What kinds of leads eventually close? There is a sure bet way to answering this question and ensuring that you’re covering your basics. When it comes to making sales everyone understands that you as the salesperson must seize an opportunity at any cost, meaning reading the signs and ABC closing your way to the close. If that involves making many calls, sending lots of emails, and/or driving great distances, you will be up to the challenge as long you know something crucial about or have real insights into your prospects. So, how do you get that real insight that makes you aggressively pursue a given prospect?

Lead Nurturing is the answer. It is a follow-up process designed to keep your offering in front of the prospect, leading eventually to big gains in the sales cycle. Every sales person, or anyone in that role, must understand and accept that follow-up is critical because without it you really can’t know your next move.

Setting up the right kind of process in which opportunities actually come to fruition takes a deeper understanding of the prospect base. That involves knowing the history of each prospect as in how long the salesperson has pursued the lead, the current situation of budget issues, and knowing the offering enough to make rebuttals on objections.

Most sales managers and executives assume that a broad spectrum of activities (now predominately including inbound methodologies) by itself generates a positive lead nurturing process. The truth is that activities not aligned with fundamentals will not lead to a reliable process. And the fundamentals remain unchanged, despite the emergence of new lead channels. McCord’s lead nurturing process is a sales support mechanism that functions as a corollary of the fundamentals, ensuring that your pipeline always remains dynamic and relevant.

Jameel Saqib
Co-Founder, McCord Solutions –March 12, 2014