The cheapest and highest returning consumer-direct strategy you can run in 2023
Reset your natural focus on new leads. Use systems to go after existing leads.
For most of you reading this, the reality is that your marketing budget has been whacked, and many folks have been recently laid off - sales and support staff.
You have the typical down cycle quandary: How to do more with less?
Let’s continue the survey of your situation.
In these downturns, some things are often left in abundance.
Your tech stack is bloated, considering your current size.
You have tons of abandoned pipelines, full of leads, sitting in your database.
You also have more leads than you need, still flowing every day.
Your strategy picture looks a lot like this slide.
With a clarifying and objective survey of our assets and constraints, we can build a more effective revenue strategy around increasing contact rates on what we have, thus generating more opportunities and rebuilding our pipelines.
Before we jump into that, let’s ensure we avoid common pitfalls.
Get more strategic ideas like this every Saturday morning.
Don’t try to squeeze more out of your lead and marketing vendors.
More with less never works in performance marketing, trust me. It’s a marketplace, and you will pay the prevailing market rate for consumer demand.
If you reduce the budget or ask for more leads for the same budget, the lead generator will go higher in the funnel and bring you lower-quality leads.
That’s not shady; it’s the only marketplace option.
Don’t try to squeeze more out of people that are already overtaxed.
The marketing, sales, and technical staff left after any drawdown will immediately be overwhelmed. There will also be significant skills gaps left in all of those areas.
Innovation and new initiatives are going to be challenging.
Instead, we want to leverage systems and automation to scale our downsized sales and marketing operations.
Start with the tech stack.
What do we have available, and what technical skills can we leverage?
Some common assets requiring little to no technical skills to use in a scalable system include:
Website content and landing pages
Sales automation, a core feature of most lead management and CRM systems
Messaging platform, allowing the automation of email, SMS, and voicemail
At a high level, here’s the project plan for using these assets in a revved-up contact strategy.
Inventory and index your blog content and landing pages in Excel or Google Sheets, listing the title, URL, and loan program or persona it addresses.
Map an ideal customer and sales journey in your lead management or CRM system. Use statuses to standardize sales agents’ disposition of leads and automate segmenting of your database. It might look something like the slide below.
Finally, write conversational sequences that automate following up and pushing forward leads that are “stuck” in any given step in the sales process, represented by a status. Use an omnichannel messaging approach, blending email, SMS, and voicemails - much like a human agent.
Next, reset your natural focus on new leads and use these sales and messaging automation systems to go after the mountain of leads in our sales operations.
I like to design sales cadences and campaigns into four strategies, addressing already acquired leads wherever they might be in the sales funnel.
Lead management sales cadences for leads that are in active sales pipelines
Lead nurturing sequences for leads that are unqualified or have gone unresponsive
Email newsletter to stay engaged with all prospects and become a trusted source.
Aged lead revival campaign for leads I have abandoned and broken contact with
As an integrated strategy, it will look something like this slide.
Lead management sales cadences should support sales agents in automating the follow-up across their entire pipeline.
These campaigns are simple sequences triggered by leads that enter and sit in any given status in your lead management system.
The primary goal of these messages is to encourage the prospect to schedule a meeting or move them to the next step in the sales process.
Sequences ensure consistent follow-up and contact frequency while allowing sales agents to focus on highly engaged and ready-to-transact opportunities.
Lead nurturing campaigns should continue to engage with prospects often marked dead by sales folks.
While it’s true that sales agents shouldn’t be wasting valuable time on them, they’re not dead.
More accurately, their priorities, circumstances, or market conditions have changed, and they’ve begun ignoring your constant requests for a meeting. So, change the conversation and the sales objective.
Use lead nurturing to start the process of becoming their preferred source of information about your product and the broader concepts around that purchase decision.
Your content assets come into play here.
For mortgages, this campaign might look like pointers to content on credit improvement, savings, income and investing, home improvement, and a broad range of other personal finance topics.
Your email newsletter is your answer to prospects bouncing back out to the web and doing additional research.
Lead generators make a fortune off consumers already sitting in CRMs across the country that have been abandoned.
These consumers are still prospects, but they’ve gone quiet because their needs have changed or they’re uncertain about the market or a particular aspect of the transaction.
So, they go to Google to look for the answers.
Then, they land on LendingTree.com, Bankrate.com, NerdWallet.com, Zillow.com, MortgageReports.com, or one of the hundreds of lead generation websites in all major markets. These folks capture them into a new web form and resell them as leads back into the marketplace.
Your newsletter can short-circuit that whole process and drive up your ROI on leads.
Publish a bi-weekly or monthly newsletter and become their preferred source of those answers.
Give them regular market insights and personal finance educational content.
Drive them back to your website content and landing pages to re-generate that new lead and renewed intent signal.
Aged lead revival campaigns are like mining for gold long ago abandoned in the deep crevices of your mountain of leads.
Aged leads could be a whole strategy in and of itself, but I’ll briefly touch on the concept.
Aged leads revival campaigns should be regular sales cadences that are run against very old, dead leads and leads that were abandoned in the sales pipelines of sales agents that left, were terminated, or have been laid off.
What a great blueprint.