What is Lead Nurturing?

Are you familiar with the term lead nurturing? If you’re in sales or marketing, you should be. Lead nurturing is a pretty self-explanatory term. What I always think about is the chicken or the hen warming the egg until it’s ready to hatch. Now there’s nothing that that hen can do to speed up the process. It simply has to nurture it until the egg is actually ready to hatch on its own. Sometimes sales is the same way. Let’s think about this. You go to a trade show, you meet 100 people. You come back, you immediately focus on the people you had the best conversations with. You focus on the people that you think are the most ready to buy and what do you do with everybody else? I know you’re going to say a lot of things like put them in your CRM, we’re going to put them in our newsletter. What happens most of the time is they completely go to the wayside, and you hope you run into them at next year’s trade show. You hope they decide to call you one day when they want to do business with you but what if you spent just as much time with all 100 leads as you did with the most ready to buy?

As a salesperson, you’re probably thinking that’s a lot of work, and I need to prioritize my time. As a marketer, you should be thinking that way. What you should be doing is putting everybody into some kind of lead nurturing program. A lead nurturing program is something that touches that person with brand messaging, helpful information, something to improve their lives to leave a positive impact from your company or you as a salesperson over and over and over again. Now there’s lots of marketing automation programs. That’s a great way to nurture leads. Sending them emails, getting them on your social media channels, getting them on your newsletter, so you can stay top of mind, and you can keep sending them information, and you can educate them. Now what’s going to happen is at some point they’re going to be ready to buy your product or service, and you’re going to already have a foothold with that client before any other competitor is even approached. That’s extremely valuable. I just feel like this is amazing leverage as a marketing initiative. If you can do this at scale, you can actually have a huge impact on top line revenue right away.

A lead nurturing program is simply a very deliberate, very intentional way of nurturing potential leads. Anybody who is qualified to do business with you, whether they need you today, or they need you 6 months from now, or they need you 6 years from now. There’s really 2 goals that you want to have in mind when you’re designing your lead nurturing program. You want to a, stay top of mind so when they actually are ready to do business, they think of you and b, you want to do whatever you can to actually get that egg to hatch faster. You want to educate them, you want to create urgency, and you simply want to move them through the buying process even faster. The technicalities of lead nurturing are out there. There’s lots of programs, there’s marketing automation programs like Act-On and HelpSpot. This is something you can do with just an email newsletter. This is something you can do at a small scale with just a good CRM, but I wanted to plant the seed for you guys to be thinking about nurturing all of your leads no matter what stage of the process, and you’re going to have better marketing, better sales and increased revenue.

You might also be interested in:

Lead Scoring and User Profiling for Your Sales Team
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Juicy Results can help you with lead nurturing and other sales technology through our Marketing Automation Agency service.