Earn More Business With Buyer-Aligned Sales Lead Follow-Up
By Perry Rearick, Chief Editor, Follow Your Buyer
What is the best way to follow up with a lead? This is one of the most common questions I hear from B2B business leaders, marketers, and salespeople who employ content marketing strategies. And it is a great question!
First, there is no universal definition for what constitutes a qualified sales lead. Each B2B solution provider must define what that means for them against the backdrop of their marketing strategy, sales approach, and the workflow driving their marketing and sales operations.
Secondly, despite using it in the title of this article, I don’t like the term lead. It devalues the buyer’s journey and dehumanizes the buyer. The people we want to attract and influence to become customers don’t refer to themselves as leads. Their buying journey is not our selling process in most instances and as sellers we should understand and mirror their process, not shove them into ours.
The outcome we should have for every follow-up with a potential buyer is to help them advance to the next stage of their buyer’s journey.
Modern Data-Informed Follow-Up
We’ve come a long way from the days when winning a sale meant calling a lead as soon as possible. Sometimes solution provider companies would place a time stamp on a lead and expect a sales rep to call within minutes, treating the buyer as if they were simply waiting for the call so they could spend money.
Following up with someone who fits a seller’s target audience is a combination of nurturing, listening, discovering, informing, educating, offering examples, and above all, helping. Rushing to pitch a solution will almost always be met with the silence of being ignored. When SPEED KILLS Sales!
Engagement data, like the kind provided by Life Science Connect, is a source of intelligence that supplies sellers with critical information regarding how to follow up with potential buyers. It enables sellers to determine where a buyer is likely to be in their buyer’s journey based on the content they accessed, their role in their organization, whether they accessed other content, and whether others in their organization accessed the same content. Sellers can then make inferences about the potential buyer and customize their follow up for effectiveness.
Having a Clear Purpose for Your Follow-Up
If you think the purpose of sales follow-up is to make a sale, think again. If you are a sales representative for your organization, that may be your ultimate goal, it is likely how your success is measured, and it is the basis of your compensation model. But, make no mistake, it is rarely the purpose of a follow-up call for the prospect.
A study by John Dawes, Professor of Marketing at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, states that only 5% of target audiences who engage in marketing content are actively seeking goods or services meaning that 95% are in some other stage of the buyer’s journey. He refers to this as 95-5 rule.1 As a B2B solution provider, if you use a single, standard follow-up oriented toward a ready-to-buy prospect, prepare yourself for disappointment.
The goal for every follow-up call with a prospect is to help them advance in their buyer’s journey. In rare cases, that may mean helping them buy something from you. But there is a 95% chance that they are not ready to buy.
Preparation
Assuming the seller has the name and contact information for someone, follow-up preparation begins by asking several questions.
- Why do I have this contact information?
- Where did the information come from?
- And most importantly, why did the contact give me this information?
The answers to these questions will help the seller judge where the buyer is in their journey. If they developed a solid content strategy aligned with the buyer’s journey, each piece of marketing collateral will be tagged early, middle or late stage.2 The seller may have a tech platform that helps them answer these questions, and perhaps even automate the follow-ups, but it doesn’t relieve them of oversight responsibility.
If the prospect completed a 14-field form and stated they were interested in a specific solution, or the engagement data indicates they were looking at specific solutions, they are likely in the late stages of their buyer’s journey. It doesn’t mean they are ready to buy from that solution provider, but follow-up should be oriented toward someone closer to implementing a plan.3
However, according to John Dawes’ research, this is rare. Most of the engagement data a seller generates will indicate the prospect is in the early to middle stages and these are more challenging follow-ups. But, if the seller has developed a content strategy aligned with the entire buyer’s journey, they’re armed with all sorts of content that gives them follow-up options.
Build Trust By Helping the Buyer Navigate Their Journey
If people trust you, they’ll do business with you. This is a principle attributed to Zig Ziglar, one of the most influential sales trainers of our time. How a seller follows up with a potential buyer is important in establishing the kind of relationship they will have.
Buyers seeking solutions to complex issues want strategic partners, not contractual vendors. Sellers who race to pitch will find themselves out of the running when the buyer develops vendor criteria for their solution.
Taking the time to understand the buyer, determining where they are in their journey, and reaching out to them with appropriate help will be noticed by the buyer. And solution providers who do this well will earn far more business than those who do not.
- Advertising effectiveness and the 95:5 rule: most B2B buyers are not in the market right now, John Dawes, May 2021, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science Advertising effectiveness and the 95-5 rule: most B2B buyers are not in the market right now | Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science Here is a Trailblazer interview with John Dawes John Dawes B2B Advertising Effectiveness And The 955 Rule
- Customer-Centered Content Marketing Part 1 & Customer-Centered Content Marketing - Part 2
- The Real Buyers Journey