How to Keep Your Prospects Engaged
The big challenge in B2B sales is maintaining the interest of the prospect through a really long sales cycle. Since the decision-making process takes so much time, it gets very easy to either lose interest of potential clients or be taken away in aggressive competition. However, sales teams adopting the right strategy and tools can handle such stretched timelines and keep the prospects engaged for a longer period of time, resulting in better conversion rates and successful deal closure.
Understanding the Prospect Engagement Challenge
The longer the sales cycle, the greater the risk of disengagement by prospects. This typically emanates from large periods between communications, too much irrelevant information, and lack of follow-up. If prospects are made to feel forgotten or confused about next steps, they could become less interested in your offering and move on to other opportunities.
Because of this, there is a real need to establish a formalized system of engagement that would keep these prospects interested and informed all the way through. This includes regular communication, but more importantly, making sure each contact is valuable and pertinent to the needs of the prospect.
Key Ways to Keep Prospects Engaged
1. Customize Your Follow-up Communication
Probably the most powerful way to keep prospects engaged is by making your follow-up communication tailor-made for them. Instead of sending general follow-ups, customize according to the industry with which the prospect is involved, the company size, and the pain points. This will evidence that you understand their challenges and that your solution uniquely fits what they are experiencing.
For instance, if the prospect has shown interest in one aspect of your product, then subsequent correspondence should stress how that aspect will solve their particular problem. If you can keep the topic relevant, then your chance of keeping the prospect interested is higher—they are most likely to take that further step toward a buying decision.
2. Guiding Your Strategy with Engagement Analytics
Engagement analytics will also help you in all ways in which prospects interact with your communications and content. You will be able to track metrics on email open rates, click-through rates, and time spent on your website to determine which prospects are the most engaged, enabling you to tailor your approach.
Again, if you notice that a lead opens your emails regularly yet hasn’t scheduled more meetings with you afterward, for instance, that can be an indication of interest but wanting one more thing to push them over the edge. Those are the ones where an email with resources or a direct call to action would help move along such prospects further through the sales funnel.
3. Designate a Space Uniquely for Prospect Interaction
A dedicated room, such as the digital sales room, will further reinforce prospect engagement by housing all sales-related interactions under one roof and where prospects might access any and all sales materials, track the progress of their deal, and communicate directly with your sales team in real time.
For instance, this could be providing a platform like the Forward Digital Sales Room, where prospects get to see personalized content in a collaborative environment, engage with sales representatives, and follow up on the status of their buying process. You could keep them informed while you take them through the sales cycle by making it much more relevant and interactive.
4. Keep Prospects Informed of Deal Progress
Keeping prospects informed about the status of their deal is key to managing their engagement level. Constant status updates enable the prospect to know what is taking place at any stage in the sales cycle and what they should expect afterward. These can be delivered through email, personalized dashboards, or even a phone call—whichever the prospect may prefer. The key is to have regular communication that reassures the prospect their business is important and that you’re actively working to meet their needs.
5. Employ Technology to Communicate Seamlessly
Modern enablement sales tools were designed to make talking with prospects easy and interactive throughout the sales cycle. These would include examples such as CRM systems, which can be integrated with marketing automation platforms, and live chat features that enable automation of follow-ups to track prospect interactions so that no communication falls through the cracks.
Instead, by embedding these tools into your sales process, you will be able to provide prospects with relevant information at the right moments so that they do not get stalled. These also support an effective system wherein you will exactly know whether your prospect is losing interest in your offer and when to take proactive steps to win him over.
Building Long-Term Relationships
Engagement with effective prospects isn’t about closing the deal; rather, it’s about building a long-term relationship that will keep them coming back for more and bring in referrals of their own. And if you show value at each stage of the sales process, then it’s going to create a positive experience for the prospect that leads them to want to work with you again and again.
This entails understanding the needs of the prospect today, but also to a great extent, his future challenges and offering solutions that can help realize his long-term goals. In such a way, you can establish yourself as an adviser in whom he has much confidence, thereby improving relations with him and opening up possibilities for future business.
Conclusion
Indeed, keeping prospects engaged throughout the long sales cycle requires a strategic approach that emphasizes personalized communication, periodic updates, and adoption of technologies to ease the interaction. Knowledge of unique needs for every different prospect enables the framing of an engagement strategy best suited for each, thereby maintaining their interest and helping them towards making a successful purchase decision.
It is not about the sale you are closing, but also the long-term relationship you are building to possibly repeat business and obtain referrals. By using each of these strategies outlined in this article, you’re going to keep your prospects hooked until you finally set the stage to get value from your sales efforts.
