We don’t have a problem getting leads making inquiries but we have a funnel issue with qualified prospects going dark and disappearing after productive initial conversations. Our price point is substantial enough such that 90% of the time a prospect won’t buy immediately but instead will do anywhere from 1-8wks of research prior to pulling the trigger. I believe where we’re leaving most $$ on the table right now is in failing to close those prospects with whom we’ve had productive conversations and who have expressed initial interest.
I’ve got a pipeline with maybe 50 deals at varying stages of the sales cycle with deals as old as 4mos. I believe with the proper touches we should be converting more of these folks, condensing the sales cycle and making better use of our time with prospects. I’m looking at rigging up some evergreen webinars for this purpose and incorporating those into an automated followup process that hits prospects who go inactive for 2wks. But I’m curious if anyone would be willing to share his/her general approach to this issue of “babysitting” prospects, staying top-of-mind and reviving them when they go unresponsive. I recognize this may not necessarily be something best addressed via automation- it may be we need to experiment with a different sales style. Our culture is a casual one in which we don’t try to forcibly close folks if they’re not ready but rather we approach the conversation as providing good customer service prior to them being a customer.
Anyways, I’d love to hear from anyone who has a good “sales process design pattern” that’s worked for either preventing prospects from going dark or reviving their interest when they do. Thanks!
@Ted at present for Pagley I’m using a decidedly manual process I call “flintstoning” using Boomerang & canned responses in Gmail to test out various followups and see what is effective. My plan (once I learn timing & content that works best) is to then bake those into automations that live in AC and happen automatically. To do that right I really need this capability that’s currently missing.
We’ve internally come to consensus that it makes a lot of sense to do either webinars or screencast videos that speak to particular pain points and/or issues with specific WP hosting providers. Those should serve dual utility as being useful both as lead magnets for capturing new leads as well as providing an excuse to reach out to qualified prospects who haven’t yet seen them and who go dark after an initial productive conversation.
We’ve experimented already with doing a recurring “office hours” audio session that’s essentially like a radio show conducted via SoundCloud whereby I chat with our CTO and he addresses technical pre-sales questions real-time. It provides content fodder for our blog and again, a great excuse to reach out to past prospects and rekindle conversations that have gone dark.
I believe the ultimate answer here involves some setup with behavioral-based triggers and a cadence of targeted content that speaks to a prospect’s particular situation and gives him/her value while keeping us top of mind and simultaneously enabling me to activate some of the more latent pain they may perceive but haven’t yet assigned priority to.
So our plan is first to lead with developing some targeted video assets and then potentially make white papers and other assets which we pepper in appropriately based on tags they acquire from our initial conversation. I’ll report back on how this effort works.
On a separate note it would be seriously helpful for you guys to sort out the issue that precludes us from filtering based on a blank field. That’s been unfortunately a real hangup on making the UTM tags effective for tracking leadsources. This is the feature request for that. I’ve been in contact with Jarad but haven’t yet come up with a workaround that allows us to keep our lead reporting based in AC. Our current plan there is to use Zapier to write leads to a Google Sheet and perform analysis outside of AC but that’s extra work, an extra repository and therefore a sub-optimal solution. Interested in any ideas from other folks who track lead sources in AC on how you’re accessing aggregate reporting data from within AC. We tried a hack using the default field value and filtering based on that but we determined it’s purely cosmetic and doesn’t actually change the default field value so that was a dead-end.
2 thoughts jumped into mind when reading your post:
One
Several of my clients have had success resurrecting cold leads using some version of Dean Jackson’s 9 Word Email. Basically, that email looks like this:
Subject: Dean
Body: Are you still looking for a web hosting solution? Bill
Some people also like to add “if so, I thought you might find this (resource) interesting”. This can be a good way of finding out who is still a prospect and who can be taken off the list.
Two
When creating your content (screen casts,etc.), consider framing it in a way that will help prospects move through their bottleneck(s). For example, you mentioned prospects typically do research - enough research that it becomes a “project”. If finding time to work on the project is a bottleneck for them, giving them more information to analyze may not help move the process along. Showing them how to conduct the research and how to make a decision may be a better way to go.
Not only does this help them move through the bottlenecks, it also gives you a way to follow up in a way that is helpful because you can ask how they are doing on a particular step and offer to help if they are stuck.
@rebar thx those are some good suggestions.
So RE #1 right now I’m actually doing something similar to the 9-word email using Boomerang and Gmail canned responses. Depending on how the first conversation went I bump it back into my inbox X days later and then respond. I have a sequence that looks basically like this:
Initial convo
+4 days
(all are replies to my last sent message if they haven’t answered) Did my responses below make sense? What other questions can I address as you evaluate Pagely for your managed WP hosting needs? Sean
+7days bump I just wanted to check in with you since we haven’t chatted in awhile. Do you have everything you need from me information-wise at this point? Let me know if I can provide you anything else in your evaluation of Pagely for your managed WP hosting needs. Sean
+14days It’s been nearly a month since you had originally reached out inquiring about managed WP hosting. Are you still seeking assistance with this? I’m combing through my notes and tieing up loose ends. If I don’t hear back I’ll assume you resolved your need via another provider and no longer need help. Feel free to reach back out if that’s not the case.
So ^ that’s the cadence of what I call “babysitting” emails that goes out manually right now. I’m using a manual process in Boomerang for the time being for 2 reasons:
each time I need to check to see if they’ve become a customer in the meantime and unfortunately this can be under a different email address so I’ve not yet found an elegant way to automate that and move it to AC.
AC doesn’t yet have this feature that would allow me to bump the last email attached to the deal
RE: your #2 suggestion- totally agree. I started down this path with this blog post with the intent of giving readers a useful framework to better think through their decision. I did a 1-off campaign reaching out to all past prospects with this as an excuse to rekindle dialogue and had decent response (probably should bake that into one of the followups). But I like how you specifically frame it in terms of helping them break bottlenecks… good call. Thx for the suggestions. All great ideas.