Nurturing your leads has been around for pretty much as long as sales have existed. Even before the digital revolution, the idea of nurturing your client base and potential clients was something sales people did regularly. Old school sales folks would drive around their sales territory to visit their leads and existing clients in person. This was back when pretty much all you had was the relationship and maybe a phone number or mailing address.
These days, the notion of “nurture” has been further refined into long-term and short-term concepts. Short-term nurture, as the name lends, is designed specifically for a small period of time and to get someone through to a particular outcome (Source).
Success happens one step at a time 🚶♀️
What Does “Contacting” Mean In The Sales Cycle?
Philosophically, your business’ Marketing journey has the job of taking someone from nothing and turning them into a “face with a name”, a Lead. Now the Sales journey begins. Which has the job of transforming the relationship from a mere face with a name into that of a paying customer.
The very first phase of any Sales journey is to qualify this new lead:
- Do they have a problem that we can solve?
- Do they have the budget for our solution?
- Do they have the authority to make the purchasing decision (this is a big one)?
Unless the answer to all three of these questions is a distinct “Yes”, unfortunately that lead is not qualified to proceed ahead in the Sales journey.
Let’s take it down into the trenches. HOW do you qualify someone? You engage them in a conversation. Anywhere. The phone, via email, social media, in-person, etc.
Now, let’s get even more granular: HOW do you engage someone in conversation? You attempt to contact them with some outbound effort.
If you have made at least one attempt to reach a new lead, and were unsuccessful, you are still “Contacting” them. And, if you are doing your job as a sales person, you will continue to contact them until they have engaged. Even if that engagement is a “No thanks”, your job to guide someone through the Sales journey consists of following up with them.
Put simply, “Contacting” is the next possible stage in your Sales pipeline after “New Lead”. If you make a call and reach someone the first time, they would skip the contacting stage entirely and move to “Engaging” or beyond.
Why Should I Do A Short-Term Nurture For Leads In The Contacting Stage?
Getting the conversation started with a new lead MUST happen for any chance of turning them into a customer. In our experience, getting a new lead’s attention and engaging with a conversation can take significant effort. They might not be available when you call. They might not pay attention to your first email. They might not check their text messages from unknown numbers. There are a ton of reasons why your first outreach might not work.
For years, when building Sales pipelines for our private clients, we always make sure to build a nurture automation that supplements a sales rep’s efforts to engage with a new lead after the first unsuccessful outreach. As soon as someone is moved into the “Contacting” stages of the sales process, there is follow up for the next month that hopefully bubbles up some kind of response. This way no new leads ever slip through the cracks after the first outreach attempt.
Of course, the sales rep still has to make sure they follow up with their unqualified leads, but that is more of a training & leadership issue. All the automation in the world will not make up for a sales rep that cannot be bothered to follow up manually.
Free Campaign Of The Month – Contacting Short-Term Nurture
We have packaged up a free one-click install of our Contacting Short-Term Nurture for Keap users.
When you install this into your account, you will get a pre-configured automation model that is 90%+ ready-to-publish which contains:
- 3 automated text messages.
- 5 automated emails.
- 1 Setup Play with the publishing steps below (Keap Pro/Max only, for now).
Automation Overview
First, watch this quick video to understand the strategy being used for this automation, including when and where you want to use it in your business. If you’d like to learn more about the ball-and-stick diagram and planning framework, please register for the mini-course here.
👇 Request Your One-Click Install Now 👇
Contacting Short-Term Nurture Launch Steps
Getting the Contacting Short-Term Nurture going on your Keap CRM database is literally as easy as 1, 2, 3! After you have done the one-click install…
Step 1 – Review & Adjust Messaging
Review and adjust the messaging according to your specific business. Don’t overthink it! You can always improve it later 👍
Step 2 – Configure The Automation Start & Stop Triggers
Option #1 Configure Stage Move Goals
If you are going to use this nurture with Opportunity or Pipeline stages, configure the automation in this way.
Option #2 Configure Note Template Goals
If you are going to use this nurture with Note templates, configure the automation in this way.
Option #3 Configure Configure Tag Goals
If you are going to use this nurture with an external 3rd party tool, are not using the pipeline feature, OR do not have Note Templates in your version of Keap, configure the automation in this way.
Step 3 – Publish The Automation
Verify all objects and the sequence is marked as Ready, then publish the campaign. Congratulations! You did it 🥳