Editor’s Note: Leaky sales pipelines are a big contributor to $2 trillion in annual lost revenue for B2B companies. In this “Plugging Sales Pipeline Leaks” series, we’ll look at common breakages, how to spot them, and how to fix them.
Here are past installments of this series:
For a broad overview, you can also read “How to Identify and Plug Sales & Marketing Pipeline Leaks.”
Below, we take a deeper look at the problems that show up during the nurturing stage.
— — —
Leaks in your B2B pipeline can emerge at any stage of the buying journey. Identifying the root cause, or multiple causes, is often challenging for Ops leaders, but this kind of detective work is essential for preventing lost opportunities.
We’ve explored how leaks appear during the lead generation and qualification stages. Today, we’ll bring our attention to the nurturing stage, and how leaks can derail this pivotal part of the buying journey.
Defining the Nurturing Stage
The nurturing stage is critical for building relationships with prospective customers by identifying and addressing pain points and educating them on solutions through content marketing, email, and social media campaigns. Nurturing enhances and gauges interest, and if all goes well, prospects get converted into customers.
Except sometimes it doesn’t pan out that way. Even though the account was deemed to be a qualified lead, a good business fit, and in-market for your solution… they don’t move forward.
When the nurturing portion of the pipeline springs a leak, it puts you at risk for the loss of important opportunities — and ultimately, lost revenue potential.
Here’s how to recognize and plug those leaks.
The Symptoms of Leaks During the Nurturing Stage
Leaks at the nurturing stage cause more than just lost opportunities. Time, effort, and budget gets poured into campaigns that don’t convert.
What’s a revenue team to do?
It’s time to take another look at the fictional Acme Corporation and find out what its Revenue Operations leader does to diagnose and fix the leaks that occur during the nurturing stage. An investigation discovers:
- Gaps and inefficiencies in the content strategy
- Generic, uninspiring messaging
- Inconsistent or delayed follow-ups to prospect engagement
Let’s see how she goes about fixing these common causes of pipeline leaks.
Gaps in the Content Strategy
To maximize win rates, you need content that aligns with:
- Buyers’ needs
- Interests, and
- Stage in the buyer’s journey
When you nail these fundamentals, you can effectively maintain and advance their interest. When there are gaps, opportunities slip through the cracks.
Here are some key metrics that ops leaders like our friend at Acme Corp. can use to diagnose this issue:
Engagement Metrics: These include page views, time spent on page, bounce rate, and interactions. Low engagement may indicate that the content doesn’t resonate with the target audience, or effectively address their needs and interests.
Conversion Rates: A low conversion rate may suggest that the content is not compelling enough to prompt the desired call to action.
Email Marketing Performance: Open rates, click-through rates (CTR), and unsubscribe rates can help identify if recipients have lost interest.
SEO Performance: Metrics for keyword rankings, organic traffic volume, and backlinks can indicate how well your content is performing in search engines and how it contributes to the nurturing process.
Social Media Analytics: Engagement rates, follower growth, and content reach metrics show how content is performing in social channels and its role in nurturing leads.
Attribution Modeling: Using attribution models can help you understand which content pieces and channels are most effectively contributing to conversions. This can highlight successful elements of your strategy and areas that need improvement.
A content coverage and gap analysis is another way to suss out which topics or stages in the buyer’s journey are underrepresented. This involves mapping out your content and identifying personas, pain points, and buyers’ journey stages with insufficient coverage.
Content analysis is, conveniently, also a great way to start solving the problem. Gaps, once identified, can be filled with relevant, educational content.
Another aspect to optimize is content distribution, and making sure it reaches prospects where they are most active and engaged. That includes channels like social media, webinars, digital ads, and emails – which should be personalized and have targeted messaging related to the persona, but we’ll speak more on that in the next section.
Uninspiring, General Messaging
Let’s assume the revenue team has a library full of content geared toward every buyer persona, every pain point, every tool and feature. And yet…
- Conversion rates drop off significantly during the nurturing stage.
- Engagement rates like open rates, click-through rates (CTR), and time spent on content pages are low.
- Email engagement metrics like response rates are low, and unsubscribe rates are high.
What’s going on here?
Give the content a read, like our ops leader buddy at Acme Corp. did, and assess the thoughts or feelings it inspires. If, like our ops leader friend, the impression that comes to mind is not much, you might have diagnosed the problem.
Content that fails to resonate, educate, or capture the reader’s interest becomes background noise for prospects at best … and at worst, it can damage brand perception and trust.
The antidote to uninspiring content is a content refresh, punching up dull, generic copy with personalized messaging that speaks to the needs and concerns of the reader. It should also be engaging, informative, and concise.
Effective personalization requires insights into buyer behavior and intent. Acme Corp. found a solution in 6sense, which offers:
- Real-time buying intent signals
- Data-backed insight into personas, buying stages, and areas of interest
- And tools that help digital marketers deliver the right message to the right audience with razor-sharp precision.
Inconsistent Follow-Up
Content gaps are filled, copy has been updated to inspire, educate, and engage, and the revenue team is leveraging digital marketing tools to deliver personalized content at scale… but opportunities are still slipping through the cracks.
What gives?
Let’s turn our attention once more to the operations leader at Acme Corp. and see what she finds.
Prospects are engaged, and they’re replying to emails looking for more information. But what’s missing is follow-through on the part of sales reps.
Inconsistent or delayed follow-through is a common cause of lost opportunities during the nurturing stage. While it’s easy to get upset with reps for dropping the ball, it’s important to diagnose why it happens. It’s likely not on purpose, they’re just overwhelmed and confused, due to:
- Lack of automation and processes: Without automated systems for follow-up tasks and alerts, sales reps might miss or delay reaching out to engaged prospects.
- High lead volume: An overwhelming volume of leads can make it challenging for sales teams to prioritize and respond promptly.
- Inadequate lead scoring and segmentation: Without a clear system to score and segment leads based on engagement and potential, sales teams might not focus on the most promising prospects.
- Insufficient resources or staffing: A sales team that is understaffed or lacks the necessary resources cannot efficiently manage and follow up on all engaged prospects.
- Poor communication between marketing and sales: Misalignment between these teams can lead to missed opportunities for timely follow-ups on leads that have shown interest.
- Lack of clear follow-up protocols: Without standardized procedures for how and when to follow up with leads, responses can be inconsistent.
Acme Corp. found a solution to all the above in 6sense, with its:
- Conversational email assistant, which helps marketers leverage AI to craft relevant, on-brand email campaigns that compel conversations and get meetings booked.
- Sales leads dashboards that focus sellers’ efforts on accounts that are perfect fits for your ICP and most likely to convert.
- Orchestrations and workflows that eliminate time-wasting, error-prone manual tasks.
Armed with automation and tools that remove distracting tasks, bring clarity to which accounts to prioritize, and make timely follow-up a breeze, Acme Corp.’s revenue team finally has a virtually leak-proof nurturing stage.
Conclusion
Acme Corp. was able to plug the leaks in the nurturing stage by taking a thorough, honest look at their content strategy, addressing content gaps, improving content quality through personalization, and implementing automation and AI.
Stay tuned for the next blog in the series, where we’ll take an in-depth look at causes of pipeline leaks in the sales process.
