Marketing professionals wear many hats—that’s nothing new. We juggle lead generation, demand generation, CRM management, partnerships, teammate training, securing buy-in, and so much more. Among all the responsibilities, one that continues to be a challenge is generating the right amount of traffic and leads for organizations.
Now imagine if you balanced traffic and lead generation with the drive to uncover new value from leads who already exist in your database. Many marketers are sitting on gold and not spending enough time digging.
Tapping into your existing database can help you uncover tremendous revenue opportunities for your organization, while simultaneously reducing expenses associated with prospecting and outreach.
There are countless opportunities to streamline processes and communication to existing database contacts through lead nurturing and other automations. Think about the expenses you could save if your internal workflows and processes were more efficient!
Finally, outreach to your existing database can give your team useful—and accurate—analytics about the content that works for your audience. Keeping this data in mind can help you be more successful with future lead and demand generation efforts.
You have a massive, sprawling, overwhelming database chock-full of stale leads—where do you begin? My advice is to begin by creating a service-level agreement (SLA) between your sales and marketing teams.
An SLA essentially defines who does what and can help each team stay accountable to collectively reach your organizational goals. With regard to your database, an SLA will help your teams understand where the line will be drawn and who will be working a given lead. The breakdown will differ by organization, but may look something like this:
One easy way to draw the line is by using the lifecycle stage of a contact to draw the line. Typically, I recommend that blog subscribers, leads, and MQLs fall into marketing’s domain, while SQLs and opportunities are only touched by sales. Creating an agreement along these lines will help alleviate miscommunications and align expectations from the get-go.
How to Engage Stale Leads in Your Database
There are a lot of creative ways you can reach leads in your database with the hopes of reviving the relationship and finding a sales opportunity. Here are a few to get you started:
Leverage Email to Increase Blog Activity
Blog Subscriber to SQL Lead Nurture Workflow
Chat Flows, Bots, and Pop-Up Form Automation
Usage-Based Triggers for SaaS Companies
Welcome Drip Campaigns for Leads from Offline Sources
These five ideas are simply prompts to get you started, but the possibilities for engaging stale leads are endless. As an organization, remember how much potential value your database already has and prioritize strategies to tap in. You might be amazed at the revenue opportunities and cost savings you find.