Is your lead nurturing building relationships?

Lead nurturing is the process of providing wanted high-value information to potential buyers who are grappling with priorities you can help them answer successfully.

It's a process, not a one-time download with a knee-jerk transition to the sales team for a pitch. At least not in a b2b complex sale. Nurturing takes time, commitment and consistency. The focus of your nurturing content should be based on how you tell stories about problem/solution scenarios, how the application of your expertise produces results and evidence that you can actually do what you say.

But nurturing also provides a way for marketers to learn about the buyers they're working to transition to sales-ready opportunities. Their reactions and behavior as related to your nurturing content will tell you a lot about how you can increase your impact and relevance with them. If only you "listen."

Below is a simplified nurturing campaign, but you can see the application of insight to nurturing track and the closed loop outcomes that mean a lead is never lost or wasted. Which is a huge accomplishment considering research showing that 79% of current leads never become sales opportunities.

In the lead nurturing process above, there are 2 specific issue tracks and one general track. The process might go something like this. We'll keep this simple and say that you're starting with a general lead list that you have no segment information about.

1. Send the first Issue 1 communication to the lead database.
2. Any leads who click through get sent Issue 1.a communication next.
3. Any leads who don't get Issue 2 communication next.
4. Any leads who get Issue 1.a communication and don't click through go to Issue 2 send.
5. Leads who get Issue 2 and click through get Issue 2.a in their next communication.
6. Leads who don't click on Issue 2 get the General communication track.

And so on.

As you whittle your way through this process of send, refine and send, you'll start to develop segments with defined interests you can tune into and develop. The more relevant your information and the more personalized you can get, the more engagement you'll build.

Remember that it can take 7 - 10 marketing communications to establish enough credibility with leads to get them to respond. The trick is that once they do, you need to "listen" to what they're telling you and follow-up with related information to gauge whether that was a one-time curiosity or a shift in priorities you can now pursue.

And note that once sales activities have happened you don't toss the ones who don't convert. You put them back it the database and continue to add to their profiles and activity histories, ready when their priorities shift in your favor.