Archive for June, 2009

There are many ways to be prospect-centric, but nurturing leads is one of my favorites. If this a concept that is new to you, read on to understand why this is something you want to consider and what steps you can take to get started.

In general, I think too many marketers are focused on getting proficient at generating leads. Instead, I challenge you to focus your attention on what happens to those leads after the initial contact.

Consider the typical scenario: someone registers on your site when they download a white paper or a webcast, and the leads are then collected into CRM system. Typically, there are a few common approaches to following up with the leads:

• The prospect receives an automatically-generated email thanking them for their download and possibly providing links to additional material a user would find interesting.
• Leads are passed to sales, and they may follow up on a few, but if they don’t get a positive response (which is likely as most people who read a white paper or watch a webcast are not sales-ready), they ignore the rest and believe that what marketing is producing is “junk.”
• Telemarketing contacts individuals to follow up, but, unless you get someone at the exact time the want to buy, they’re probably not going to have much luck.
• Leads sit in a database in case you want to reach out to them at some point.

A much better approach is to nurture your leads, which means having a process in place to continually provide touch points to your prospect to move them along the path to purchase (Note: you need to get the customer’s approval to send them additional emails).

There are ways you can make your nurturing programs very sophisticated and use tools to help you automate the process, but you can also start simply. Making a few changes at a time will continually improve your organization’s interactions with prospects; small steps OK! If you are new to lead nurturing, I suggest this two-step approach:

Step 1: Map out your typical buying process and the key people involved in the purchase decision. Then, determine what content would be useful for each person at each stage of the buying cycle, filling in gaps by creating content to use for each person at each stage. (It all comes back to really understanding your prospects.)

Step 2: Create the actual nurturing program, which includes deciding how long you want to communicate with your prospect (ideally, it should be as long as the typical buying process) and developing the customer touch points throughout the process (e.g. emails, direct mail, possible phone calls, etc). In short, you want to continually provide your prospects with targeted content that moves them through the buying process and keeps you top of mind.

Want to learn more?

There is a ton of information available on lead nurturing, but here are a few of my favorite posts on the subject to help you get started (I’d recommend all of these blogs as well):

Unleash Your House Database with Lead Nurturing (Marketo)

Detecting Buyer Roles in B2B Marketing (Digital Body Language by Steve Woods)

Payoff for B2B Content Marketing is Movement (Marketing Interactions by Ardath Albee)

Losing Touch with Leads? 7 Suggestions for Nurturing Programs (This is a post I wrote for my blog, Savvy B2B Marketing)