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Nurture to Increase Sales

Nurture leads to increase sales

Nurture to Increase Sales

All too often, companies will go through cycles of feast and famine, which can lead to other difficulties for your business. John Bancroft, MD of Incognate, looks at ways to smooth out these cycles.

Running one-off, lead generation campaigns with focused propositions in specific market sectors will generate good returns. Yet how much money are you leaving on the table? Once a campaign has finished and the focus switches to the next one, what happens to the contacts?

To find out more about how Incognate can help you increase your sales by telemarketing get in touch.

Drip-feed sales leads

Companies often leave a significant amount of money for their competitors, yet there are some simple things that can be done to stop this from happening. For example:

  • Lead nurturing to create a consistent sales pipeline
  • Telemarketing to existing customer accounts
  • Cross-selling and up-selling other products and services

Lead Nurturing

For many of you, this is perhaps not new but is often forgotten or poorly executed. Yet new business leads can be found 3–6 months after the initial calling, so it is important to, at the very least, monitor and keep on top of the list of call-backs, even if it’s months after the initial campaign. You need only allow between 2–4 days a month for follow-up calls. The data is already there, up-to-date, and everything is in place to carry on successfully nurturing leads long after the initial campaign has run.

Lead Generation within Existing Accounts

More often than not, when a new piece of business has been won it is ultimately transferred across to account management. Stop! When dealing with very large accounts, it is well worth continuing to get your new business sales team to focus on the account.

Developing a strong foothold in a new account can take some time, and often the Account Manager is caught up in delivery issues to generate new opportunities. In the meantime, your competitors’ sales force is busy approaching your account and opening up new opportunities.

Selling into your existing accounts can be highly profitable. Find out how we can help here.

Up-selling and Cross-selling

You win your first piece of business and you are then busy delivering and meeting deadlines, but you could be missing out on further business.

People are often nervous about looking for more business too close to acquiring a new account, but this is your chance to identify further opportunities. Once you have the project under way, organise a review meeting to discuss how things are going, but also to identify other opportunities by asking questions such as, ‘Who looks after your …?’ Have you considered reviewing suppliers for …?’

The worst thing that can happen is they ask you to leave that until later in the relationship. On the other hand, you could win more new business as well as save your customer more time or money.

Ultimately, when the deal is done, don’t let your new business sales people just move on to the next campaign – there is a lot more to be won by lead and customer nurturing.

If you recognise the need for external marcomms support contact us now.