Customer nurturing is an essential part of the marketing process. After all, acquiring a new customer requires much more time, money, and effort than maintaining and growing with a current one. But marketing shouldn’t be the only department involved in nurturing. When marketing enables the sales team to participate and control nurturing to suit their needs, it opens the door to a new strategy: sales-influenced nurturing.

Understanding Sales-Influenced Nurturing

Sales-influenced nurturing focuses on supporting sales activities through tailored marketing efforts, ensuring that both current and potential customers receive relevant and timely information as they move through the sales funnel. This strategy is particularly crucial during the middle stages of the funnel, where nurturing can significantly impact qualification and opportunity management processes.

Sales Qualification

At the early stages of the funnel, sales teams engage in qualification activities to identify potential customers’ needs and determine if they are a good fit for the product or service. Marketing automation can support this by sending targeted emails, using page tagging to understand customer interests, and providing valuable content to help resolve qualification questions.

Opportunity Management

During the evaluation stage, the focus shifts to managing opportunities. This involves providing comparison criteria, offering social proof through testimonials, and avoiding content that might disrupt the sales process. Effective nurturing at this stage ensures that the customer feels understood and supported in their decision-making process.

Who Benefits from Sales-Influenced Nurturing?

Sales-influenced nurturing can benefit various roles within the sales team, each with its specific needs and challenges:

• Sales development representatives (SDRs): SDRs often face long and challenging processes as they attempt to connect with leads. Nurturing can help maintain engagement, especially when initial contact attempts fail.
• Inside sales teams: Typically handling smaller deals with a faster turnaround, inside sales teams can benefit from nurturing that aligns with their quick-paced environment, enhancing their ability to close deals efficiently.
• Field sales representatives: Handling larger, more complex deals, field sales reps are often the most resistant to marketing interventions. However, when done correctly, sales-influenced nurturing can provide valuable support without risking disruption to their processes.

Implementing Sales-Influenced Nurturing: Strategies for Success

To successfully implement sales-influenced nurturing, consider the following strategies:

• Empower sales reps with control: Sales reps should be able to control the nurturing process. This can be achieved through simple on/off switches, pause functionalities, or allowing reps to select specific nurturing campaigns from a predefined list.
• Leverage CRM integration: Integrate your CRM system with your marketing automation platform. This integration ensures that sales reps can update fields related to nurturing campaigns directly within the CRM, which then syncs with the marketing automation system.
• Use activity-based triggers: Implement activity-based triggers to start nurturing campaigns when there is no sales activity for a specified period. This ensures that potential customers continue to receive valuable content, even when sales reps are unable to follow up promptly.
• Phase implementation: Introduce nurturing controls in phases to ease the transition when you introduce sales-influenced nurturing. Start with basic controls and gradually introduce more advanced options as the sales team becomes comfortable with and have confidence in the process.

Overcoming Challenges and Gaining Buy-In

One of the most significant challenges in implementing sales-influenced nurturing is gaining buy-in from sales leadership. To address this:

• Present data and narratives: Use success stories and data to demonstrate the positive impact of nurturing on sales outcomes. Highlight cases where nurturing helped re-engage prospects, maintain interest if the prospect becomes distracted, or close deals that were previously at risk.
• Ensure sales rep autonomy: Emphasize what sales reps will retain control over in the nurturing process. This autonomy can alleviate concerns about marketing interfering with sales activities.
• Address potential concerns: Be mindful of the political dynamics within the sales team. Collaborate with sales leaders to align nurturing strategies with sales goals and address any objections proactively.

Sales-Influenced Nurturing:

Sales-influenced nurturing offers a powerful way to enhance the collaboration between marketing and sales, ensuring that potential customers receive relevant and timely information throughout the sales process. By empowering sales reps with control, leveraging CRM integration, and implementing activity-based triggers, businesses can create a seamless and effective nurturing strategy that drives engagement, improves conversion rates, and ultimately boosts sales performance.

For a head start on your own sales-influenced nurturing strategy, get in touch with our team today.