After identifying and qualifying a lead, your work has only just begun. An enormous part of the sales cycle involves nurturing leads to close, and this is true both when selling directly to customers and selling through partners.
While some strategies apply to both, it’s essential to customize your B2B lead nurture activities based on your end goal and the context of the sale. This article will explore how to create a comprehensive plan, along with best practices to keep in mind when nurturing leads of all types.
Lead Nurturing in Partnerships vs. Direct Sales – Key Differences
There are a few key things to consider when nurturing partner-sourced and direct sales leads; perhaps most important to keep in mind is who manages the relationship. With partner sales, you need to ensure that your partner team is enabled and skilled-up to represent your tool accurately. With direct sales, it’s your sales team that needs to be enabled.
Understanding the context of B2B sales conversations will help you craft beneficial resources that nurture leads to close in their respective scenarios.
For a more in-depth comparison of the two, check out Channel vs. Direct Sales.
General Strategies for Partner & Direct B2B Sales
Determining lead scoring criteria
When approaching partner-led and direct sales, a few concepts are applicable in both scenarios. First, and perhaps most important, is lead scoring. With lead scoring, you award prospects a set number of “points” for each quality they have or action they take. If your prospect works in the right industry and is a decision-maker, they should earn points. They should accumulate even more points as they engage with your sales team.
Setting a target number for points will help you to understand when your team is ready for outreach during each stage of the sales cycle. Similarly, if your prospect has qualities that don’t fit your target persona, you should subtract points, so your team isn’t wasting their time on bad-fit leads.
Keeping personas up-to-date
As you work to define the actions and qualities that deserve points, it’s worth refreshing your partner and customer personas. Evaluate the demographics you’re targeting, what qualities they embody, and how they behave. It’s a good idea to update your buyer and partner personas every few months to ensure they’re still accurate. Then, you should use that information to tailor your marketing message so it’s specific to the recipients’ motivations, pain points, and background.
Cementing a strategy to reengage leads
Finally, both teams should have strategic plans for reengaging leads who go dark and have access to targeted content marketing. Both of these are best enabled with automation tools that allow you to build lead nurturing workflows that can be triggered at any point in the sales process, such as downloading a resource or going no-contact for two weeks.
Dynamic retargeting plans – new content in new ways
Don’t make the mistake of bombarding leads with the same selling points over and over again. Instead, mix up messaging and mediums in ways that play off one another. When testing which materials receive the best engagement, don’t evaluate the data as if they were received in a vaccum. Instead, look into other factors that would influence performance. For example, if a particular email has a high “open” rate, consider previous touchpoints that may have contributed to recipients being more receptive to your brand.