As a child I really liked popcorn. The eating it was one thing; that was always a tasty delight with tons of butter and salt.
The popping fascinated me. Whether it was in a big pan with oil or from an hot air popper, watching it pop fascinated me.
The unpredictability of it all, that no two kernels popped at the same time.
Ever.
Even when I applied a pattern to what I saw, the randomness kept popping and popping.
Like sales.
Segue to the ERE Expo this week. So many quality speakers and sessions that it was enough to make my head pop like a hot corn kernel.
One theme that kept coming up time and again was "talent community". How to build, sustain, adapt, thrive, engage, nurture, hire from said talent community. Many companies are creating them for the greater recruitment and hiring effort good.
Susan Burns, chief talent strategist at Talent Synchronicity, presented on just that and it got me thinking how that relates to your prospect community.
How as HR suppliers we build, sustain, adapt, thrive, engage, nurture, sell to from said prospect community. But we don't really treat them the same way.
Hammering your sales pipeline with demo requests and maybe a monthly newsletter isn't engaging them or nurturing. The same customer service outreach you give your customers can and should be applied to your prospects.
In fact the community should includes customers and prospects alike. We are doing more of that ourselves and seeing consistent conversion and up-sell results. According to one of our recent posts, it could be months before a prospect converts to a sale once they become a lead. It's only every few years that companies invest in HR software solutions. That's makes for long sales cycles.
Consider these:
That's only the beginning. Your sales pipeline needs to be full of popcorn because you never know when they're going to pop.
Invest the time for these lead-nurturing activities because that's what makes them pop.
Post by Kevin W. Grossman (join me on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn - and now join HRmarketer on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn!)
Labels: lead nurturing, marketing, online community, sales prospects