The strength of your sales pipeline starts at lead generation, but it doesn't stop there. There are several other factors to consider too. So we are here to cover the basic best practice techniques for strengthening your sales pipeline.
1 - Only 10.5% of leads will respond to a sales email
If email is your main marketing tool, you may want to expand on it. The statistics are low for email responses because emails are easy to ignore. Instead, the most successful lead generation follow up tactics come from telemarketing, tradeshows, executive events and conferences. What do all these have in common? They connect you to your lead as a person - whether it's over the phone or face to face. It's much harder to ignore someone you are actually speaking to, which is why these methods are more successful at driving leads to your sales pipeline.
2 - If you follow up with leads within 5 minutes, you are 9 times more likely to convert them
The average consumer attention span has dropped to just six seconds. In the B2B market, that six seconds is cut throat. You not only need to get in contact with them immediately, you need to win them over in that six seconds too. Social media like LinkedIn and Twitter are great for this. If you have the tools to track them back to their social media accounts, they know you mean business. And if you win them over before you've even passed them to sales for a phone call, nine times out of ten you've got a sale. Imagine the amount of time your sales team could save if you've already connected with the lead before passing them through the pipeline.
3 - Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than otherwise
While shortening the sales cycle is ideal, it's not practical to assume that all sales will shoot straight through the pipeline. A lot of leads need to be nurtured. Unfortunately, most sales teams are only contacting a lead twice before dropping them. But research shows that an average of 80% of sales require at least five follow-up phone calls before they are ready to buy.
Losing leads that need to be nurtured is like having a leak in your pipeline. It's weakening the amount of leads coming through and not helping your ROI. So, consider the tools you need to successful nurture your leads. By using an automated email campaign, you can create a simple but effective marketing tool that nurtures and keep leads until they're ready to buy without taking away your time to drive even more traffic.
By Lee Chadwick, CEO CommuniGator & WOW Analytics
