1. What is lead nurturing?
2. What are the benefits of lead nurturing?
3. The ROI of lead nurturing

What are the benefits of lead nurturing?

Your salespeople’s time is too valuable to be spent chasing cold leads or developing their own educational materials, but that does not mean these long-term leads should be dropped altogether. Statistics vary by industry, but based on our experience, with constant lead nurturing you can reasonably expect to convert at least 20% of inquiries into qualified leads within one year. See The ROI of Lead Nurturing for more industry statistics and tips on how to calculate the ROI of lead nurturing for your own business.

In addition, we have described below Before and After scenarios as specific examples of what you can expect from lead nurturing.

• More sales-ready leads (show/hide before/after)

  Before

  You hired a telemarketing firm that had guaranteed you 500 new leads. The problem is that most of them are “early leads”. They are still in the research mode, “just looking” for possible solutions. They are certainly not ready to commit to a budget or timeline. In fact, the quality of the leads is so bad that the sales team reject rate is averaging 80%, so the 500 “leads” now look more like 100. Worse, your salespeople are so frustrated with wasting their time on cold leads, that they are now reluctant to follow up on any leads, including the good ones.

  After

  Marketing and sales finally agree on a common definition of what constitutes a sales-ready lead and initiate a multi-touch nurturing campaign to cultivate relationships with longer-term sales opportunities. As a result, sales people are now able to focus strictly on well-qualified prospects, without neglecting the ones that have a longer opportunity window.

• Higher marketing ROI (show/hide before/after)

  Before

  Every year you invest in various marketing initiatives to identify new leads: corporate Web site, Google AdWords, trade shows, webinars, networking, etc. When people visit your Web site, respond to one of your ads or register to an event, they indicate some level of interest for your solutions. But what if they are not ready to engage with a sales person yet? Do you just abandon them? What a waste of marketing dollars!

  After

  With a lead nurturing program in place, inquiries are systematically scored to determine whether they should be nurtured or discarded. The nurture leads regularly receive relevant articles and offers matching their interests and communication preferences, keeping you in the game while they research their options, and increasing your chances of doing business with them. As a result, the return on lead generation dollars is much higher after multiple contacts.

• Higher productivity of your sales professionals (show/hide before/after)

  Before

  Your sales funnel looked pretty dry, so you asked your sales person to generate her own leads. Assuming this took 2 hours of her day, the cost of asking a seasoned sales professional, whose salary is $100,000/year, to generate her own leads would be $25,000. Not to mention, the cost of forgone opportunities, which is the cost of not spending 25% of her time on activities that could generate more revenue for your organization. Multiply that by the number of sales professionals you have.

  After

  The beauty of lead nurturing is that you now have a process. Your pipeline is never dry because marketing is in charge of systematically cultivating the interest of early leads—the ones that visited your Web site, registered for one of your events, etc.—until they ripen into sales-ready leads. Also, nurturing viable prospects involves creating content for each stage of the sales cycle, which, in turn, can be used to measure the progression of leads through the sales cycle. For example, someone who registers for a webinar is more likely to be the in the later stages of the sales cycle, whereas someone who downloaded an evaluation guide is probably in the early stages. As a result, your sales people can prioritize lead follow-up accordingly and make the most of their time.

• Maintaining top of mind awareness (show/hide before/after)

  Before

  In the past, you ran a few ads in industry magazines, hoping that when customers would need a solution, they would think of you first. While advertising may very well increase your brand awareness, you also realized (1) that its effectiveness is hard to measure and (2) that advertising is a repetition game and that it can be cost prohibitive for a small- and mid-sized organization like yours to run three or four ads before observing any results.

  After

  The day you realized that lead nurturing works to stay top-of-mind is when you received an email from a prospect you had contacted months earlier. This person knew the software he was using was outdated, but he was not ready to make a change yet, let alone allocate a budget to a new solution. Not a highly qualified lead, by sales standard. Nevertheless, a few months later, that same prospect contacts you and says he is finally ready. Now—and this is how you know lead nurturing works—you scroll down to the bottom of his email and see that to contact you, he simply replied to the nurture email you had sent him three weeks ago.

• Reduced opportunity leakage (show/hide before/after)

  Before

  Every now and then, sales would get some really good sales-ready leads. The salesperson would diligently follow up, meet with the decision-maker, and even send a proposal. And then what? Nothing. It’s not like the prospect picked a competitor, it’s just that nobody made a decision, and sales, understandably, no longer wants to waste any more time with this prospect (who has the time?). So, the “good” lead is dropped from the pipeline. But, everyone is shocked, when, 18 months later, sales learns that Mr. Undecided finally picked a competitor that was not even part of the selection process at the time.

  After

  With a lead nurturing program in place, sales can now send the stalled leads back to marketing and monitor any activity that would suggest that the prospect is loosening of the status quo, thus reducing leakage from the sales pipeline.

• Strengthened credibility (show/hide before/after)

  Before

  If your company or offering is not differentiated, it is a commodity, and commodities compete… on price.

  After

  Content plays a key role in lead nurturing, and the more helpful you are, by sharing ideas and best practices, the more people will perceive you as a trusted advisor, which means that they will be less sensitive to price.

Lead nurturing is a simple concept that really works and some organizations may prefer to develop their drip irrigation campaigns internally, but our clients prefer to focus on their core business and let us help them with developing content and carrying out their communications, because, just like in gardening, the key to lead nurturing success is consistency and persistence. Learn more about our services.

Next: The ROI of lead nurturing

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