Supporting the sales cycle once the buyer engages in a formal buying process with a sales rep is termed as Opportunity Nurturing in fancy marketing terms. It is an integral part for a closely knit revenue cycle.You may follow the links, wherever provided. We shall discuss the third stage of revenue cycle as not much have been discussed about it on the Web.

1. Developing relationships with very early-stage prospects before they even enter your database as a lead (“seed nurturing”)
2. Building and maintaining relationships with known prospects as they educate themselves (“lead nurturing”)
3. Supporting the sales cycle once the buyer engages in a formal buying process with a sales rep (“opportunity nurturing”)
4. Deepening and expanding relationships with existing customers (“customer nurturing”)

Opportunity Nurturing

Social media can be quite valuable to your internal marketing and sales operations as well. You can promote greater alignment between the two departments by refining the lead handoff process and bolstering the “lead lifecycle”—the path that your leads take once in your lead management system.

A successful lead lifecycle requires agreement between marketing and sales on what constitutes a “sales-ready” lead, and agreement on when and how leads should get recycled back to marketing for further nurturing. Social media interactions can provide deep insight into sales readiness and buyer intent, so they are critical to keeping leads moving along the lead lifecycle.

Here are a few key ways you can make social media a deeper part of your sales and marketing alignment objectives in the future:

Use social conversations to enhance your lead scoring and impact lead handoff to sales.

In addition to demographic, BANT and behavioral data, begin to use social interactions as factors in your lead scoring methodology. Then, tailor your automated business rules for lead handoff to include social media interactions. Let social media activities trigger the handoff and impact which leads are deemed “hottest” for sales. For example, if a prospect tweets that they’re interested in opinions on your product, use this activity to trigger a sales
alert indicating a sales-ready lead.

Notify sales reps when prospects and customers

Hot leads demonstrate “interesting moments” or behaviors that indicate their sales readiness. This might be increased website activity, e-mail click-throughs, and in the case of social media, increased interactions and conversations on social media sites. By notifying the sales team of these interactions immediately, you will dramatically increase the relevancy and timing of their conversations with these prospects.

Lead recycling campaigns through social media

You could set up a rule whereby an increase in activity on social sites triggers a lead score change that then re-engages the lead with sales. While this business rule will be automatic, be sure to also give sales the ability to manually indicate a specific time frame in which the lead should be
re-engaged if they have deeper insight into the relationship.

Sell using all available channels

Social media interactions provide a great way for the individual sales rep to build relationships with contacts, especially younger contacts who may be as comfortable interacting online as they are using e-mail or phone. Understand what channels each contact uses to communicate, and  communicate with him or her in that manner.