Blog Post

Improve Your Lead-Nurturing Strategy Through Team Accountability

  • By Mark Baker
  • 21 Dec, 2015

Customer-experience (CX) professionals are typically responsible for creating positive experiences throughout the customer lifecycle. This includes retaining current customers, acquiring new ones, and nurturing leads. The problem is that CX professionals have so many duties that they can’t possibly take care of all of them with the same care and attention that each deserves.

Lead nurturing tops the list as one of the most crucial responsibilities that falls to the CX team. But it’s time to re-think that strategy: in order to better nurture leads, the responsibility of creating positive customer experiences should be distributed throughout the entire organization, and not just on the shoulders of the CX team. By placing every team member in a lead-nurturing position, your organization can more efficiently nurture leads and improve the customer’s overall experience.

How can you spread the lead-nurturing responsibility throughout your team? Identify the individuals who interact both directly and indirectly with the customer, keep those individuals engaged by underscoring the importance of lead nurturing, and create a positive and realistic customer experience by integrating both qualitative and quantitative analytics.

IDENTIFY THE PLAYERS

As customers move through the buying experience, they interact with many individuals across every organizational sector. The danger is that customers may lose interest in the product or service.

Everyone—from sales and marketing to tech support and customer service—must remember that customers exist before and beyond the point of sale. Customers can cease being customers at various points throughout the journey and it is important for every player to listen to customer reactions.

When you map your customer’s journey, think beyond the sales team: pinpoint each interaction that a customer has with each sector of the company. Then, ensure that every sector is engaged in lead nurturing.

INCREASE ENGAGEMENT

Emphasizing the impact that lead nurturing has on business financials is key to engaging employees in the lead-nurturing process. Use analytics and data to make a connection between the company's financials and customer experiences. This kind of quantitative journey mapping is essential when making the case for strong customer relationships.

Here are some suggestions for building engagement:

  • Clearly outline milestones to mark improvements in customer relationships. This provides accountability and measurability across sectors.
  • Train collaborative teams from various sectors to analyze feedback. They should work together to provide meaningful paths to correct problems or to maintain areas of strength.

INTEGRATE THE QUANTITATIVE

Documenting customer reactions and interactions is a good place to analyze how you can improve your lead-nurturing strategy, but the information you find must be integrated into your response. This can be difficult if you don’t have a streamlined process to collect data, analyze it, and put it to use.

With the capacity to collect real-time performance data from websites and handheld devices, businesses have far greater access to customer reviews and experiences than ever before. Analytic software featuring algorithms and improved metrics streamline information, but integrating the data into practice requires a change in mindset.

New Relic CEO Lew Cirne told CMS Wire, “It’s not how many errors-per-minute. It’s how many customers are having errors, and what are the impacts on the customer experience, as to whether or not they’re coming back.

To determine why customers do not return, it is important to look to the qualitative forces at work in their decisions.

VALUE THE QUALITATIVE

User-experience designers frequently check in with customer-service agents to gain a better understanding of the issues users are having, because the organic, real-life user experiences often differ from test experiences. Customer-service agents and tech support are on the frontline; their reports are valuable to those with indirect ties to customers.

The qualitative pieces of information that come from customer service and tech support have real value. For instance, Natalie Meehan reported in B2C.com that:

General Mills learned through listening to their customers’ organic online conversations that families weren’t only using their Pillsbury Dough to cook with – they also use it to make shapes and craft for fun with the whole family. These insights gave General Mills the information they needed to revitalize their brand, shifting their focus on to the product’s family activity value.

By emphasizing the importance of the customer experience among employees, the entire company can maintain a focus on customer experiences. In the end, more effective lead nurturing across the company sectors means increased profits overall.

Mark Baker

Mark Baker is a natural artist. Since starting his first business hand painting graphics onto vehicles in high school, Mark gained experience in the entertainment, sports, and retail industries before founding this company in 1993. Honest and pragmatic, Mark knows that anything can be accomplished with a great communication plan and creative thinking. 

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