An important part of your stay-in-touch nurturing leads campaign is timing: how frequently to communicate with your leads. Every company should figure out its own schedule. In general, a good rule of thumb is to avoid contacting leads more than once a week, but more than once a month. How do you figure out what frequency is right for your company? Here are a couple of tips:
1) Compute the average length of the buying process. Selling high-priced items is naturally going to take more time, as a lead will probably equate price with risk. Use this average as a metric to see if your lead is especially reluctant. If you so determine, you may either want to apply a full-court-press, or recycle the lead for later follow-up.
2) Consider the method(s) of communication you use. A phone call is definitely more intrusive than email or direct mail. The general pattern is to keep the communications low-key until you approach the end of average buying time. At that point, you can mix in phone calls from sales reps and increase the frequency of communications.
Assume a lead has responded to a call-to-action with enough data to warrant being classified as a prospect. Here is an example of a buying cycle that normally takes three months to complete. This is just one possible scenario – don’t take it as gospel.
- 1st Day: send an introductory email to the lead
- 10th Day: another email, this time with an offer for a download of an article or e-book
- 15th Day: the sales rep sends out a personal email to the prospect
- 30th Day: send the prospect a report discussing industry best practices
- 45th Day: first phone call from sales rep, very low key
- 60th Day: another email, this time promoting a group activity such as a webinar or virtual trade show
- 75th Day: the sales rep now sends another personal email, this time offering to demonstrate the product or service to the prospect
- 85th Day: Sales rep calls to arrange an in-person meeting with the prospect. Tone is strong but not threatening.
- 90th Day: Email a sales proposal to the prospect.
If the prospect remains resistant at this point, you should probably put him or her on the recycle list, and make contact again after a couple of months.
When all else fails, simply ask your prospect how often they want to be contacted, and what information would suit their needs best.
agree nearly 100% with a slight exception. There are those who would like things to move slightly faster and you have to learn to read people in conversations and e-mail content by reading and studying their characteristics. However generally speaking the buyer will be the more aggressive one usually in this situation. I have a recent experience with a phone call that did not get returned to me until the following day after and some info that was suppose to be sent to me and has yet to be sent. When these kind of practices happen you can very likely loose your prospect to a competitor because it could be construed as poor quality customer service. Sorry but just had to be honest.
I do like what I am reading and am going to continue onward because I am getting a lot of info from all of this. Keep it coming
Thank you.