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Posted on: October 6, 2020
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Category: Lead conversion
Let’s be clear from the start: lead nurturing is NOT Fight Club.
There most definitely are rules for lead nurturing and the first rule is that these must be applied to succeed.
So, gather round because we’re about to outline all five of them one by one.
Hang on, what exactly is lead nurturing?
For those that slept and are looking for an overview of exactly what lead nurturing is, we provided a succinct overview of the way that you can develop prospects from funnel-entry to sales-ready in an earlier post.
Right now we’re going to lay out the ground rules that will, paradoxically, blast those sales figures sky high.
A common misunderstanding is to view lead nurturing as the preserve of the marketing department.
How very, very wrong!
Leads must be nurtured throughout the entire sales journey.
This means that sales must have an active stake in how the process is managed before the handover. And that, after the handover, marketing can still greatly influence the nurturing that takes place.
For this to work sales and marketing alignment is essential. And this is tougher to achieve than it sounds.
Sales and marketing need to share the same view of – and share common goals at – every step of the customer journey. That’s throughout the sales cycle in general and in all of their…
Lead nurturing without sales involvement, or with a tailing off of marketing input toward the top of the funnel, is like trying to dance with two left feet.
It’s more likely to fall flat on its face than waltz to victory.
Read our guide to buyer enablement to understand how the right content can help move prospects through the sale funnel.
Now you are neatly aligned across sales and marketing it’s time to start gaining benefits from all your hard work. Together you can piece together a complete view of your customer journey.
At its simplest, customer journeys move from a need for generalised information toward tailored and more specific content.
To put some flesh on these bones, buyer personas can be used to determine exactly what type of information would be most useful to each of your audiences at different touchpoints.
And, voila, you have effectively created a lead nurturing strategy.
Automation is theoretically not essential for lead nurturing, but theory alone has never brought in a sale.
In practice, successful lead nurturing is delivered by marketing automation solutions and CRMs.
These not only make things easier – they also make things smarter and more effective and, by linking your CRM and automation tools, you also create greater transparency and alignment between marketing and sales.
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Data helps you understand your customers – it’s nice like that.
But data should also be helping you understand yourself – in particular, the success of your marketing campaigns, including your lead nurturing strategy.
Hint: without a bedrock of metrics and KPIs your data will never ground your understanding. Get these in place or risk floating through a sea of unfathomable figures.
Let’s keep the maths simple as we sum up optimisation.
Lead nurturing:
Customer journey mapping +
Content marketing
= More and more useful data
Optimisation:
More and more useful data +
Understanding
= Effective action
That customer journey is just the start of the road to optimisation: use the data you gain from addressing it to loop back and improve your understanding of it and response to it.
Here’s some examples of that virtuous loop in practice::
A/B testing of email campaigns
Why let landing pages have all the split testing – apply this to your emails too.
The furnace is lit – let’s drop our golden rules of lead nurturing in and see what comes out.
The nugget we are left with is this: COMMUNICATION
Lead nurturing is all about good communication.
Rinse and repeat.
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Craig Mathewson
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