Lead nurturing – developing the other 90% of your sales funnel

July 10, 9:22 AMB2B Marketing ExaminerCamberley Bates

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Quarter over. Numbers in. Some companies reaching new levels. Others facing budget cuts, again. Marketing is re-examining investments. What now?

Lead nurturing. Find the golden opportunities from the leads you have generated.

At the BtoB Online – Leading Edge conference, SilverPop reported that 82.5% of the leads generated are ready or will be ready to buy. Sales will typically follow-up with 12.5%, based on a higher qualification or purchase timing. That leaves a whopping 70% that will be ready now or in the future. Without a plan, potentially 70% of the marketing budget is wasted.

So what is lead nurturing? It is the process in which a company engages in conversation to exchange information with a person or company until they are ready to buy. It requires patience (their time is not your time), consistency (they got to know who you are and what you do) and persistence (out of sight, out of mind).

Patience: who has interest, who does not? This requires lead scoring to know what behavior indicates more interest. Lead scoring does not need to be tremendously complicated. Start with the basics of how you already interact with the customers and decide what each behavior is worth. You will also need to understand what they are interested in, in order to develop the conversation. You will need tools to do this including web tracking analytics and a good marketing database.

Consistency: If a company is not ready to buy in the next 12 months, and you change your message (yet again), will they know who you are? Make sure you know who you are and hammer away at it. If you are changing every 6 months, you haven’t given it a chance to fit into longer term budgets.

Persistence: If you are patient and get to know the state of the purchaser through lead scoring. Then the persistent quality will be welcome and relevant. This is where you create campaigns that fit the expressed interest (what pages have I reviewed, what is important to me, how did I get my information) with the timing (how much time have I given you over what period of time).

Lead nurturing is what sets the premier marketing organizations apart from the those just worried about activities. Nurturing leads – the 70% of what your lead generation activity produces - is what creates a sustainable funnel for sales.
 

For more info: Lead nuturing systems: www.Net-results.com ; www.SIlverpop.com ; www.eloqua.com