If you are a regular reader of this blog (and thank you), you know that I am a big believer in recycling leads and lead management in general, some would call it lead nurturing. While there is an ongoing debate as to where marketing ends and sales begins, what aspect of lead qualification development should be done by marketing and when; all too many sales people miss opportunities by waiting for or hoping someone else will get things done or do things the sales rep can do regardless of how the role is defined. I do come from the school where at the end of the day the quota is mine, I can rationalize why I missed it or I can do what it takes not to miss it.

In our lead management process Touch – Contact – Engage, we recommend “touching” you lead base regularly. When we are asked we share the process and purpose for our monthly newsletter, also coincidentally called The Pipeline. Everyone in our database gets a monthly newsletter primarily focused on tips, advice and updates, plus a few announcements a year; all in all we touch everyone about 18 times a year. This gives us regular contact, a view on interests based on what different people read, be alerted to changes, and other benefits.

We encourage sales people to do this with their client/lead base; well to be accurate we encourage the company to do it on behalf of reps to ensure a level of quality, branding and standardization. But if the company is not in a position to do it sales professionals should take it on and do it themselves.

While many see the upside, there are usually two questions from sales reps. The first is about content, how can they make the content relevant especially when they are not comfortable writing. This is a valid point but easily resolved; you can reach out to your marketing group to provide content. These should be more about trends, industry development, process improvements achieved when using a product/service like yours, anything informative and is not blatantly promotional. You can also seek input from you service group, “how to nest maintain”, “3 Top Hidden Features”, etc.  You can also access content from experts who place their articles on free news article website such as EzineArticles. 

The other concern they have is money and or time.  There are a number of commercial providers of e-mail services.  They help you manage your data base, provide easy to use templates, and get reports on who is reading what when; once you have the basics set, you can reuse over and over and update as needed, so on a monthly basis it should take no more that 10 – 15 minutes to pre a blast. The cost is nothing, for a 500 name database you are looking about $30. A month, you do 1,000 for not much more. 

Remember that money gets the mail out but more importantly gets you a lot of back end data, who when, which articles did they read, how many times, a lot of intelligence. I once had a fellow read an article on cold call 18 times in three days.  So I called him, “Tom how are you doing?” I asked, “Tibor I was just thinking about you.”  No kidding, like 18 times over the last three days, guess which program he bought a week later?

Yes, they take a bit of effort, but isn’t that what makes one a leading professional, that bit of extra proactive effort.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto