Lead Nurturing – Uncover a Gold Mine of Opportunities
Nurture is very simple word that means to supply with nourishment. Today, lead nurturing is immensely popular with marketers because it is a simple yet extremely powerful marketing automation software. Lead nurturing programs can be compared to a garden that will produce a good harvest only if tended well. Similarly it is not enough to just generate leads, it is important to nurture them to be converted into customers.
Organizations spend huge amounts of money marketing their products sending mailers, email and invitations to webinars or advertising heavily on TV and radio. The leads generated by this exercise are passed on to the sales team. As sales are responsible for generating revenue for the quarter, they tend to ignore the prospects that are not hot – thus sales teams ignores almost 80% of leads generated by marketing. That is 80% of the budget going to waste.
This gap between sales and marketing teams is the biggest challenge faced by B2B enterprises. Once the lead is handed to the sales team, the marketing team no longer follows up on these leads as they have already been handed over to sales. Hence it makes more sense for marketing to pass on only the qualified leads to sales. This is where Lead nurturing programs comes in.
Lead nurturing in the B2B space is the process of building long term trusted relationships with qualified prospects irrespective of whether they are interested or not, through a consistent dialog throughout the sales lifecycle. Thus we can say lead nurturing is a process that converts inquiries into leads and leads into sales.
Remember 75% of these unqualified prospects will eventually buy from you or your competitor. Yes, there are some who may be unqualified; those should be siphoned out of the system immediately. The rest we should care about and focus on. Lead nurturing best practices helps keep your finger on the pulse of those undeveloped prospects.
According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing are able to generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost-per-lead.
Build a Relationship
Lead nurturing is used to build bridges and inspire trust between the lead and yourself. It helps you to provide valuable education and information about the product to the lead up front, in the form of letters, emails, case studies, white papers, articles, webinars and success stories.
By using this kind of lead nurturing campaign you relate with your prospect better and get deeper insights into their buying intent. Once you have built that trust you are looked upon as an expert. You don’t sell; you only provide information and solutions. You space out your campaign depending on the lead time. You ultimately benefit from more and higher quality sales leads and increased conversion rates with an increased bottom line.
Thus if lead nurturing is done right fewer leads are lost, more qualified prospects get into the funnel and your sales team can focus their attention on the most promising of them.
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