Lead Nurturing

Many companies have adopted a strategy of lead nurturing. This is a marketing activity that prepares a lead to hear your offer when they are ready to make a decision. A sample lead nurturing program would include an email going out once a month sharing press releases, case studies, offers, or relevant articles. There are several different software applications that can facilitate these activities that can be found simply by Googling the term.

When should you nurture leads? There are primarily two occasions to nurture leads. The first is when you purchase a list of leads that may or may not need your products or services. You can purchase a list, start sending them emails, faxes or direct mail before you attempt to qualify them as prospects. Once the lead has been in the nurturing process for a period of time, or has taken some sort of action as a result of your marketing, you can remove it from the nurturing and hand it off to your Lead Generation Team and/or Sales Team.

The second occasion to nurture leads is when you get real time leads that are routed to your Sales Team or Lead Generation Team only to find out that the prospect is not ready to make a decision but is in the preliminary stages of collecting information. You can then place them in a nurturing campaign that provides them with the information that is beneficial to companies seeking your services. You can take this opportunity to persuade them to choose you before they are planning on selecting a solution.

As you implement a nurturing strategy, you will see that there is a larger chasm between marketing and sales than you previously thought. Since the majority of CRM solutions do not track leads well, and lead nurturing systems don’t pretend to manage sales opportunities, you will need to decide who owns the lead as it is being nurtured.

Thus enters Lead Nurturing 2.0 – Lead Response Management – which is powered by tools that allow transparent reporting for Marketing and Sales through the entire process. Lead Response Management mixes marketing or nurturing activities with sales and lead gen. activities so they can happen simultaneously instead of one at a time. A sample Lead Response Management strategy triggers a phone call right when a lead presses submit on your web form, followed by a series of emails, faxes and phone calls that vary depending on the outcome of the previous activity. The calls are scheduled for optimal contact times and are triggered automatically without the Lead Generation Team making the conscious decisions to call. Since Lead Response Management can happen while other activities are taking place, you can employ a strategy for new leads, old leads, recycled leads, lost leads, pipeline opportunities, cold deals, lost opportunities, existing clients and clients approaching renewal of contracts.