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What are your company’s biggest obstacles to successful lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing is seen as a critical success factor for modern marketers by the experts speaking at the 6/29 Focus Interactive Summit "Mastering Lead Management" (register now: http://focus.com/c/B2E) What stands in the way of your company's success in lead nurturing, and how are you working to overcome those obstacles?
Events
- Dos and Don'ts of Small Business Marketing May 29 @ 11 am PT
- Lead Nurturing 202: The Next Generation May 31 @ 11 am PT
- The Tricks to Paid Media June 6 @ 11 am PT
- Display Advertising for Brand Awareness June 20 @ 11 am PT
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4 Answers
Michael:
The two biggest obstacles we see with our clients is the lack of process (as Howard mentions above failure to plan) and also a lack of content.
The process issue reveals itself in a several different ways.
1. The first is to narrow a focus when developing lead nurturing. Many companies only look at lead nurturing and lead scoring and leave out other crucial processes such as lead planning, lead routing, lead qualification and metrics. By not looking at nurturing holistically and not part of the overall framework it does not reach its full potential.
2. The second way it is often seen is by no process or strategy at all and therefore they fall into what Howard mentions - the ad hoc approach.
3. The last obstacle we often see is companies not taking nurturing far enough. Many companies stop the nurturing at marketing and do not realize it should be used throughout the buyer journey and through the entire customer life cycle. By developing nurture campaigns that allow for deal acceleration through the pipeline as well as endears customers to your product or service, companies will get more from their campaigns in terms of revenues and loyal customers.
To help our clients overcome this obstacle we work with them to develop nurturing programs as part of their overall Lead Management Process.
The second obstacle is content. Often we hear from companies that they do not have enough content to develop nurture campaigns. The reality is that they do, but often times it is so scattered through the organization trying to gather it is a chore unto itself.
To help our clients battle this challenge we work with them to develop content maps to each stage of the buyer journey. From the time of response, through to close and then onto the customer life cycle, it is important to map the content that is needed at each stage. Doing so will improve the engagement with the customer. Once the content is mapped, an organization can see what they have in-house to fill the gaps and where there is none, know that it needs to be produced.
Carlos Hidalgo
President
The Annuitas Group
Michael, far and away the biggest obstacle we see is the failure to plan. Many companies invest in marketing automation software without a plan or lead nurturing strategy in place, and once the software is in place there's enormous pressure to demonstrate ROI, pressure that outweighs the desire to craft an overall strategy. The result can be an adhoc strategy that evolves randomly and organically without any real objectives or framework.
As a service provider in this space, the sad fact is that we work mostly with clients who are 6 months into their software implementation (and realize they're not doing as well as they should), when we should be working with more companies who want to develop a lead nurturing strategy prior to even having the software in place.
A good question with excellent comments. In my opinion, with prospects already getting e-bombarded with free trial offers, white papers that will change their lives etc etc, that means you can't just create a plan, sign up at any of the "X"-Contact websites, dump in your prospect base and away you go. Thus, the greatest obstacle (at least for a small business) is time, coupled with enough information about your prospect, to allow you to nurture them with unique content, that actually provides them real value.
Other than finding a way to make more time, the best way to overcome this is to be creative, direct and honest. The best prospects will remember and appreciate that.
I agree with Howard and Carlos. The purpose of lead nurturing is to move prospects through the buying cycle, so you need content that accomplishes that goal. This means highly personalized content based on buyer variables.
You also need to track this movement. And since it may take a long time to move through the process, you need a lot of content. But you also need a way of monitoring the movement through the Revenue Cycle.
Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor
President, Find New Customers "Lead Generation Made Simple"
http://www.findnewcustomers.net
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