What is lead generation and nurturing?
The sales pipeline begins with a stream of potential customers discovering your content. As they progress through your onboarding funnel, some percentage of people will drop off when they realize that your services don’t meet their needs. Others will blow past the warning signs and attempt to set up an account. To ensure that you dedicate the appropriate amount of resources to each lead, you will need to develop a lead scoring metric and automate as much of the process as possible while maintaining a human touch. Lead generation represents the top of your sales funnel, whereas lead nurturing refers to the stages of education, support, and encouragement that ultimately lead to conversion. Not all leads represent the same value to your company, which is why lead scoring is so essential.The Basics of Lead Scoring
Imagine you are a sales rep at a car dealership. Two customers enter simultaneously, competing for your attention. One of them comes in wearing no shirt and appears to be intoxicated, while the other rolls up in an expensive car and has offered to pay in cash. In marketing terms, the customer with cash in hand would be given a higher lead score, due to their confidence in your product and their readiness to purchase. The intoxicated, shirtless prospect would still be engaged, however they would be assigned a lower priority status. Lead Scoring tends to be more nuanced than the scenario just described. Most companies are assessing their leads based on several variables. How interested are they in your product(s), are they a fit for your business, and how much potential revenue does their account represent? Returning to the car dealership analogy, if you swap out the intoxicated shirtless person with someone fully dressed and with cash in hand, their difference in lead scores could be based on other factors, like the cost of the vehicles that they are inquiring about. Your sales team will need to identify the critical variables that define the potential value and eligibility of your leads. Once those variables are defined, they can be arranged into classes ranging from highest to lowest priority. If you are using a customer support portal like Intercom, you can query stored customer data to automate the evaluation of explicit lead scoring data. Further down the funnel, you may need to collect implicit data to gauge their level of interest.Using Appointlet to Refine the Lead Nurturing Process
Armed with well defined lead scoring categories and an automated solution for evaluating prospects, you can begin focusing on sales calls. Prospects often want to speak with a representative to ask clarifying questions and ensure that your services are a good fit for them. Due to the high cost of sales calls, it’s important that you allocate a budget and determine your bandwidth for high-touch support. The very act of booking a call can be incredibly time consuming. Manually coordinating a time to speak with customers is a time sink, as you will often send multiple emails back and forth before locking in a time that works. You can automate this process with Appointlet by creating meeting types for each class of leads.Using Round Robin Host Assignment, Manual Confirmation, and Private Meetings
The value of Appointlet in the lead nurturing process doesn’t end with automated booking. We provide additional features that will give your sales lead account executive even more control. Round Robin Host Assignment is a valuable feature for sales teams, as your prospects typically have no preference regarding who they speak to. They simply want to talk with a representative. By pooling the availability of your staff, they will be assigned to sales calls based on a “round robin” approach. Appointlet will not ask the lead to choose a representative, effectively simplifying the booking process.How Will You Choose to Engage Leads?
Now that you understand what lead nurturing is and how Appointlet can help you to automate the booking process for sales calls, it’s your turn to come up with solutions. What would be the ideal configuration for your Appointlet account to handle your various lead categories?Ezra Sandzer-Bell
Ezra Sandzer-Bell works at Appointlet as product marketing manager and customer advocate. He has helped thousands of customers improve their online scheduling workflow. Outside of work, he is a music theory instructor and founder of a music software company.