The Heart of Sales is Nurturing
Nurturing Leads for Long-Term Success
Thriving sales focused businesses have mastered this mindset; they understand that the success for the sales year lies in the relationships with client relationships and satisfaction. Nurturing those key relationships is the lifeblood that sustains current and future client and prospect connections, ensuring long-term partnerships and sustained growth. This article is an overview and a reminder for leaders who recognize the potential within their existing connections and client lists.
The power of personalized communication from you to your connections is strategic and is the effort that describes the type of nurturing to elevate the ability to convert conversations into lasting, loyal clients, referrals, and additional work for your organization.
Nurturing is more than voicemails and email outreach.
Sustaining relationships takes an immense amount of work which is why growing companies can get trapped in the service cycle of acquiring, promising, serving, work-overtime to stay current, and then burn out or disappoint a new client. It’s a cycle that, if left unchecked, can be the root cause of declining or flat sales with high churn rates of clients.
Back to nurturing, successful leaders distribute workloads, hire to meet service levels, and allocate their time and energy to connecting in a meaningful way with clients. That’s the nurturing behavior, not arriving at the office every day at 5am or leaving after 8pm daily to get everything done at the office. No, instead we have to create the tools and systems to keep the office running, connect with the clients and prospects, and lead teams. If you are a founder/owner/ salesperson, you may be in this vice of trying to do everything on your own, even with a support team around you. It’s an all to common challenge scaling or growing companies face.
Habits = Change
Nurturing is a habit, not a singular action. Ensuring the nurturing is an ongoing effort can be aided by several tools and practices. For example, leveraging the CRM tools for tasks, meetings, and other activities can be a resource for a leader who is overscheduled. Using a virtual assistant to manage the calendars of your executives can aid in keeping them on high-value activities for the organization. Using messaging tools to aid in the onboarding and reminding of tasks becomes a fruitful addition to the toolbox if it prevents reschedules/double-bookings and show-up rates.
Get Effective
For the nurturing to be effective, the message and related content available must be of high enough value to the reader to ensure that it is viewed, internalized, and applied. Think of the content you have at your disposal; what pieces are high value and which ones do you know offer minimal value to the reader? The whole point of nurturing is continuing to provide added value to the reader who is your client or prospect.