Tips before starting a lead nurturing program?

Hi Molly-

You’ve already gotten a lot of good advice here. So I’ll offer just one additional tip for your team to consider before launching your nurturing program.

* Write a lead nurturing customer experience brief *

If you plan to nurture leads at any kind of scale, you will at some point implement (if you haven’t already) a marketing automation solution or service. Once you do that, you will have a very powerful weapon in your hand. And even a skilled user of these platforms can do unintended harm if not guided by principles of an ideal customer experience, informed by a solid understanding of your nurture leads.

The leads in your nurturing process are unique in at least two ways:

a) In most cases, they’ve already “voted once” to engage your brand, either by completing a web form or otherwise making themselves known to you (e.g., trade show, chat, direct mail response, social media interaction, etc)

b) By definition, they are not yet ready to (seriously) talk to a salesperson.

These two attributes make these people different from any other buying constituency your marketing programs touch. Accordingly, your nurturing campaigns should reflect this difference. Considerable thought should be given to how you communicate to this group. Some of the factors to decide include:

- Frequency of touches/contacts
- Type of touches/contacts (email only? Email + call? Email + call + twitter direct message? Etc)
- Tone (e.g., familiar or professional)
- Voice (e.g., authoritative or collaborative)
- Offers (e.g.,

** transactional value: “First month free! Call me!”
** educational value: “I found this blog post that I thought you might like”
** entertainment value: “While you consider my request for a meeting, I had my marketing team create this funny comic strip. Here’s a link. Enjoy!”

Finely tuning these and other aspects of your nurturing program can not only make a big difference in conversion rates, it can strongly influence brand perception among those people who do NOT convert. And, at least in the short run, the non-converters will far outnumber the converters.

So while marketing is ultimately tasked with delivering qualified leads to sales, it is also expected to represent the company effectively to the market writ large. These two objectives are complimentary. A well-designed nurturing program is mindful of the impression it leaves with all of the people it touches, which ultimately improves brand preference, and naturally attracts more buyers.

Tom Scearce
Scearce Market Development
www.tomscearce.com
info@tomscearce.com

Molly:

Great question. I am sure there will be an array of answers posted and honestly there is a lot to be said regarding nurturing but do not want to write a novel so will provide some of the top things you can do.

1. One of the best things you can do to ensure a successful nurturing stream is to ensure you have developed nurturing as part of your overall lead management process. To have nurturing done in isolation apart from lead qualification (includes lead defining and scoring), lead routing and metrics will only yield a marginal result. By developing the entire lead management process and understanding that each are linked you will yield a better result. Start with conducting an audit to determine the gaps and then go about working with sales to remediate them starting with those that have the biggest potential impact.

2. Map out your customers buying cycle and once completed develop an offer and content map. Determine before hand what actions, offers and messages will be targeted to the buyer(s) along the buying cycle. You will be able to get a good read on the buying cycle by asking sales what they are seeing and getting their participation in defining it. In addition to sales, ask some of your top customers what their buying cycle/process was like and they will most likely share their insights with you. Once developed, review with sales again and then begin the process and monitor and test. Once you begin to see the results tweak as needed.

3. Automate: I am hopeful that you have already taken this step but if you have not taken the step to automate your marketing with a solution, it will be near to impossible to run a successful, consistent nurturing program

4. Measure: Before you launch determine the objectives and goal of the campaigns and the target number of sales accepted leads and contribution to revenue (lead planning process). Work with sales to determine the key measurements and then combining the information from your CRM and Automation system measure the results against your pre-stated goals and objectives.

Good luck on the program!

Carlos Hidalgo
President
The Annuitas Group
chidalgo@annuitasgroup.com
www.annuitasgroup.com

Everyone seems to want leads this month.
1. Develop a smile/ and a style.
2. Develop a 10 second "Elevator Pitch" deliver before door closes.
3. Bring something to the table - that cures someones ailment:. foot cream, new shoes, delivery service, taxi, internet shopping ... all answers to the quest and can be sold separately!
4. Attend my ABC course; Always Bring Cards!
5. Work the room.
6. Press the flesh - with #1, then #2
If you meant the care and feeding of current contracts:
1. Personal contact, even if it is to an ans machine beats e-mail 20:3
2. Conduct follow-ups and ask if they have any questions, comments, or referrals -- I'm focusing on retaining and creating NEW business.

David Raab http://archive.raabassociatesinc.com/ has done excellent work examining inbound automation tools to help you find the right platform. I'd heartily endorse all of Carlos' points, and emphasize the need to get sales' feedback on how to "score" leads to you're sending them the right ones. And re the content map, I'd suggest creating content specifically designed to attract prospects at different points in the buying cycle, with specific needs or even with specific products already running.

Best of luck;

Bob

There is so much to lead nurturing and the above experts have done a great job in covering best practices.

On top of what has already been said, I'd add that from my experience, regardless of the nurture campaign you're running, be it an email, a webcast or your website promo, make sure that you communicate it to your Sales and telemarketing teams. They are also responsible for nurturing leads in their pipeline as much as Marketing, so have them echo that same messaging. Having Sales' buy in on your messaging and getting them to repeat the same helps to reinforce it.

Generally, webcasts, due to its level of engagement tend to work really well for us. Get them on the phone as soon as the webcast is over and our chances of converting them into sales-ready leads are exponentially higher and much quicker.

sorry for the double posting but i can't seem to find the delete button for this 2nd entry.

Assuming this is a b2b opportunity, I would ask one simple question: What can you give to your 'lead list' each day / week / month that will help them do their job better?

Once you can answer this question, you have everything you need to keep them engaged and develop the relationship necessary to win the business.