By now you should know that just because your buyer doesn’t want to progress right now, doesn’t mean they never will. Recycling is mandatory, and in order to make the most of your list and establish a successful funnel, leaked buyers must be carefully nurtured through this process. What many Sales and Marketing people don’t realise is that recycling can actually be the difference between a 2% and 20% share of the market. The reality is: if you aren’t doing it, you should be!
In this blog, Hugh explains the four keys to effective recycling. He emphasises how important it really is to revisit and nurture your original list in order to gain traction. It may not save the Earth, but there is no doubt that successful recycling of buyers can have a long term impact on the fertility of your Funnel and overall market share.
You already know how important recycling is for the planet, I’m going to show you why recycling is important for marketing too. In fact it can make the difference between a 2% share and a 20% share in any given market.
I’m going to use a fairly typical business to describe the impact of nurturing and where you need to improve it. In this example I’ll talk about a quite small business, total revenues of $750,000 over the next three years. Your business might work in millions or billions but the math is identical.
Let’s imagine that that $750,000 is going to be generated over three years and that we are going to see a growth curve that sees us with something like:
- $200,000 in the first year
- $250,000 in the second year and
- $300,000 in the third year, there’s your $750,000.
So its growing at a reasonable clip and let’s complete the picture and say that maybe in the 4th year we are going to generate $400,000. So we start to kick on a bit in the 4th year. Now if the average deal is worth $10,000 then over that 3 years that’s $750,000 at $10,000 a pop, that’s clearly going to be 75 deals.
Let’s complete the picture a little bit from the sales side. Let’s imagine it takes 13 weeks to close a deal, it takes 4 meetings to get that close, when you do close, and let’s qualify reasonably aggressively at the top and we’ll make it a marketing driven company. Say that only a third of the leads, ever make it through to the proposal stage and because we are qualifying aggressively, let’s say we can win one in two. You can work out therefore how many names you need, we need 75 deals over the 3 years, We are going to win one in two, so of course we are going to put 150 proposals out over those 3 years. Because we said earlier that we’re going to have a third of those leads become proposals, so to get our 150 proposals we are going to need 450 leads. Now let’s further imagine that about 10% of the market we touch responds actively, so to get our 450 leads we need, 4,500 names.
Pretty simple right? Good enough picture? No, I think thats horrible picture! There’s 75 deals from 4500 names, means you are sitting at way below 2% market share, that is invisible, that’s a horrible picture. I’d rather see you get 75 sales out of 450 names, rather than 4500. At 20% you can count on inbound, at 2% you’re invisible.
Let’s see if we can fix that picture. You need to be a big fish in a small pond. Let’s take a reality check. In the scenario I’d painted before, the assumption was that you were never going to go back to the list and market to them again. Of course that’s a silly assumption but it still paints the picture because what it really highlights is how important it is to go back to that list. You know if we are just going to start again a year later, that’s not going back to the list, that’s a new list.
So if we are going to go back to the list over the three-year period in order to get the 450 names not the 4500 names, and therefore the 20% share and not the 2% share, if it’s that important wouldn’t it make sense to get really, really good at recycling, I think it would and I’ll shows you some of the keys to get really good at recycling.
What does good recycling look like and how do you get there?
The short answer is rhythm, you need to be rhythmic in your nurture. Let’s unpack that just a tiny bit, firstly you need to get back in there quickly. Imagine that you leave a list alone for a year and then you go back to them, even though you had many dialogues with them up until this point and then you leave them alone for a year, you go back to them and you are cold, it’s like a cold call or even worse it’s like a spam email.
- Get back in there quickly,
- Need to earn the right.
- Negotiate the exit. ‘Hey I recognize that you can’t proceed any further, thanks for letting us be a part of the journey so far, here’s what I’m gonna do’ then you explain the nurture program so you earn the right to get back in there quickly.
The recycling content needs to be:
- Incredibly valuable to your market (your buyer’s need to want to receive the next piece of nurture content) Content that shares genuine insights for free to earn the right to stay positioned with the market.
- On message – The message is the problem that you solve better than anyone else on the planet. You want your target market to know, if I ever have that problem, I’m going to come to you. That’s the position that we need to be in, so the content needs to be about the problem that you solve.
Just to give you an example, in our case the problem that we solve is ‘my sales and marketing engine is underperforming.’ So all the blogs that you’ve seen and all of the written blogs we put up once a week as well, they’re all about insights into that particular problem. How it affects, why it affects and how do you fix it? So stay really consistently on message so that you can position the solution to that problem and make your content really valuable. Before you can do either of those two things you need to get back in there quickly and to earn the right, that’s the key to great recycling.
For now may your funnel be full and always flowing.
