Here’s what you’ve done so far as you followed your stream through this series of blogs.
You made (or got made) a great permission asset that will generate leads for the next decade.
You made (or got made) a great landing page that will convert better than most in your industry.
You have a large, evergreen campaign you can deploy again and again without any more work.
Now you’re going to nurture them into customers for life.
But first…
In the other blogs you read on our website, we outline how people in different roles in your business can complete the various B2B lead-nurturing tasks in this large workflow. Simple steps based on who you are.
There’s a method for owners, directors, and others managing staff at a high level. We call these people Conductors.
There’s a method for sales professionals and others who might be interested in creating a permission asset to help with their main job role. Making this kind of content isn’t their primary responsibility, so it’s done quickly, off the side of their desk. We call these people Curators.
And there’s a method for the marketing manager or marketing generalist or content writer. We call these people Creators.
Find your steps below and get on the path to the revenue growth you want.
With more opportunities it becomes increasingly likely that you’ll achieve your revenue goals. In fact, it becomes almost impossible that you won’t. Achieving those goals makes your company more formidable, more stable, more valuable. Makes your job more secure. Makes your salary bigger.
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Large companies have dedicated teams of Sales Development Representatives (SDR). Their only job is to book appointments for the sales team. To take leads, wherever they find them, and get those leads talking to seasoned sales professionals.
Most small to medium enterprises don't have a full-time SDR team. Most, like yours, send those leads straight to experienced sales reps. And that actually takes away from their ability to do their best work.
Your sales reps might spend around ⅓ of their day talking to actual leads. Where does the rest fo the time go?
What you have to do is build a system to nurture the leads collected by your permission asset (and eventually, assets), so the lead is red hot by the time they first communicate with your sales team.
Then, your sales team is talking to hot leads for a larger portion of their day, not prospecting and researching and writing emails and entering data and scheduling calls that go nowhere.
You can automate this whole process and chase down these leads at scale, fire them up, by following the steps you find in this chapter.
You’re going to write (Creators), generate (Curators), or assign and evaluate (Conductors) short, plain text emails inviting your prospects to communicate and let down their guard. And your ultimate goal is booking sales appointments (although you’ll never call them that).
These emails are going to:
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To get a response from as many contacts in your database (new leads and existing customers) as possible.
And for leads to book sales appointments on a real-time calendar so your sales team can do more of what they love (and generate more revenue).
You’re going to send these emails from a phantom. A fictitious member of the staff at your business with a job title that screams helpfulness to your contacts.
So you’ll choose a full first and last name, you’ll create an email account that follows the same conventions as other emails in the business (for example johnbuie@jbbgi.com or jbuie@jbbgi.com or john@jbbgi.com). You’ll authenticate this email address with your email marketing platform. And you’ll use this email sender for all your plain text emails.
The last thing to know is that you can do this three ways.
#1. You can send this nurturing campaign to all your contacts - those who downloaded the permission asset and everyone else in your database. All your current customers. Cold customers. All of them.
The main benefit of this is the unexpected sales opportunities you’ll unearth from existing customers or cold customers. And of course you nurture leads who downloaded the permission asset more closely than you otherwise could.
#2. You can send this nurturing campaign only to the leads coming out of your permission asset download.
This way, you can target them very specifically with questions about the permission asset and their application. This kind of targeting produces better results than option #1. But with a smaller audience.
#3. You can do both. A nurturing campaign for your permission asset downloaders with specific messaging related to the permission asset and their application. And a parallel nurturing campaign for your existing contacts, where you speak more generally about problems they might have.
We recommend #3. But you might choose one of the other options based on your resources. It’s up to you.
Dont worry about getting wrong. Let us do it for you.
You read the introduction earlier in this blog, so you know the idea behind this nurturing campaign.
Since this is not your primary job function, building these types of campaigns, we recommend you create one single nurturing campaign for all your contacts.
Later, when you have capacity - like in 12 months - you can use the method outlined in the coming pages to create a nurture campaign just for your permission asset leads.
But for the sake of your sanity, right now you can focus on just 1 campaign.
You’re going to use ChatGPT or your preferred AI to generate these emails for you, and you’re going to rely on the mind map you created as you read this blog on permission assets to prompt the AI effectively.
Back then, you mapped features to benefits. And those benefits inherently solve a frustration.
So you’re going to ask your AI to write brief emails about those frustrations, ending each email with an open ended question to which they can respond.
Or you’re going to use the template below to write your own, following the same pattern but with different frustrations taken from your mind map.
Here’s an example:
Subject:
Hey FIRST NAME. What’s your risk tolerance?
Hi FIRST NAME.
How much $ do you think human error costs your workplace?
For one of our clients in X INDUSTRY, a single TYPE OF ERROR last year cost about $5 million.
To make sure it never happens again (or at least to get the absolute best chance that it won’t happen again), we helped them automate several repetitive steps in the APPLICATION.
Machines don’t get as casual as humans do after running through the same steps 50 times.
There might be similar easy ways to reduce the risk of human error (or other risks) in your workplace.
I dare you to stump us with your problem!
Where are you seeing those costly recurring errors?
In that example, the frustration is human error and the financial cost incurred. But you could easily change it to human error and the time burden incurred. Or human error and the workplace culture hit. Or human error and the logistical challenges of product recalls.
From that single template with a single frustration you could turn out 4 valuable emails that touch on exposed nerves for your prospects.
You can follow the same pattern and niche down your frustration.
Maybe the frustration is sharing equipment in their workplace. Maybe the frustration is working long hours because there is too much demand on existing infrastructure in the business. Maybe the frustration is managing the budget with a supervisor breathing down your prospect’s neck.
There are dozens of frustrations you can work with inside this template and it may be less effort to simply adjust the template yourself than using AI to write them for you.
So if you choose to use our template and adjust the messages yourself based on your mind map and personal knowledge, just…
If you choose to use our template, combined with AI to generate your emails…
Once the emails are written to your liking…
You and your colleagues will have to monitor the phantom inbox so you can respond in a timely way. That’s part of the power of this type of campaign - responding as quickly as a human would.
You could even assign two junior staff members to monitor the inbox so you and your more experienced colleagues don’t have to. Get those junior staff to inform you when an email comes in.
And having done all this, you are now nurturing new prospects attracted by your permission asset, existing contacts from previous purchases, and cold contacts who haven’t worked with your business in a long time, at scale. You’re doing more than most teams at your largest competitors and positioning yourself for a good pay increase.
Not enough time to do it yourself? We'll handle it for you.
So much of your job is just keeping staff honest and giving them the tools to do well.
They feel like imposters because they don’t know how to do everything, and they produce work that isn’t up to your standard because they feel like imposters. Not because they aren’t capable of the work, but because their fear shuts them down.
They’re afraid of being found out.
But with the right guidance, you can nurture them so they can nurture your customers. So they stop performing like imposters and start shining like the skilled applicants you hired.
You can give your Creators the tools to do this right, so they have steps to follow and know exactly what you’re looking for in their output.
And so you have the steps to review with them just as easily. You don’t have to take mental time out of your day to review their work, you just have to go through the checklist with them and verify they’ve done it all.
And if their ideas aren’t good (because contrary to the maxim, there definitely are bad ideas), you can help them improve those ideas easily.
Step 1. Send them the link to this blog, so they can read the section dedicated to them above.
Step 2. Give them the mind map you created when you worked through this blog.
Step 3. Tell them you need this turned around by the end of the week (even if it’s Friday, to make them sweat!).
There is a qualitative and a quantitative element to this.
To measure the quantitative element, review this checklist with them:
Then, to measure the qualitative element.
The qualitative elements are where you can really start shaping your Creator into an expert. A lead (and revenue) generating machine for your business.
If you answer in the negative to any of the qualitative questions, you can show your Creator exactly why.
This shows them you’re investing your personal energy into their professional development, and it helps reduce the long-term burden of their learning on the business.
As you work through this checklist, you give them feedback they can write down and post all over their workspace. And they’ll take it to heart the next time they perform this task for you.
Once these 12-24 emails are to your standard, your Creator can build them out in your email marketing platform just as described in the Creator section of this chapter.
You can then require monthly reports on the results from this nurturing campaign to see how each individual email performs. And you can look at long term trends after about 8 months, to see if existing customers have increased spending with you. Sometimes the most important metrics aren’t the clicks or opens of individual emails, but the long-term trends you can only start to see after some time has gone by.
And holy smokes Creators, Curators, Conductors. You’ve done it. You’ve completed all 6 steps of your lead-and-revenue-generating permission asset marketing and merchandising program.
Take a moment outlook at everything you made in the last few weeks.
Feel proud.
Then tell us how it went, or how it’s going. We love talking to you. Reach out any time for a friendly chat about your growth, your weekend plans, your plans for the business next year - just email friends@jbbgi.com.
We want to see people do well. Because life isn’t a competition. It’s about helping each other succeed.
So tell us about your success and make our day.
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