I sat in on a great webinar the other day on adding the human touch into your lead nurturing.
In the interest of full disclosure, keeping human contact as part of the marketing and sales processes is – admittedly- a subject that is near and dear to my heart. I’m interested in every way that we can take advantage of the power of the human voice to improve communications and sales results. It’s particularly refreshing to hear two leading voices in lead generation/management and technology marketing – in this case Brian Carroll of MECLABS and Jon Miller from Marketo- come out so strongly in support of the (it seems) recently neglected benefits of real human contact. They made so many great points it’s hard to decide what to talk about first, but one point that truly resonated, was the concept of “starting a conversation” amongt your suspect/prospect/customer organizations.
How to do that? Mostly, you need to find a way, as an inherent part of your own messaging strategy to always be adding value to the communications process. You need to address issues that matter – not to you – but to the people you are reaching out to. You need to offer insights- and best of all actionable insights. You need to help your contacts solve their problems. But, how can we tweak our messaging to spark a conversation that we won’t be there to take part in?
One approach that could be effective is to pay better attention to messaging segmentation in business voicemail campaigns. You already have the persuasive powers of the human voice on your side, so why not pre-plan campaigns and segment the audiences within each organization so that you can approach each campaign from your audience’s point of perspective. I can’t think of a business challenge that only presents a challenge from a single side so if you have a list that includes financial executives- message with finance in mind. Talk to marketers about marketing challenges, sales about sales challenges, manufacturing about the issues that keep them up at night. ( I can assure you that manufacturing challenges are fully capable of triggering insomnia, too.) By doing a better job of reaching out to contacts as individuals – even within the confines of a multi-contact campaign, you’re going to do a better job of adding value to your message (and improving their opinion of you).
That’s just the first step and at this point in the game, everyone already knows that addressing a person’s functional issues is necessary. So, as well at that, why not ask a question that will actively drive a conversation among colleagues- albeit from different groups. For example, “When sales can double the accuracy of their projections, what improvements will that drive in production?” or “When you can boost your profits by 10%, where will your company invest that money?” OK. These might not be brilliant examples, but I’m sure you get the drift.
If you want your contacts talking about you, what can your sales and marketing messages do to actively initiate a conversation? It’s a great objective.
I want to share an aside to your post. I have often found that regardless of the service or product, if I can spend a few quality moments speaking with a lead as part of an ongoing conversation, it is monumentally easier to convert that lead. Better yet, if I can convince a lead to meet with me face to face, I am almost assured of closing the sale.
This isn’t a testimony to my closing skills. Instead it is indicative that human beings crave interaction with other human beings and they prefer a relationship over an email more times than not.