How has lead nurturing changed the motion of your inside sales team?

The integration of lead nurturing with inside sales is a potent combination. Instead of inside sales smiling and dialing without any segmentation, today's inside sales reps knows "who" to spend the most time on and is talking to prospects that know much more about "why" they are calling then ever before. From a "motion" perspective, we have a seen a number of formulas both of which work:

1. Score first -- call after -- Some of our most sophisticated clients don't even let their inside teams call prospects until they reach a specific score. Once they do, it populates the inside team's queue to call.
2. Call first - score after -- This is most common, inside teams call leads first and kick off the nurturing/scoring process.

By the way, Focus is hosting a summit on lead management where there are a number of expert presentations on lead nurturing: http://www.focus.com/webcasts/interactive-summit/lead-management/?tfso=6048 I highly recommend anybody interested in the topic should check out.

Hi Jenny-
There are several ways lead nurturing can drive performance gains in the inside sales function. I’ll provide a few examples below as oversimplified and linear “cause - effect” cases, with the obvious caveat that, in practice, there’s a fair amount of interplay between these causes and effects.
1) Improved service levels - improved customer experience. Lead nurturing allows vendors to define a pre-determined program of follow up touches -- which in most environments should include at least one phone call attempt -- that guarantees each lead will receive the same baseline level of attention. These programs must be well-planned and executed. For example, the programs should factor in variables such as time zones, inside sales staffing levels, optimal email timing and deliverability, audience-appropriate copy treatment, relevant content and offers, 3rd party evidence, etc…. With these factors addressed, vendors can not only eliminate the rarely discussed but very real issue of leads “falling on the floor” but they also cost-effectively drive brand preference through a better customer experience than offered by their competition.
2) Improved pipeline intelligence - better messaging and positioning. Most lead management platforms provide reporting and analytics capabilities that go beyond what is offered in pure play CRM platforms. These reporting tools especially reward those vendors who have enabled rich sets of lead profile data (e.g., lead source, campaign tracking codes, industry, annual revenue, employee counts, sales routing details, etc) to flow through their process. Not only do these enhanced data sets allow for more compelling lead scoring scenarios, they also bring valuable intelligence back to executives, sales, and marcom experts about the market segments are responding best to certain offers, promotions, content, or even individual sales people. Over time these diverse stakeholders can re-tool their approaches to mine the most profitable segments for pipeline and revenue growth.
3) Improved spend management - better marketing ROI. As a result of points 1 and 2, lead nurturing allows marketers to more closely examine where they are (and aren’t) getting leverage in their marketing mix so they can confidently optimize performance. In many cases, the successful implementation of a lead management process allows vendors to either reduce marketing spend, or to re-deploy it “down-funnel” where it can drive specific outcomes that may be more valuable to your sales team than raw demand generation. Mike Damphousse provides a great example of this – combing lead nurturing with appointment-setting -- in his earlier response. Another option for funds re-deployment is a 3rd-party-managed study of the “stuck in the funnel” lead population – those prospects who have yet to purchase a solution or opt out of nurturing communications, but who are not moving forward in the buying process. Many companies offering products with a high consideration factor lack a full understanding of their prospects’ buying process. A focused study of these latent, in-market prospects can deliver valuable insights that may not be revealed through a traditional win/loss analysis conducted “after the fact.”

Jenny,
agreed with many of the points above. The only thing I would add to that is that lead nurturing, when done well, also provides a much richer array of content for prospects to interact with. When they do, and marketing presents this information to the inside sales team (ideally, within their CRM system), this allows inside sales to:

a) know which companies to talk to
b) know who at that company is the right buyer
c) know how to start the conversation with that person, based on their specific interests

I highlighted that in a bit more detail here http://media.eloqua.com/documents/BeyondLeadFlow_eBook_SW.pdf if you are interested.

Best,
Steve