How Inbound Marketing Can Automate Your Sales Force

In the first two posts in this three-part series about inbound marketing, we explained how buyer personas and campaigns work. Once you've conquered those methodologies and practices, it's time to take your inbound marketing to the next level with automated workflows.

Automated workflows nurture leads for your sales force from their current stage down to the purchase stage. Going back to the real estate agent and Renter Sally example, if Renter Sally in the awareness stage came to the agent's site and filled out a form to request more information about a listing, we could create workflows where that action would trigger different actions. Filling out that form could launch a series of follow-up emails, adding her to relevant lists that nurture her as a lead and qualify her as a quality marketing lead.  

This planning your offers worksheet from Hubspot is a great template for beginning to plan your lead nurturing workflows with a series of offers emailed to your leads for each product or service they express interest in. Each workflow can have as few as three steps or many more, depending on the length of your typical sales cycle.

Next, you'll want to use smart forms, mapped to each stage in the buyer's journey, to gather more information about your prospects. Smart forms are forms that never ask the same question more than once, but instead raise news questions for your prospects to answer each time they want to download an offer on your site. This allows you to learn more about them. Here are some questions you might want to consider adding in the smart forms targeting Renter Sally:

• Awareness: First name, last name, email, zip code
• Evaluation: Estimated move date, down payment, budget, number one priority in a home, number one priority in terms of area, top three preferred cities
• Purchase: Dates and times available to view listings, which listings do they want to see

Why would we want to take all of this time and effort to create workflows to nurture her instead of just having the sales agent call and meet with her?

• It costs less: Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost, according to Forrester Research. 
• It's effective: B2B buyers are at least 57% through their research before first contacting a seller or supplier, according to Corporate Executive Board. 
• It has a higher ROI: Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads, according to The Annuitas Group.

It's pretty clear why this would be more effective than just meeting with her and explaining everything to her right away. What if she's not quite serious about looking? What if she didn't know the typical associated costs with buying a home and after doing a quick search online, realizes she's still a few years out from starting the homebuying process?

The automated lead nurturing process can be great for qualifying and educating prospects about your products and services, as well as getting additional information about them through smart forms, before the sales team closes them.

Do you have contacts that need some lead love? Give us a call! Call us at 214-937-9521 or go here to get in touch today.