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“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 . 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 llowed 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.

Going by the second objective which is , 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

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.

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 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.

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 product development team kept in mind while developing 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, 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. There’s a lot of buzz at the Nurture camp this week as we get ready to officially throw open “” which has been in the works for some time.

e has been developed as an appexchange application which can easily be added to any existing account and setup very quickly. The application will help sales persons using Activity tracking has been one of the most useful features in 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 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 “” form at the bottom of the page or get in touch with us!

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 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 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 . 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.

of Eloqua shares a fantastic example of how VFA put together a to breathe new life into a set of old “dead” leads they had gathered over time in the 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 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

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.