Lead Nurturing The Sales 2.0 Way For Startups

Before I start, I would like to give you a small recap of what sales 2.0 is for people who have missed reading my earlier article here. Sales 2.0 is nothing but an intersection of marketing and sales with the help of smarter tools and softwares.

With companies like Salesforce.com and other SaaS biggies, there is an increasing motivation for companies to go the SaaS way, but hold on; building a multi tenant system or putting your product on the cloud is not the only thing that you may want to do. Leaving the technology aside one needs to have the necessary sales and marketing eco-system to really scale.

I would like to stress on the lead nurturing part of the sales and marketing, which is quite an important spoke in the Sales 2.0 wheel. As you start creating a buzz around and you have a lot of leads pouring in, it’s virtually impossible for a handful of you guys to be in touch with every lead, answer any questions that they would have, consult them on your product, follow up with them, help them with the necessary product collaterals and take them to a stage in which they are ready to close the deal. So effectively if you were handling 10 leads per sales guy per month/quarter (initially founders themselves while multi tasking) you would be handling 20-30 leads between you, now if you have to scale to 1000+ leads immediately you just can’t think of hiring sales guys.

Lead Nurturing:

You will find a lot of lead nurturing and qualifying tools which will bring down your cost drastically as you start scaling. It’s effectively a link between your website and CRM where you have the leads, and you can design a mailing campaign with timelines for your prospects depending on his nature. For example: if you have a campaign of 15 emails for prospects who see your banner on facebook and register, where you send case studies, product updates, best practices at appropriate intervals to someone who is interested in your product and has signed up. This will ensure that you are able to understand what will your prospect want at different times (predefined) after reading your mail and you deliver that content.

Lead Qualifying:

After you the software starts sending automated emails with respect to timeline of lead entry, depending on the users behavior with the emails, the software starts scoring him, this gives the information of how hot the lead is for the marketing guys, and after crossing a particular score the sales guys can follow him immediately. It helps you focus your energies only on the hottest of leads, analyze the pattern of conversion of your customers and replicate the same to increase the conversion number.

You will find numerous tools for the same depending on how detailed you want the systems to work, some of the popular ones are Hubspot, marketo, paradot, loopfuse, salesfuse and eloquoa. Having tried my hand at a few of them for early stage companies Hubspot does have the best possible ROI and for more matured companies Eloquoa seems to be the obvious choice.

Deltecs recently raised first round of investment from Kutchi Angel Network