Lead Nurturing with NetSuite CRM

Lina Kessman, Sr Product Manager

December 13, 2013

Traditionally organizations have spent a lot of money to generate leads however that has not necessarily guaranteed conversion to better opportunities or increased sales. So how can organizations make the most out of the large number of “not ready to buy” leads? The old process of directly handing those leads over to sales is resulting in fewer conversions and increasing complaints about bad leads. In many cases, the problem isn’t with the leads themselves; it’s simply that the leads are not ready to engage with sales yet.  Consumers today are overwhelmed with marketing communications and broad advertising campaigns. There is a very strong tendency to view any marketing activity as spam or junk mail if the consumer is not ready to learn about your product or services yet. 

 

The answer for many organizations facing this problem is Lead Nurturing.  Lead Nurturing is the process of encouraging your leads to become better acquainted with your company’s products and services so that you can deliver stronger, more specific and relevant messaging. The outcome is higher conversion rates due to the adoption of smart nurturing strategies that allow sales and marketing to target leads based on their interests and behavior with event-based marketing.

 

Rather than just mass email campaigns, which can be very cost ineffective, to all of your leads, lead nurturing entails strategically courting leads through targeted marketing activities that enable ROI-driven, measurable results. NetSuite customers are further able to refine their targeted marketing activities through a variety of behavioral and business intelligence (BI) analysis tools that boost the accuracy of lead scoring and event alerts.

 

How Lead Nurturing Works In NetSuite

If you’re ready to start incorporating lead nurturing processes into your marketing strategy, NetSuite Version 2010.1 offers you a rich set of functionality to manage it within the application.

The Lead Nurturing process can be designed using NetSuite’s new Workflow Manager user interface to define the steps and conditions and customize the criteria used to determine who receives each campaign message, the timing of these messages, and the actions or responses that trigger subsequent email(s).

Alternatively, customers who are well versed with scripting can leverage lead nurturing by utilizing the Send Campaign Mail API which allows you to send campaign messages to leads when specific conditions are met and inducting them into a nurturing campaign.

Lead Nurturing flows can be as uncomplicated as a one or two-states that send template based messages when leads are created to initiate them into a nurturing cycle or they can be workflows that are more complex and include entry criteria, multiple steps, transitions and actions to represent a high touch and involved nurturing campaign.

Once you’ve designed and set up your Lead Nurturing workflow within your NetSuite account, it’s easy to automatically send campaign emails to leads at the most strategic times, whether triggered by their behavior or events, and coordinate follow-up activities with sales. This strategy may not only help bump up your company’s sales but also increase the ROI on your marketing dollars and cut down on MDF for sell-through – all via automated processes that can be launched in a snap!

 

We would love to hear from you on how you’re planning to leverage NetSuite Lead Nurturing to increase sales and improve the quality of leads that exist in your organization today.  Also stay tuned for other posts on this topic.

NetSuite has packaged the experience gained from tens of thousands of worldwide deployments over two decades into a set of leading practices that pave a clear path to success and are proven to deliver rapid business value. With NetSuite, you go live in a predictable timeframe — smart, stepped implementations begin with sales and span the entire customer lifecycle, so there's continuity from sales to services to support.