Lead Nurturing – Uncover a Gold Mine of Opportunities

Lead Nurturing – Uncover a Gold Mine of Opportunities
Nurture is very simple word that means to supply with nourishment. Today, lead nurturing is
immensely popular with marketers because it is a simple yet extremely powerful marketing
automation solution. Lead nurturing can be compared to a garden that will produce a good
harvest only if tended well. Similarly it is not enough to just generate leads, it is important to
nurture them to be converted into customers.
Organizations spend huge amounts of money marketing their products sending mailers, email
and invitations to webinars or advertising heavily on TV and radio. The leads generated by
this exercise are passed on to the sales team. As sales are responsible for generating revenue
for the quarter, they tend to ignore the prospects that are not hot – thus sales teams ignores
almost 80% of leads generated by marketing. That is 80% of the budget going to waste.
This gap between sales and marketing teams is the biggest challenge faced by B2B enterprises.
Once the lead is handed to the sales team, the marketing automation team no longer follows
up on these leads as they have already been handed over to sales. Hence it makes more sense
for marketing to pass on only the qualified leads to sales. This is where lead nurturing comes
in.
Lead nurturing in the B2B space is the process of building long term trusted relationships
with qualified prospects irrespective of whether they are interested or not, through a
consistent dialog throughout the sales lifecycle. Thus we can say lead nurturing is a process
that converts inquiries into leads and leads into sales.
Remember 75% of these unqualified prospects will eventually buy from you or your
competitor. Yes, there are some who may be unqualified; those should be siphoned out of the
system immediately. The rest we should care about and focus on. Lead nurturing helps keep
your finger on the pulse of those undeveloped prospects.
According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing are able to generate
50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost-per-lead.

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Build a Relationship
Lead nurturing is used to build bridges and inspire trust between the lead and yourself. It
helps you to provide valuable education and information about the product to the lead up
front, in the form of letters, emails, case studies, white papers, articles, webinars and success
stories.
By using this kind of lead nurturing campaign you relate with your prospect better and get
deeper insights into their buying intent. Once you have built that trust you are looked upon as
an expert. You don’t sell; you only provide information and solutions. You space out your
campaign depending on the lead time. You ultimately benefit from more and higher quality
sales leads and increased conversion rates with an increased bottom line.
Thus if l ea
d n ur
turing is done right fewer leads are lost, more qualified prospects get into the
funnel and your sales team can focus their attention on the most promising of them.
Know ore - lead management system, lead nurturing definition

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