Lead cultivation is the process of building interest in your solutions with potential customers (leads) through targeted communication with the goal of nurturing them through your sales process towards making a purchase.
Primary implication
If your most significant growth challenge is converting leads into customers rather than generating more leads you need to implement a lead cultivation process that helps you take your prospects through their need for knowledge and affinity-building steps for your solution that lead them to buy from you.
Overview
Getting new customers to buy from you is one of the most difficult challenges any size business faces. It is complicated when awareness of your existence in the marketplace is low. It is even more difficult if your sales cycle is long in moving a prospect to a paid customer.
The marketing process involved in moving consumers from ignorance to awareness of what you do is one of the more expensive steps in the marketing process. Promoting your business is particularly difficult if you aren’t clear on what problems your products solve and when people will need your solution. Click here to learn more about how the 7-P Framework helps you avoid wasting money on promoting your business.
Once people express an interest in learning more about your product and services, you have a lead, a prospective customer. Again, if you have a high ticket item or a long sales cycle involving multiple sales interactions to persuade a prospect to buy. In that case, you need to adopt a lead qualification process. Lead qualification is how you determine which prospects are most likely to make an actual purchase. Your goal is to block suspects from entering your sales funnel. Suspects need to be weeded out, so you don’t waste marketing and sales resources trying to convince an unqualified lead to buy from you.
It is impossible to separate suspects from prospects if you don’t clearly understand what your target customer looks like. Your target customer represents the who for your business. The easiest way to identify your target customer starts with “Who benefits most from our product?” It’s impossible to position your business to make money until you know who benefits most from what you do. Ultimately your ability to make money is driven by your knowing what matters to your target customers deciding to buy from you.
Another way to define your target customer comes is anchored by knowing the breadth of your product’s appeal. Do you have a broad user base, allowing many different types of customers to benefit from what you do, or do you have a narrow customer base where only a small group of users will be interested in what you do? Click here to learn how serving a broad or narrow consumer base determines how important defining your target customer is to your lead qualification process.
Once you have qualified a prospect, your next process for helping them recognize you as the best solution to their problem is lead cultivation. This is the marketing and sales process that provides a prospect with personalized and relevant content at each stage of their buying journey with you. Your purchase decision funnel that your sales process is structured to bring qualified prospects through is how you cultivate the leans you have already invested time and money into building awareness that led them to express interest in your solution.
Lead cultivation increases the likelihood of prospects buying and reengages past customers in buying again from you. The failure to cultivate leads robs you of the opportunity to build relationships with prospective customers through your sales cycles. When you fail to cultivate leads, you are also robbed of the opportunity to build affinity for your products and services and trust in your business.
How you cultivate leads depends on what channels people engage in their purchase considerations for what you do. The most common method of follow-up is email. It is essential to know that your first lead-cultivating email should not be another sales pitch or a list of other products and services that you have available. Your first prospect follow-up needs to build trust that you understand what problem they are trying to solve by providing them with helpful information.
Another vital component of your lead cultivation process is understanding where each prospect is in your sales funnel. As prospects move from awareness to knowledge, their need for additional information is replaced by their need to build affinity for your solution. When a prospect has an affinity for your solution, they are ready to purchase.
Using a lead qualification process keeps you from getting distracted by suspects, so you can focus on cultivating your prospects through their needed knowledge and affinity-building steps that lead them to buy from you.
