Most businesses has thousands of leads in their CRM database but majority of those leads are not sales-ready. They are not in the buying cycle right now, but may be in the future. In such cases, its futile for the sales team to call on all leads without knowing which ones may be the best prospects to consider their offering. Lead nurturing is the apt marketing technique that can help businesses to identity and focus on potential customers who are sales ready.

Lead nurturing is the process of reaching out to your potential customers on a consistent basis across multiple channels to build a conversation with them, engage them and build trust that makes them think about your company and offering when they are ready to buy. Lead nurturing helps you to cultivate relationships with potential customers and to be right there when they are ready to buy. It allows you to create a stronger and more predictable channel for customer acquisition. The trust created by innovative lead nurturing campaigns helps you to not only be one of the shortlisted vendors every time a need arises but that trust also creates positive word of mouth where potential customer engaged with your campaigns, recommends you and your offering to other potential customers.

The most common channel used for lead nurturing has been email, but it is highly recommended to consider lead nurturing across all channels including email, direct mail and telemarketing, as every channel further strengthens the conversation and trust. Infact, the role of human touch in lead nurturing is getting increased attention and endorsement as it helps sales teams connect with potential customers and makes the follow-on email and direct mail feel more personal as potential customers are able to connect and relate to the messages based on their actual conversation with a sales person.

Are you explore lead nurturing as a way for cultivating relationships with your prospects?

B2B marketing and lead generation has becoming increasingly challenging over the past 5 years. While marketers have employed a range of initiatives to drive demand, including trade shows, direct mail, email marketing, webinars and search marketing, buyers have evolved further to block out these messages to focus on what’s most important to them. Yet, the marketing tactics have stayed almost the same without much evolution. Here are a few reasons that current one-way mass marketed messages do not and will not deliver results:

1. Buyers rarely pick up their desk phones and are extremely difficult to reach on the phone.
2. Buyers buy only when they have a need. Else they have learnt to shut off their minds to any and all of your reachouts.
3. Buyers do a lot of their homework online and know a lot more about their exact requirements, their options and what they are exactly looking for. So they end up responding to only those messages that hit their focused requirements. Today marketers don’t know much about their buyers based on one-way feedback-less outreach marketing.
4. Buyers are looking for sources that educate and inform them about a solution that they are looking for and tend to turn off pure salesy messages.
5. Buyers respond much better when they know that you know their specific requirements and are helping them with a personalized approach.

Here are a the core elements of what you need your marketing to be like going forward:

1. You must identify and connect wtih your buyers in a way that they trust you and look forward to hearing from you.
2. You must have a systematic way of understanding the spectrum of problems that your buyers face and how to educate them about potential ways of resolving those. You need a suite of education and information tools like webinars, white papers, case studies and industry research that helps your buyers decide what to do about their pain points.
3. You must have a system for personalizing the interaction with every buyers and to treat them separately.
4. You must have a system for tracking and measuring your buyers’ response to your messages and interaction to create a feedback look to help you understand your buyers.
5. Lastly, you must leverage the feedback to further personalize the interaction with every buyers as you hand hold them towards a qualified lead and revenue.

This, in essence, is the core of automated lead nurturing that creates personalized lead activity streams for every buyer. Most importantly, atleast a percentage of buyers will be well engaged with you via this process and will turn to you when they are ready to buy. And since you are essentially in continuous, incremental and presonalized touch with the buyer, you are their easy first choice vendor. While they have been early solutions in this market, I believe, automated lead nurturing will evolve rapidly in the coming years and will define the furture of B2B marketing and sales.