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What is lead nurturing? How does one define lead nurturing? Jon Miller, VP of Marketing at 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.

Brian Carrol of InTouch rightly says in a blog post on the :

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 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 . 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.
Auto responder email programs are often talked about as lead nurturing tools but auto responder email programs though very effective when used well, are just that….auto responder emails and not lead nurturing applications. Similarly fortnightly newsletter programs can be sent using , but isn’t strictly lead nurturing on it’s own.

So when you are planning your program, stand back, take a look at how it’s setup and check to see that it fits the goal of lead nurturing and isn’t whats its not supposed to be.

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 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 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 , 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. This 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. is the tool that can give one that kind of insight. David Thompson, CEO
puts this point across crisply in this short video clip which emphasises the importance of timing:

So if you may be giving up on leads which are not put into a 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 “” made me question “how much is too much when it comes to the multi-touch approach of ?” The study conducted and published some interesting findings which were brought out well in the write up. In a nutshell, these findings included:

• 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 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 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 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.

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?