Lead nurturing.
It’s another one of those buzzwords flying all over LinkedIn and marketing blogs.
Lead nurturing is an important part of the sales process that is extremely time-consuming and expensive to accomplish without marketing automation. So it is almost always talked about in the context of a marketing automation campaign. If you have a mental block against marketing automation, we urge you to push through it and stick with this article. We’ll keep it short, and this info really will help you.
Lead nurturing refers to growing the relationship between your company and a prospect, beginning with their first interaction with your organization, regardless of their position in the sales cycle. (When we talk about sales cycle position, we mean their readiness to buy. For instance, those who are further along the cycle are more ready, and those who are early in the cycle are still just gathering info.)
ANYWAY, you wouldn’t want to start spamming prospects who express interest in your offering with just ANY e-mails, offers, and messages. The goal of lead nurturing is to convert as many people as possible who express interest into a lead and then a sale. The messaging needs to be appropriate for their point in the sales cycle, relevant to the interests they’ve expressed through behavior on your website, and a good match for their demographics.
Lead nurturing with marketing automation allows you to score leads based on various information you collect from them and behaviors they perform. Lead scoring means the prospect is assigned a numerical value that puts them in a category of readiness that will ensure they only receive communications that match their category. But their communications will not just be filtered based on their lead score. They will also be filtered by the prospects’ interests — the exact products and services they were researching, and those that directly pertain. You can also filter by other information you can collect, such as reasons they are seeking the product or service, to make the messages extra relevant.
When you finally send that close-the-deal sale offer or make a person-to-person call, the prospect will be ready. And you’ll know they were ready because your marketing automation system will alert you that they are. How does it know they are ready? At that point they will have scored a certain number of points within the system and performed certain actions that denote readiness, which you have specified in advance.
TO SUMMARIZE: Lead nurturing through marketing automation allows you to send perfectly relevant, personalized messages that are appropriate for the prospect’s position in the sales cycle at just the right time. With lead nurturing , you can turn a significantly higher percentage of interested prospects into sales.
Want to chat more about lead nurturing and marketing automation? Get in touch with Lake34. We’re not high-pressure salespeople and we enjoy educating folks about the opportunities available through marketing automation.
Hope to talk to you soon!
