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What is lead nurturing? How does one define lead nurturing? Jon Miller, VP of Marketing at Marketo defines lead nurturing:
Lead nurturing is the process of building a relationship by conducting an informative dialog that helps qualified prospects who are not yet sales-ready, regardless of budget, authority, or timing – and of ensuring a clean hand-off to sales at the right time.
It’s easy to mix the objective of lead nurturing and assume everything lies within the lead nurturing or marketing automation technology or software but there is more to it than that if you look at the definition. It’s possible to get a a really great lead nurturing application, start configuring it and get running while still missing the point
of being able to create a conversation and touching base with leads through informative content in a close loop till they are sales ready. Thats why it’s important to know what is not lead nurturing.
Brian Carrol of InTouch rightly says in a blog post on the B2B Lead Generation Blog:
It’s surprising how many marketers now say they do “lead nurturing” but in reality they are just sending monthly email campaigns or monthly newsletters with some call to action.
If all you do is send generic email marketing messages to your early stage leads over and over and over again, you’re missing the point. Consistency is good but being relevant and then consistent is even better.
To be truly effective, marketers must get over the “automated only” approach to lead nurturing (meaning there’s no actual human interaction just a blind system that can’t think). The point of nurturing is to build relationships and to do that we need to have a dialog between people that’s relevant and consistent.
One needs to be able to differentiate between creating a periodic email marketing campaign and setting up a lead nurturing program for the very reason mentioned above. Another point to note is, every email should not be an outright attempt to sell or make an offer. Selling is for leads that are already nurtured and ready to be sold to coral calcium complete renaissance . During the lead nurturing stages, leads are absorbing content and information which may help them decide on how their problem can be solved when they are ready to buy. Perry of Leads360 puts this point across well in a blog post saying:
You must not sell. A lot of business owners fail in drip marketing because they are selling products to their nurtured leads. First, they do not fit the qualifications you have, so there is a huge chance that they are still not going to make a purchase. Second, if they keep on seeing the word “buy” in their inbox or mailbox, they can get so annoyed and leave your business. However, you can pre-sell.
A common perception that our sales team comes across while talking to marketing managers at relatively smaller companies is “we are too small for marketing automation technology or implementing a lead nurturing program”. It’s not always easy to break that perception even though a solution like Nurture is just as ideally suited to a small business or startup with a few leads as a bigger company. It’s not uncommon to hear thoughts like “we would love to setup a lead nurturing program of our own some day but we just have about 150 inbound leads in a year” or ” we are a small company and don’t have the budget to invest in something like marketing automation technology as yet so we’ll stick to email for now”. If you are one of those companies that haven’t considered setting up a lead nurturing program for your leads because you thought you were too small for it…I hate to break it to you but lead nurturing is not exclusively for the big guys.
Sure, a large company with tens of thousands of leads from various sources needs some form of marketing automation to help them identify which ones are ready to be engaged but the beauty of what lead nurturing technology is capable of happens at the individual lead level and not just what it can do if you can feed in a huge list of leads. As a one man marketing and sales team of a startup, armed with a list of 200 target accounts and 400 decision makers can lead nurturing technology help? Ofcourse it can. For example, if emails were sent out to all these 200 contacts, it would still be possible to track how they respond to the emails and study their level of interest. Personalized emails can be sent to individuals and tracked too. Knowing interest levels and open times can go a long way in indicating when to pick up the phone and get in touch with a prospect or even when not to connect with them till they are ready. It’s a great way not just to keep connecting with prospects who are not at the buying stage of the cycle but also to help sell smarter with more insight to the ones who are ready.
So what makes so many believe that it’s out of reach or they are too small to use something like this? Is it the price? Just because one often reads case studies and news articles on how global giants managed to drive millions in additional revenue by nurturing their large databases of previous leads it doesn’t mean it’s so expensive. When we launched Nurture, we kept in mind it needs to be priced keeping in mind that it should be accessible and cost effective to both small and large companies. The Nurture Express version is a great way to start a lead nurturing program without needing big budgets and similarly there are other hosted Saas out there which can get you started without putting a hole in your pocket.
It need not be too complicated. It need not be expensive. It can still be just as effective as it has been for the big guys but it’s certainly not exclusively for them.
A sales call is going well and the prospect seems to be showing interest and asking a few good questions and all of a sudden the tone changes and it looks like this call is not going to end as expected… what do you do? Some would end the call and make up and mark the lead “cold” giving up on it and moving onto the next one. The others whom some may call optimists would end the call but think to themselves “Alright, I’ll give this one some time and then follow up in a few weeks to see if there is any change”. I would say the optimism is a good thing because when it comes to how a qualified lead reacts to being engaged, has a lot to do with timing. Knowing a leads timing schedule and striking at the right time can spell all the difference in how they react to a sales call. Lead nurturing is the tool that can give one that kind of insight.
David Thompson, CEO of Genius.com
puts this point across crisply in this short video clip which emphasises the importance of timing:
morgue the dvd So if you may be giving up on leads which are not put into a lead nurturing program and nurtured till they are ready, you may just be missing out on a future customer. Think about it.
A recent article I read published on DemandGenReport “New Study Supports Payback Of Lead Nurturing, But Raises Questions Over Touch Count” made me question “how much is too much when it comes to the multi-touch approach of lead nurturing?” The study conducted and published by published SmartLead which you can find and download here rimonabant and death or crescendo
published some interesting findings which were brought out well in the DemandGenReport download make it happen divx write up. In a nutshell, these findings included:
- Lead Nurturing is useful and effective
- Two nurturing touches to a prospect or lead are optimum producing better conversions
- Four touches or more can be potentially damaging to the conversion prospects
Now the findings are subjective to the type of companies and products surveyed in the study but lets look into this a little further. The ability to touch leads regularly with communication is a huge part of what makes lead nurturing software useful or the process of lead nurturing so effective. The software simply helps automate improve a process that would be carried out even by a single sales person and is based on what works in the marketing and sales process.
For example, the other day, I sent an introductory email to a prospect I thought fits our bill as a good lead. He showed some level of interest and said he will take a look at it although there was no immediate requirement. I followed up with some work samples of how we have helped previous customers tackle certain issues with links to more case studies on our website. Since the emails were trackable, I was able to view clicks to our website and views for certain case studies. Since there was no response about 2 weeks later, I sent an invite to an online demo we were doing followed by another email a few weeks later. About a month and a half from the first email, he finally replied saying he would be interested in exploring what we had to offer a bit more.
This is the same approach lead nurturing download sphere dvd takes by constantly keeping a channel of communication open and touching leads regularly with useful information until they are ready to be contacted directly and ready to be engaged. As a customer, I know I must have received at least something from Dell once every two weeks for the last one year before I decided to buy one of their laptops. I wasn’t annoyed by the regular communication because I did have the option to opt out of receiving them. Their nurturing program worked on me. I can’t say it would have worked if they had given up after two trys though I could understand how several people would find too many touches from them annoying. The point is, I’m not sure if its possible to universally define how many touches are optimum and every company would have a very different threshold for this.
If sending two emails or pieces of communication was the ideal way to nurture leads, would we really need marketing automation and lead nurturing products at all? Wouldn’t just two bulk email send outs do the job? So how much is really ideal and how much is too many when it comes to nurturing messages?
“Well ofcourse you should strike while a lead is hot…isn’t that way too obvious a statement to make?”, you might be thinking. However in practice, it isn’t always followed by companies even those equipped with state-of-the-art lead nurturing technology. Leads which display a sudden spike in activity levels and can be scored higher are ones that are calling out to be contacted and followed up with personally by sales. If leads that have been nurtured to the point they have reached a level where they are “ready” and then allowed to sit idle for a longer period without being engaged by sales, the effect of the nurturing process will wear off after some time and that lead will “cool” down and eventually go to the bottom of the nurturing cycle where it probably started.
If you look at the main objectives of lead nurtring download sexy beast free :
- The first is to help keep your business fresh in a prospects mind so they think of you when they have a requirement you can fulfil
- The second is to identify when a prospect or lead is ready to be engaged based on how actively they are looking at your products or solutions
If you go by the first objective, a lead has your business on the top of their minds when they are actively looking at your emails, when they are frequently visiting your website, when they are downloading more content on your offerings. Lead nurturing technology helps you see when these activities pick up and since thats teh time when your business is on their minds, that is the time to strike. Calling a lead who is going through what you have to offer or has very recently been through your content makes connecting far easier and more effective and the timing is right. “Ahhh I was just going through your website and looking at….” is the kind of response you can expect to hear at the time as opposed to “And who are you and what do you do?”.
Going by the second objective which is identification of leads that are sales ready, a “sales ready” state would be reached when a lead has responded actively to your content consistently enough to know that some level of interest has been achieved. A level enough for sales to take over from. The constant messages, content and reachouts are all focussed on driving a lead to this state and when a lead has reached this level, it’s time to act
. Every hour after a lead has been identified as ready is an hour when the effect of all the messages till this point is wearing off and delaying beyond a point would result in the lead being cold again.
So if you have a nurturing program in place and have the technology to track lead activity and identify ready leads, make the most of it and strike while the lead is hot.
Neil April 27 - Comments
Microsoft Outlook is a great inside sales tool in itself which is why so many sales professionals will swear by it and will tell you it’s the center of all their computer based reach out activity. Some rely it on to be their contact manager. It has a very functional address book to store and retrieve contact information but I would think its slightly lacking as a full fedged contact management application like Highrise for example. “It’s has everything we need to send emails to prospects before we call them!” some would argue and I won’t disagree that it won’t do the job. I just think there are other options out there which could do the job better and give you a selling edge.
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There is belief or understanding among sales professionals that lead nurturing technology
is a drip marketing software to generate qualified leads which will be passed to them (sales). It’s technology for marketers to help them with what they do. It’s true….but its not in an absolute sense. The truth is some features of lead nurturing are more helpful for marketers but some lead nurturing technology features can also be priceless to sales. For example, the kind of insights and lead activity tracking lead nurturing software provides marketers to guage which leads are more actively showing interest and more likely to be qualified can be a huge boon for sales teams to guage interest levels and contact leads accordingly. If sales people are able to view what a lead has been clicking on, what website pages they have been reading and what their interest level looks like, it enables them to go into a call that much more prepared. Needless to say, the better prepared, the more in control of a call they can be and the better the productivity and results.
This is the same line of thought that the Nurture 2001 a space odyssey download cranberries coumadin and
product development team kept in mind while developing Nurture for Salesforce which takes these features of lead nurturing and arms sales teams using Salesforce.com with the same level of insight which would help them track every email sent out beyond just a read receipt notification. Similarly with lite versions of lead nurturing technology as we’ve released in Nurture Express, there are some very cost effective and accessible lead nurturing solutions which can just as easily be used by sales to help close more customer than by marketing to generate leads. So if you’re still relying on Outlook to keep in touch with leads or send out multiple emails, you may want to explore what else is out there. While some things may just do the job, others may be able to do it better. Give them a try.
They just got better. Theres a lot of buzz at the Nurture camp this week as we get ready to officially throw open “Nurture for Salesforce” which has been in the works for some time. The new flavor of Nurture keeps in tune with Nurture Pro download rounders divx without dostinex precription free hct diovan
and the other versions of the lead nurturing solution in being very simple and easy to use while completely adapting itself to sales people rather than marketers.
Nurture for Salesforce has been developed as an appexchange application which can easily be added to any existing Salesforce.com account and setup very quickly. The application will help sales persons using SFDC
to send out “trackable” emails from within the leads or contacts page of their Salesforce accounts and give them a clear insight into the what happens after the email is sent out which is usually a blindspot for most. It creates an activity stream for each lead which displays email opens, clicks, link clicks, landing page visits and other activity within Salesforce to help inside sales and sales gain clear visibility into the activity before connecting with their leads.
Activity tracking has been one of the most useful features in lead nurturing technology and goes a long way in going into sales call better informed and having a clear idea of what content the lead has shown interest in. However this kind of insight was found lacking while sending emails straight from Salesforce accounts where sales teams usually contact prospects and leads from as the development team at Nurture noticed. Its the sales team which could really make the most of being able to track the interest levels and interest areas of a lead and use this to their advantage while calling or meeting them and since most of them are comfortable within the Salesforce.com application environment, creating this activty tracking feature without having to leave the Salesforce CRM application seemed like the ideal solution rather than having to refer to a seperate application.
While Nurture for Salesforce has not been listed in Salesforce appexchange as yet and is still awaiting an officla release date, it’s ready for any early birds who would like to check out a demo or add some punch to their SFDC email sending capabilities. Simply fill in the “Getting Started” form at the bottom of the page or get in touch with us! hernia zelnorm causes
It’s a good sign when a prospect who has received an email from your company opens it. It’s a better sign when they open and read an email multiple times and it’s an even better sign when someone clicks through and actively reviews content on your web site. Thats when you know you have a lead thats absorbing the content you’ve developed on your site and that lead is being nurtured. When it comes to being able to track lead web activity on your website, there is more to lead nurturing software than the direct benefits of being able to know what the customer has been clicking and showing interest in.
With the whole evolution of online marketing, websites have become more than just an online brochure with information on your business. They are sources of rich content which helps prospects understand your offering better and help them decide whether you can help them fix a pain point. Websites have gone from being stand alone pages of information to an integrated part of the sales and marketing process and as important as it is to know what content your potential customers are reading to understand their interest level, it’s just as important to know what they are reading to know whether you are providing them the right content and learn what you can improve on.
Using the web activity tracking features that lead nurturing software offers, it’s not to difficult to vizualize the browsing patterns of leads on the company website. For example if a lead goes from your email to a landing page on your website, selects the product or offering which interests them, reviews information on that product, downloads content related to it and proceeds to a request form or tries to connect with the company, it displays a good website flow which is working towards building interest in being contacted by the company. On the other hand if the lead goes to the homepage, clicks random links very quickly and leaves the site quickly, it means the website is not able to keep them engaged and needs to be worked on.
Web activity tracking is a great indicator of what needs to be added to the website, what needs to be changed, what needs to be provided to make the website as much a part of the lead nurturing process as the software application being used. After all till all the elements work in synch, adjustments need to be made to reach that goal of generating a steady flow of qualified leads.
I don’t literally mean “dead people” although it would be a great advance in technology if lead nurturing could do that. I mean bringing dead leads back into the sales pipeline using lead nurturing. A lot of companies gather leads over long periods of time through various channels and somewhere along the line, they get marked “cold” or “dead” in the CRM and never to be seen again. These dead leads can still be very valuable but they need a little nurturing. tamoxifen clomid sale
Steve Woods of Eloqua shares a fantastic example of how VFA put together a lead nurturing program to breathe new life into a set of old “dead” leads they had gathered over time in the post VFA: Nurturing to Re-Engage Dead Leads . The insightful case study explains just how they managed to do this and is a must read for anyone who knows of a database somewhere in their company that has been lying untouched since everyone thought it had no potential. The end results of the campaign as quoted from the original post:
The campaign succeeded in bringing back a tremendous number of leads from the “dead”. Over 120 highly qualified leads were passed to sales, and over $1.6M in pipeline was created. In a typical example, a lead may have been disqualified at a much earlier date, but given changes in the prospect’s organization, they were now ready to purchase and a sales opportunity was discovered. Only through nurturing and observing the buyers’ digital body language were these opportunities rediscovered.
To think a $1.6 million pipeline was created from leads that were presumably no longer worth pursuing, makes you wonder how much untapped revenue can be set free if companies everywhere would digg up some dead leads and nurture them the way VFA did. That is something to think about right?
And the Marketing Sherpa email marketing award for Best Automated Series – Auto Responder goes to (long pause) Sony Corporation & Datran Media! If you look into the campaign which Datatran made a superb case study grace is gone free
out of , you’ll find a well crafted and equally well distributed campaign which consisted of 3 automated welcome email messages to a group new Sony Rewards Loyalty Program each sent a few days apart to engage them while educating them about the program. In contrast they also carried out a simple single welcome email sendout and the results were impressive. There are a number of different things you can take home from this great case study and lots that can be learnt but here are two points that stand out and can be useful in setting up automated email or lead nurturing campaigns too.
Great Copy
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Well designed content and a great copy that encourages action in the form of click throughs goes a long way in the sucess of a campaign. Have a look at one of the sample emails that was auto triggered by a new customer registered for the program and definitely click the image to see the flow of the messages on the Datatran website:
Sony & Datatran Welcome Auto Responder Email
Customer Engagement Strategy coumadin sphere dvdrip
The second point that stands out is the customer engagement approach used by sending the emails on day 1, day 4 and day 7 to prompt action and get the customers attention and educate them on the benefits. This is the same strategy offered by lead nurturing technology which allows a programmed send out of emails and then subsequent follow up email messages activated on triggers which maximize the number of opens and click throughs. The effect of the customer engagement strategy for Sony? Well the results are quite stunning. Compared to the group that received a single welcome message, the multiple touch messages group had 157% more click throughs and 627% more clicks in general to the site.
Simply put. Customer or prospect engagement through email can be a powerful strategy!
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