• Businesses who generate 40% or more of their leads on line grow 4x faster than those who don’t.
• Businesses without a lead nurturing process in place lose up to 80% of their opportunities.
• Leads gained through inbound methods cost up to 62% less than those gained through traditional outbound methods, such as cold calling.

Therefore it is clear that if you are able to act on the above information, your sales results and bottom line should be vastly improved as you move into next year. The question now is, how do we do this?

The simple answer to this question is that you need to put the following resources into place:

1. An inbound lead capturing strategy
2. A lead nurturing system, preferably automated

What Is An Inbound Lead Capturing Strategy?

First, I’ll explain why the inbound sales funnel is so important. These days many, if not all, small business owners and decision makers will not take sales calls, nor respond to prospecting emails. It used to be that sales people could call or visit a prospect, deliver their pitch and then close the sale. This is obviously still happening, although I would suggest that it happens much less frequently. Instead, business owners and decision makers like to identify the need, have an internal discussion before researching the market on-line, and then approach the vendor(s). And that means that your sales process has to change – you need to focus on your inbound efforts.

Put simply, this means that you should have a system in place which enables you to draw prospects toward you at the time of research and purchase. It’s obviously great if you can be on the first page of Google – that would certainly help your inbound leads. However, not everyone can enjoy such a position. That’s the bad news; the good news is that you can still take steps to significantly increase your inbound lead generation capabilities through other means, such as using social media, or focusing on content and affiliate marketing.

What Is A Lead Nurturing System?