4 B2B Pros Share Their Secrets for Converting Leads into Customers

Tiffani Collins is the Senior Demand Generation Manager at NetDocuments, a document management solution for legal professionals. Collins knows that getting a new lead is the beginning of the process, not the end goal. Once a new lead is acquired, the lead nurturing process begins. Collins’ approach to lead nurturing is based on offering a steady cadence of valuable content that addresses the target’s specific pain points.

Lisa Pansini, Director of Marketing at Rocket Matter, a practice management software provider, believes in the personal touch when following up with leads. Pansini said her business development team personally calls to thank each individual who fills out a form to download Rocket Matter content. During that conversation, they will ask questions about the lead’s interests and challenges.

Following up by phone immediately can be challenging, especially if you have a lot of leads coming in at once. However, Pansini believes it’s best to strike while the iron is hot, so her team makes a point to follow up with incoming leads as quickly as possible. Professionals are busy, and they have short attention spans. If you wait to follow up with a lead, they may not connect your brand with the valuable content they downloaded when they first entered your marketing funnel. In other words, the longer you wait to make contact, the narrower your window of opportunity.

When a prospective buyer downloads your content to become a lead, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re at the purchasing stage. Pansini cautions against being too aggressive right off the bat. Like McCullough and Collins, she views lead conversion as a process, not an event, so she and her team nurture leads with ongoing content offers.

Even while letting leads consume content at their own pace and not pushing sales on them before they’re ready, Pansini prioritizes staying in front of potential buyers with strategic content offers over the course of the entire sales cycle, which can often last for weeks or months. Her team wants their solution to be top of mind when a prospect is finally ready to make a purchase.

McCullough’s team utilizes the same strategy. In his words, “Don’t be a pest.” His team prioritizes providing value and being helpful, but not being overly sales-focused if the lead isn’t yet at that stage.

Pansini’s content team creates an engaging mix of content for buyers at both ends of the buyer's journey – those who are just beginning to investigate possible solutions to their challenges as well as those who are ready to make a purchase. Her team’s goal is to create content that builds trust, educates readers, and helps prospective buyers associate these solutions with her organization. That way, when a lead is ready to convert, Rocket Matter is the first solution that comes to mind.

Creating content for all stages of buyer readiness can also encourage leads to transition to the next stage of the buyer’s journey by providing the information necessary to make that next step. Buyers spend a considerable amount of time researching potential solutions to their challenges on their own. If your company is a source of the information that will help facilitate their investigation process, that puts you in an incredibly advantageous position once a lead is ready to make a purchase.

Jessica Veiga, Chief Marketing Officer at Botkeeper, is laser focused on leading with value at every touchpoint. Botkeeper provides automated bookkeeping support to accounting firms. Once her team understands the pain points their target audience is facing, they create and distribute relevant content offering new ideas and solutions.

Veiga believes in repurposing high-value content in a variety of formats and contexts to get the most mileage out of it. In Veiga’s opinion, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel for each new piece of content – She and her team prioritize getting the most out of existing content.

Veiga also believes one piece of content should lead seamlessly to the next. Her team may create individual blogs based on sections of an ebook or white paper. Content from the ebook and blogs may be repurposed into webinars that, in turn, create yet another touchpoint for attracting and converting leads.

Many marketers, Veiga said, produce tons of high-quality content that may not ever be seen by prospective buyers – it just goes to the blog to die. This is not an efficient strategy, and content teams are just spinning their wheels. By creating a few key, central pieces of content and repurposing them in strategic ways, marketers achieve two crucial things: They increase the likelihood of getting in front of and engaging their target audience, and they save their content team from getting bogged down in a relentless cycle of poorly-performing content.

When it comes to lead nurturing, many processes are repetitive. To increase efficiency, each of the four marketing pros uses marketing automation software, such as HubSpot or Marketo. Veiga explains that using marketing automation software allows her team to scale their marketing efforts significantly, while still personalizing outreach based on each prospective buyer’s topical interests.

Collins, too, makes sure that each new lead is placed into a nurturing stream based on their interests and individual needs. When a prospective buyer begins engaging with more sales-oriented content, such as case studies and reviews, it signals that the lead is closer to a purchase decision and ready to be followed up with by the sales team.

All four marketing pros, each with a successful track record of being able to convert leads into customers, share a similar philosophy in how they approach lead conversion: Lead conversion is a process, not a one-time event. In other words, getting a new lead is the beginning of the journey, not the end goal. Ultimately, a successful lead conversion strategy is a lead nurturing strategy. Having a well-planned, repeatable method to nurture incoming leads – and incorporating the best practices shared by our four marketing experts – will increase your conversion rates, as well as the ROI of your lead gen investment.

Lead Marvels specializes in helping B2B marketers build a pipeline of new, qualified leads by leveraging our partnerships with professional associations. Our unique platform also provides lead nurturing capabilities to help you move leads toward conversion right from our dashboard. To learn more about Lead Marvels’ lead generation and nurturing capabilities, schedule a demo today.