Nurture Lessons from the Garden
Like any project in the soil, I started developing the Nurture Selling Process slowly. It arose from a sudden epiphany, an idea that came to me one day in 1968 as I was exploring the entire buying/selling process for a major software company. I suddenly saw that sales was growing far beyond the mere harvesting phase and was becoming analogous to that of the entire gardening process. An idea was born that has fascinated me to this day. Let me explain.
Impacted by the insightful observations exposed by such visionaries as Mahan Khalsa from Franklin-Covey Corp., Michael Bosworth at Customer Centric Selling and Roger Dawson, author of Developing Knowledge Based Client Relationships, and countless others, I began to see a huge gap unfulfilled by anyone thus far in the methodology for transforming suspects and prospects all the way to client status and beyond.
Certainly the emerging philosophy of ‘helping clients succeed’ was changing the temper and tempo of selling as the solutions progressively became more expensive and mission critical. At the same time, such decisions were escalating from purchasing right into the executive level. Even more people for the serious rep to educate, cultivate and motivate.
No doubt the very skills and attitudes around true customer relationship development made a great difference in sales productivity. What seemed to be missing was a solution to the most difficult part of the entire affair, that of staying in touch. Just maintaining appropriate contact with the slower adopting prospects, over a constantly elongating buying cycle, drained the little time left from the relentless pursuit of riper, more, low hanging, fruit.
Few sales reps had any technology tools or even administrative assistance to handle this growing challenge of earning top of mind positioning for their offerings. Left up to individual memory capacity, personal motivation and relationship development skills, research showed that nearly 70% of all opportunities presented were in fact not hot leads at all, rather they were inquiries indicating an early interest in a solution but requiring much nurturing before a closing opportunity would bloom.
The 30% that were closable got all the attention and lacking any process for warming the ‘slow’ growers, most if not all were left to wither from lack of appropriate attention or left vulnerable to the approach of more flexible competitors.
It was a costly mess and with the chasm existing between marketing and sales departments, not much was being done about it. The mantra seemed, just keep on doing more of the same even harder.
Then along came the frequent flyer program and everything was about to change. We had a tangible lesson that important relationships could be identified, individualized and cultivated using powerful software solutions and adopting a modified direct mail campaign that could at last be automated. It was truly a marketing revolution happening all around me yet it would take nearly two decades before the makers of software would take the lessons from American Air Lines and others and migrate the software down to the laptop level available to any sales rep needing the help with touching the right people with the right messages at the right time in the right media, every time, all of the time.
Naturally some of my more forward looking clients saw the power of slow, drip, drip, drip, marketing right away and early-on invested in very complicated to administer, manual processes to at least develop campaigns and action plans to assist reps in the never ending task of ‘touching’.
In spite of the difficulty and massive attention to the details of Nurturing, they persisted and saw astonishing results. Not just from winning vastly more of the opportunities they were in on but they soon discovered the wealth that lay hidden in neglected, smaller, customers residing in their multitude of customer databases.
Slowly, they began to create customized in-house software solutions to make the daunting but vital tasks manageable by administrative level support employees, thus freeing sales for the harvesting part they so loved to do.
Gradually, more innovative contact management software evolved from mere information at the fingertips to a true stay in touch methodology.
The real magic of nurturing was about to explode.
Today all of the major developers offer such Nurture methodology and the tricky task of finally merging the efforts of marketing with sales to ensure the messages were the right ones and that sales people got involved began.
Now a sales rep, completing an initial sales call, could, with a simple mobile phone app, assign the key individuals to exactly the right immediate follow up step and an ongoing drip plan right from the palm of their hand and know that the first ‘drip’ would be produced and ready for signature the very next morning and would continue to provide relevant touches at the right time with no further effort on their part. WOW. What a concept and what leveraging of a sales rep’s time.
