he might be treated as a customer.

You need to stay on their short term memory so that when they are ready to make a move, your company is an obvious choice.