With many tradeshows being canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, what was once a reliable source of leads for life sciences marketers has immediately dried up. Marketers must now focus their attention on maximizing their other leads and relocating marketing investments toward targeted digital platforms.
Biocompare offers a variety of lead-generating programs that deliver both high-funnel and sales-ready leads. Now is the time to review your lead follow-up processes to make sure all leads are responded to appropriately and that no leads fall through the cracks.
Sales-Ready Lead Recognition Is Key
Who doesn’t love the low-hanging fruit of a hot lead? These prospects are ready to buy and are looking to you to make their decision easy.
The first thing you need to do is recognize the hot lead. If you don’t already, you should have criteria in place that defines a sales-ready lead. The criteria vary by organization, and your criteria may be different than another company’s.
A prospect that requests a quote is certainly a hot lead, but what about a prospect that has had multiple interactions with your company—such as downloading a white paper, attending a webinar, watching a video, and accessing content on Biocompare’s Future Lab?
If you establish a system that assigns points or a score based on a prospect’s behavior and interaction with your offers and content, you will have an easier time spotting the sales-ready leads. Once you have them, you must act quickly.
If you’re looking for the magic formula for dealing with sales-read leads, it might look like this:
Speed + Relevancy = New Customer
- Speed—In the lightning-fast digital era, a prospect expressing urgent interest in your products or services expects a quick response to their query, typically within 24 hours. If you don’t respond quickly, you could lose the prospect to a competitor as well as damage your reputation.
- Relevancy—A fast response is a must, but you must do more. You must demonstrate that you are on top of your prospect’s needs by responding in a relevant manner. For example, a request for a quote gets a quote, not a data sheet or a technical article. A posed question about a feature or support policy gets a direct answer.
If you’re prepared to respond in this manner to sales-ready leads, you are highly likely to gain more new customers.
High-Funnel Leads Require Nurturing
While we’d all like nothing more than to get only sales-ready leads, the reality is that most leads—and the source of most business—comes from longer-term, high-funnel leads that are not ready to buy when they first contact you.
These prospects are in the early stages of their buying journey. They’ve identified a need and they are researching potential vendors, but they need to do more research before making a decision.
These leads can come from a number of Biocompare sources, including:
- eBook downloads
- Application Note downloads
- Webinar registrants and attendees
- Future Lab registrants, where prospects can learn about the latest developments in a given area of research
These potential buyers need to know how your products can address their specific needs. Your goal should be to stay in touch with them using an organized lead-nurturing drip campaign. Continue to educate them by offering additional content. Helpful content includes data sheets, case studies, articles, and other webinars and videos. As these prospects approach their buying decision, they will find demos, free trials, ROI calculators, and support and warranty policies helpful.
When planning what content to create, keep this in mind: You are trying to tell a story, one chapter at a time. The story is about how you understand your prospect’s needs, are an expert in your field, and can help them solve their problem using your products and services.
Track Nurturing Efforts
Email is the most popular and effective way to communicate with scientists in a lead-nurturing campaign. There’s no rule about how often you should reach out to prospects. Many companies send emails more frequently in the first few weeks while the need that drove a prospect to your company is still fresh. Over time, frequency may diminish, depending on response.
Keep track of how your prospects respond to your offers. Those that are moving toward a decision will likely engage with more of your content and offers.
Is There a Replacement for Tradeshows?
One advantage of a tradeshow is the ability to meet person-to-person. While that is no longer possible when a tradeshow is canceled or postponed, you can still engage your audience and demonstrate to prospects who you are:
- Take advantage of Biocompare’s production team to help you create a webinar or video featuring people: experts explaining a concept or process, thought leaders discussing a provocative industry topic. Put people behind the message.
- Look for our new platform, called Tech Talks, which will offer audio webinars—a perfect alternative to a presentation you might have given at an in-person conference. Biocompare will host your Tech Talk on a microsite and promote it to potential viewers, who can register to view the content.
For more information about our Tech Talks Showcase please contact your Biocompare Sales Executive.
Please also be on the lookout for an email from us next week, as we will be providing some insights we are seeing with regard to our website traffic.
These are challenging times and we at Biocompare are ready to help in any way we can. Please feel free to reach out and let us know how we can assist your company today.