Most companies focus heavily on acquiring new leads every month to close new business.
However, if you are not using a process to keep in frequent touch with leads acquired in past months, i.e. nurturing prospects already familiar with your business, you lose the opportunity to close business with those prospects.
If you have any doubts, consider our recent work at HubSpot to nurture "cold leads" (individuals who had not responded to us in a while) and "lost opportunities" (companies with whom conversations fizzled out, or at some point decided it was not the right time to buy).
Over a period of 4 weeks we invited both groups to a series of product webinars with a lot of free, valuable information to help them with their business, but at the same time included demos of our product (more so than in our regular webinars).
Here are some results from nurturing leads via those four webinars:
1) Re-Awakening Old Deals
On average we "re-awakened" just over 300 cold leads and 47 lost opportunities per webinar.
Additionally, our cold leads helped us attract around 85 new leads per webinar by sharing the information in social media and with colleagues.
2) Highly Engaged Sessions
On average, 160 individuals attended each webinar and we had an opportunity to host highly engaged sessions with a lot of questions about our product and pricing.
Our overall registration-to-attendee conversion ratio was a whopping 46%. The various segments individually performed well. 36% of cold lead registrants attended, 35% of new lead registrations and 43% from the lost opportunity bucket.
3) Re-Kindling Conversations
While the cycle for determining the sales success for each of these segments is not complete, we've already closed deals with companies in each of them. Through the engaged Q&A during webinars we were able to learn how their needs had changed and start new conversations.
The take-away of all this work?
Nurturing old leads is a way to rekindle old conversations that have fizzled out. You never know when a closed door will re-open -- and you can only find out by knocking!
What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Photo credit: ak37
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