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.

Sales and marketing play different roles in the customer journey. But they truly shine when both can work together. To do this, many companies implement a “nurturing while selling” strategy, which allows sales reps to manage some marketing campaigns while working on opportunities. But how might this work in your organization? Let’s explore nurturing while selling further.

Nurturing While Selling: The Basics

To understand nurturing while selling, you must first grasp the concept of the customer journey: the process of a customer moving from initial interest to eventual purchase. While most companies focus on marketing at the beginning and sales at the end, the middle portion often remains neglected. This is where nurturing while selling comes into play.

Nurturing while selling involves supporting your sales reps with marketing automation and other tools while they engage in the selling process. This approach can include sending targeted emails and offering resources to help your sales reps close deals.

The Role of Marketing Automation in Nurturing While Selling

One of the most common challenges in sales is keeping leads warm. Fortunately, marketing automation provides a much-needed solution. Sales reps can take advantage of automated marketing communications to stay in touch with potential customers and gently nudge them toward a purchase. Your team will be able to automate targeted email campaigns, provide tailored communications, track customer interactions, and provide valuable insights into consumer behavior. Best of all, this automated approach to nurturing while selling allows sales reps to focus on their core tasks without worrying about accidentally ghosting leads.

Navigating the Sales Process

In the early stages of sales, qualification is crucial. Sales reps rely on customer needs and behavior data to narrow down a potential client base for their products or services. Marketing automation can help here too. Page tagging can track customer behavior and provide insights into product interest. Meanwhile, automated email campaigns keep customers engaged with relevant information and promotions.

As leads enter the evaluation stage of the customer journey, opportunity management becomes the focus. At this stage, customers compare products and services and decide what to purchase. Providing content that helps customers make informed choices without overwhelming them with broad, early-stage content is essential. Social proof and testimonials are particularly effective here.

Implementing Control for Sales Reps

Sales reps who typically handle larger, more complex deals might object to marketing’s involvement in their sales process. You can mitigate this problem by giving your sales reps control over when and how marketing automation comes into the picture. Not only does this provide them with valuable tools, but it also ensures they feel empowered in their role.

You may choose to give control to your sales reps through:

• On/off control: This basic option allows sales reps to stop or start nurturing campaigns.
• Pause capability: This option adds a pause function to the on/off control, allowing reps to pause nurturing when actively engaging with leads and resume it when needed.
• Campaign selection: This allows sales reps to choose from a list of nurturing campaigns based on their needs. This approach is powerful but requires more involvement and expertise from the reps.

You may also want to consider automatic nurturing. This campaign kicks in if a set period of time passes with no sales activity, ensuring leads don’t go cold from lack of communication. Whatever your final choice, the key is to give your sales reps control over the process without overwhelming them with options.

Nurturing While Selling: Final Thoughts

Nurturing while selling can be a game-changer for organizations looking to improve their sales and marketing alignment. Keeping everyone on the same page ensures a smooth customer journey and potentially higher conversion rates. But taking the first step can be tricky. Changes can feel overwhelming when your sales and marketing teams have their preferred systems and approaches established. That’s where we can help. Contact to help your sales and marketing teams work together and focus on nurturing while selling.

Should your marketing team continue nurturing while your sales team works on opportunities? Listen as 4Thought Marketing CEO Mark LeVell discusses the pros, cons, and options that empower sales to influence marketing nurture behavior.

If you’d like expert help with both nurturing and selling, get in touch with us today and take your marketing game to the next level.