What is Lead Nurturing and How to do it?

Lead Nurturing refers to the act of engaging with the your leads in order to develop a relationship. The purpose of lead nurturing is to create brand awareness and create a positive brand image of your organization in the minds of the prospect. 


Lead nurturing may not lead to immediate improvement in sales revenue figures. The objective of lead nurturing is not outright sales but to play a long term game of building brand trust and loyalty. 


Most of the leads which usually fall on the top of the marketing funnel are usually not ready to make a purchase immediately. Nurturing them helps to build an everlasting relationship due to which, whenever the prospect is ready to make a purchase, they shall choose your organization's products or services to make the purchase.



How to Nurture Leads?


Nurturing leads usually means engaging with the leads at various stages of his buying journey. This can be achieved by providing them the much needed information to solve his pain points. 


Buyers may have a needs of different types of information depending on the stage of his buying journey. Top of the funnel leads might be looking for information about his specific pain point awareness while the bottom of the funnel leads might have already done their research and would be in the stage of evaluating and comparing different products which may include yours as well as competitors' products. The goal of nurturing should be to quench the thirst of information for various leads depending on the stage of their buyer's journey.



Some of the ways by which you can nurture your leads are preparing contents around the pain points you are solving, the challenges faced in the Industry to which you are catering to, and the solutions which you offer to solve those pain points and challenges.


You can write blogs, prepare whitepapers, ebooks, social media posts, email newsletters, run sequence based email marketing campaigns, etc. One of the simplest approaches is also to create user guides or knowledgebase of your products which are available in the public domain or can be accessed easily via an email opt-in form. 


You may also try out by writing on topics which lead your customers to succeed. For e.g. ToolsonCloud is Sales CRM which helps to improve sales productivity of sales teams. This motivated us to write on topics which help our customers to improve their sales and sales productivity.



Sharing contents regularly to the leads serves two purposes. Firstly showing up regularly ensures that leads feel you are alive and they can trust you for a long term engagement. Secondly, when they find the content to be helpful for them to make purchase related research and decisions, it builds much needed brand awareness and builds loyalty.



I hope you liked reading this article, do let me know your thoughts on this.


By the way, If you run a startup or a small business and are looking for a Sales CRM software to track your leads better, then do try out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM. You will definitely love using it.



Practical Cold Emailing tips for Entrepreneurs

Cold emailing is one of the powerful tools in an Entrepreneur’s arsenal. If used well, it can do wonders for a startup. You can use it for sales, getting deals, getting investments, getting mentors and many more. But the fact is most often cold emails get ignored. If your approach is incorrect, you may rarely get a reply from the recipient. 

In this post, I would like to share some tips to make your cold emails more appealing. This shall surely help you get more replies to your cold emails.



1. Personalize and Customize

The most important element of any cold mail is personalization. People won’t even bother to read any email from an unknown person let alone reply to it, unless it is relevant to them. You can make your emails relevant to the recipient by personalizing your email. 

Remember, sending cold emails is different from a mass email campaign. Since cold emails are sent to a limited set of people, you should be able to do a bit of research about your prospect before sending them a cold email. 

You may look out for publicly available information on company websites, their social media profiles in Linkedin or Facebook, any newspaper articles, etc. In your email, you may cite such instances such as you liked reading their article on Linkedin or liked reading their thoughts on media publications, etc. This will help you warm up your prospect.


2. Keep it short, quick and easy to read

When you are sending your first cold mail, ensure to keep it short and concise. Avoid sending any detailed business proposals in the mail content when you are just trying to initiate the conversation. A short and to the point content is faster to read and act. The easier it is for the reader to understand and act, the faster you tend to get replies.


3. Talk about solving a business pain point

If you are selling to a B2B client, then everyone’s goal is to solve some or the other business challenges in their organization. Instead of selling the features of your product you will be required to talk about solving a business pain point being faced by your prospect. This will generate more interest and will help you improve your reply rate.


4. Don’t sell anything in the mail 

Many beginners tend to make mistakes by trying to sell their products within the first cold email itself. This approach is bound to just worsen your brand image and you may never get a response. The purpose of a cold email is to get a meeting or an appointment with the prospect. The best approach is to ask for a short discovery call to begin with. The first discovery call will give you enough information to decide whether it is a qualified lead worth pursuing further or not.


5. Avoid describing product features

As I wrote earlier, avoid describing your product features in your first cold email. This is because, in the beginning, even you will not be aware of your lead having any real requirement for your products or services. Additionally, you should avoid pushing any unsolicited information to the lead such as product features and specifications without gauging the level of interest from the leads.


6. Avoid sounding like a template

Many beginners tend to make the mistake of using cold email templates available on the internet. While it is not wrong to use templates, often they send the same email contents to the prospects without modifying as per their context. While you may feel confident with that, the fact is people can smell templates because those are so common. People want to hear from People instead of Machines. So you must bring out your personal tone in your emails. This shall help build a connection and a relationship to initiate a conversation. 


7. Follow up till you get a reply.

Success in sales lies in timely tracking and follow-ups. Many research suggests that salespersons tend to get replies after the 8th follow-up. You may not need to wait till the 8th one if you do a timely follow-up. It is highly likely to get a reply in your 3rd or 4th email. So always ensure to follow up with your prospects. Ideally, you should follow up within 2-3 days otherwise the prospect may forget.


Hope you found these tips useful. If you are interested in trying out CRM software for Cold Emails and Lead tracking, Do check out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM. It’s Free!

4 Tips on How to Convert Your Leads into Sales

 

Photo by Lukas from Pexels


It takes skills to find leads, but it requires more effort to convert these leads into sales. Based on the research conducted by Verse, marketing and sales teams leave about 55% of leads neglected. This shows how the majority of leads don’t convert into sales are put to waste, but you can take measures to reduce lost leads and produce better conversion rates.  

Leads are vital if you want your company to succeed and different teams from your organization should work together. Read more on how to convert leads into customers.


1. Assess Your Organization

Identify the pain points in your company to improve your lead generation and conversion process. You may look into the following factors during the assessment:


  • Company size - How you will approach conversion depends on your manpower
  • Channel - Look at the existing channels which will reveal which is the least profitable and most effective channel
  • Demographics - Understand the demographics of the market conditions, your target leads, and local competitors
  • Industry - Taking a look at the general picture of your industry will also help to stay updated on trends in the targeted leads
  • Conversion cycle stage - By analyzing the exact points where leads’ interest go downhill, you’ll be able to adjust your conversion process.


2. Stay in Touch with Your Audience

Buyers and consumers are more skeptical of the rampant push-for-sales and advertising they see online. Hence, you must maintain constant communication with them. Instead of spending the majority of your time researching leads, scheduling calls, and planning emails, allot time to actually talk to your existing prospects. Doing this will take you out of the loop of simply generating and capturing leads and contacts without converting them into sales. 

Lead conversion software can help you keep in touch with your audience as you no longer have to manually manage your leads. ToolsonCloud is one CRM application that can help you organize your leads. Its email integration feature sends emails to contacts directly from the application. In addition, it is cloud-based which stores all information online. With this feature, you and your team can organize personal contacts for your leads.

Part of keeping in touch with your audience is determining unresponsive leads. You may do this through quick follow-up emails or phone calls asking your leads if they are interested in purchasing the service or product. This is an effective way to weed out dead leads and to quickly convert leads into sales before a lot of time passes. 


3. Focus On Monitoring

After identifying your dead and active leads, you already have an idea on what specific leads to invest your energy and time into. It’s best to know what stage your leads are at the moment. Better visibility on the active leads will give you insights on the next steps to take.

From the moment that the leads are generated, make it a habit to record the leads. As you do this by using CRM software, you’ll be able to monitor the leads better throughout the sales funnel. 

Furthermore, CRM helps with this tracking process. If you can find one that provides reports and insights, then that would provide data-based decisions for your organization. ToolsonCloud has very useful tracking features like adding activity and setting reminders for follow-up tasks, insights reports, and sales pipeline manager.


4. Collaborate with Your Team

You must communicate goals to your team. Goals are set by the upper management, but it's the entire company that will have to implement them. There are many ways to communicate goals. You can do it via a formal document, face-to-face or virtual meetings, or through a software that allows collaborative features. Whatever way you choose, it’s important that you define your goals, craft a strategy, stick to it, and implement it. 

The best lead management software allows social collaboration. ToolsonCloud provides you with the freedom to collaborate within sales teams with its options to assign leads, deals, or tasks. You may also measure the performance of your employees with ToolsonCloud which promotes accountability.


Path Towards Sales

It can be overwhelming to figure out how to convert customers into sales. However, you can take on the above-mentioned actionable steps.

Your journey towards converting leads to sales may also be aided by different platforms and software. You may build organic leads using social media or manage active leads using a CRM software.

You can take your pick for the platform and software that you are going to use. If you are looking for a CRM software with a clean and lightweight user interface, then try ToolsonCloud by signing up here for free.


Free Sales Lead Tracker Excel Template

Dear Reader, Greetings and welcome to ToolsonCloud Blog!

We have been listening to our reader's demands and many of you expressed interest in a Sales Lead Tracker template to organize your leads in excel. In this post we would like to share with you a universal sales lead tracker template prepared in excel. You can easily reuse it as per the sales process followed in your company.

How to capture leads and contacts from Website into CRM

If you have a website or a blog, sooner or later you will start getting enquiries from visitors who might be interested in the products or services you offer. If the enquiries are limited to a few per month, then probably it is manageable. However, once the enquiries start increasing you will soon realize that you are ending up doing a lot of copy paste work of the form data received from your website contact forms into an excel tracker manually.

4 Sales Qualification questions to ask every lead

In any organized B2B or B2C sales team, Sales Development Representatives (SDR) are assigned the task of generating new pipeline of opportunities by qualifying the leads from their database. But most of the time, SDRs are little unsure on what kind of questions should they ask in order to qualify their leads.


In this post, let me tell you 4 important things you should check while having the first conversation with them in order to check if they are qualified to be pursued further or not.

Remember that your screening or the so called Lead Qualification is critical to the operational output of your quota carrying Sales Executives, because they should work on only the valid leads so that it increases the chances of conversion at the end.

Being in SDR team, you should also measure your KPI by taking into consideration the final conversion of the leads which you qualified earlier. Never measure your metrics only with the mass numbers of leads you qualified if the Sales Executives are not able to convert them later, wasting your organization's productive time and energy.

When you get a Lead from a database, networks, conference or through inbound channels while a customer tried reaching you or subscribed to your newsletter, you should first log them into your CRM as a best practice. It will help you organize your sales effectively.

You may checkout Toolsoncloud CRM if you are looking for a Sales CRM.

Once you add your leads, start reaching out to them via their preferred medium may be Email or Call. It is preferable to have a telephonic discussion so that you understand their context in detail.

While you probe them further for qualifying, focus on the following 4 areas:

1. Fitment of Customer Pain point against your Offering.

In the qualification call, always understand the pain point of client first. Let them speak first about their challenges which they are trying to solve instead of going big bang with a pre-recorded & rehearsed Sales presentation of your product.

Once you understand their problem, try to assess from your own understanding whether your organization is equipped with solving the challenges of the prospect. If the answer to this is "Yes", then go ahead for the next question.



2. Customer Budget

Many a times, you would find that you can solve the customer's problem, but not within the low budget of the Client. To be frank & practical, When you have a lot of leads lined up, It is unproductive for a sales team to spend too much of time and resources to convert a deal where the Customer do not have the required budget to purchase your offerings. You shall simply lose the other potentially qualified leads with budget over the ones who do not have the required funding.

It is good to acquire new customers with some lower budget in the beginning if you are looking for more business from them in future and they do have that much of wallet to give the expected scale of business later.  But the decision of how much of sales executive time should be allocated on those deals, should be taken with the joint decision of your internal sales team leaders.

Do not be hesitant to ask the budget related questions to your Client. Go ahead and explicitly ask details regarding the budget they have planned or allocated for the deal or purchase. If the budget is not worth the effort, then move on or mark the lead on low priority.


3. Timeline for Purchase

Before you pass on a lead to your Sales Executive, he should be apprised on the expected timeline of closing that deal, so that he can align the meetings and follow-up accordingly.

You can ask your lead:

  • What are the processes or steps they need to do internally to complete the purchase?
  • What is lead time for each step of the process? 
  • What kind of challenges might be expected in some stages so that the executive can proactively coordinate to solve them and take it to logical closure.


4. Stakeholders associated with the Deal.

Every purchase whether it is small or big, involves a decision maker and some associated stakeholders like influencer, gatekeepers, actual users, etc. Always ensure you know them in advance so that the Sales Executive can do some homework researching about the stakeholders in order to present a solution which works best for their context. 

When you are asking the lead for the timelines for the purchase process, you may add another question on who shall be the decision maker or stakeholders involved in each stage of the purchase process.


Disclaimer: Funny Images sourced from Multiple Internet sources, No copyright claimed


I hope you liked reading this post, do comment below and let me know your thoughts.

If you are looking for a Sales CRM to manage your sales leads, why don't you check out ToolsonCloud CRM?

6 Proven Ways for Sales Suspecting
You might have read multiple articles on Sales Prospective guide, but this post is about Sales Suspecting. 

Yes, you heard it right! In this post, we shall explore 6 Proven Ways for sales suspecting.
Complete Guide to Lead Management
Hey there, Welcome back to our blog.

In this blog, we wanted to share a complete guide to Lead Management for Startups founders and newbies who are new to Sales. Let's get started with some basics:

Who is a Lead?

Lead is a person who you think might be interested in buying your products or would be interested in what you offer such as information related to the products or services you sell. It is also alternatively called Business Enquiries in some organizations.


What is Lead Management?

Lead management refers to the process of capturing sales leads, qualifying them and nurturing them in order to make them sales ready to handover to sales executives to take it forward for deal opportunity closure.

Steps in Lead Management process:

  1. Identify your Lead profile/persona.
  2. Get the list of leads as per your expected lead profile (Marketing Qualified Leads)
  3. Establish Lead assignment rules.
  4. Assign Leads to Sales reps based on assignment rules.
  5. Prioritize Lead follow-up and activities based on Lead scores.
  6. Nurture your leads based on their engagement status as Cold, Warm or Hot.
  7. Update the engagement status periodically based on lead nurturing and follow up discussions.
  8. Track and Analyze sales progress, incorporate feedbacks and iteratively improve process.

Challenges faced by Sales reps while managing Leads


  • With increase in the number of leads, manual or spreadsheet based tracking often leads to missed follow-ups and delayed sales activities leading to lost opportunities.
  • When the sources of capturing leads increases, manual tracking leads to missed lead capture leading to lead leakage and missed opportunity.
  • Many important data points get missed in manual tracking such as contact information or any specific point discussed with the lead around his requirement.
  • Without using a streamlined Lead Management system, sales reps find it difficult to decide which lead to prioritize for improving lead qualification.

What is a Lead Management System?


A Lead Management system is a software application which helps you manage your end to end Lead Management process. It helps you capture leads from multiple sources into the CRM, view and update their stage in your lead funnel, nurture leads with contextual campaigns, educate them to make them sales ready. Once a lead successfully traverses through a lead lifecycle, the next step is to create a deal or opportunity out of the lead, which is taken forward by the Sales Executives.


Benefits of using a Lead Management System in CRM:

  • Consolidated 360 degree view of a Lead to help the reps for better Lead Nurturing.
  • Lead Scoring to help Sales reps to decide the lead priority.
  • Clean and Validated data points in the CRM to avoid unnecessary clutter to help focus better.
  • Sales workflow automation of multiple operational tasks such as scheduling a meeting, follow-up reminders and alerts on planned activities, lead assignment, etc.
  • Complete history of past interaction of Sales rep and the Lead on multiple mediums such as Email, Messages, Chat, Phone calls, Social Media, Digital Document interactions, etc.
  • Consolidated data points in a single CRM platform helps you get meaningful insights on your Lead management data and provides you with recommendations for improvement.
  • Increase in Lead Conversion rate and sales revenue. 
  • Reduction in sales cycle duration.
  • Increased ROI on Marketing investment for capturing leads



Ways to perform Lead Management:

1. Ways to Capture Leads in CRM

  • Manual Entry: If the Lead addition frequency is less, then you can add the Lead’s record manually in the CRM 
  • Import from External List: If there are lot of leads to be added from an external list, Import it into the CRM via Bulk Import function.
  • Lead Capture Forms on Website: If you have a landing page from your digital marketing advertisements or website contact forms, then you can embed the Lead Capture form from the CRM into the Website which will automatically capture your leads into the CRM.
  • Lead Capture Integration with Social Media: If you get leads from Social Media, then there are lot of social media plugins or integrations available in CRM systems to help automatically capture the leads into your CRM.

2. Ways to Manage Leads in CRM

  • Data Validation: Use field Validation rules to capture data uniformly to keep database clean
  • Lead Scoring: Define the criteria for lead scoring in the CRM to automatically give Lead scores in order to prioritize leads.
  • Lead Assignment: Assign the active leads to respective sales reps either manually or through assignment rules.
  • Labelling: Label or categorize the leads correctly based on their engagement level such as Cold, Warm or Hot.


3. Ways to Nurture Leads

  • Personalized Email Marketing: Run contextual and personalized email marketing campaigns for the leads. You may want to run different type of campaigns for leads in different stage of the funnel say Cold, Warm or Hot leads.
  • Free Educational Content: Periodically, try sending free educational contents to the leads without asking them for any favors. Based on the interaction to view or download the content, you may gauge their updated stage in the lead funnel. If you are helping the lead in educating them in their buying journey, surely they may show some interest in your products at a later stage.
  • Webinars: Invite them for online webinars and conferences on some topic of generic interest. This shall help you improve your brand imagery in the minds of the leads. The leads would be more interested in associating themselves with brands which try newer ways of marketing compared to conventional ways. This shows that the Organization is serious about their business and leads.
  • Social Media Groups and Updates: Create a group of interested leads in social media. Regularly answer their day to queries by commenting on their posts. This is one of most effective way get more visibility since social media comments are viral in nature. Keep posting regular updates on your social media fan pages so that your fans know that you are alive.

If you liked reading this post, Do share it with your friends. 

Are you looking for a Lead Management System? Try ToolsOnCloud Sales CRM for free!