Inbound Lead Nurturing (IMU)

Professor: Brian Carroll, MECLABS, InTouch

Your lead generation efforts have really paid off and you have a full database of people just waiting to hear from you, but maybe not buy from you, not yet. What do you do next? Continue blasting them with email and phone calls? Or, maybe you’re ignoring them altogether? Brian Carrol from InTouch gave us another idea during his IMU presentation – you should nurture those leads through your pipeline.

Brian’s definition:

Lead nurturing is a relevant and consistent dialog with viable, potential customers, regardless of their timing to buy.

Much of the information included in Brian’s presentation would be helpful to anyone looking to better understand sales processes in general and he provides some very colorful mind-maps that would be useful when brainstorming some of these lead generation and nurturing activities.

Some of my key takeaways were:

Lead nurturing can take a significant amount of resources (time, money, people). And, if you’re in a larger company, don’t discount the internal battles between sales and marketing that you’ll have to negotiate if you want to put one of these plans into action. (Who owns lead generation? Who owns lead nuturing? When do the leads pass from the nurturing team to the sales rep? How do we know that the sales rep is following up? Etc…)
Don’t underestimate the power of the human touch. Although email and other online tools can be helpful, when it comes right down to it, you’re trying to build deep relationships with selected leads, not lots of shallow relationships with every lead. Building those deeper relationships requires more consistent and meaningful contact.
Spend enough time at the beginning to clarify who your ideal customer is, how you’ll be able to identify and qualify them, how they’ll be scored and prioritized as they move through the pipeline, and how you’ll nurture them in a way that’ s meaningful to them (e.g. CIOs typically like to have printable reports, so don’t just send them webinar invites).
Keep building your lead nurturing library of articles, reference guides, white papers, podcasts, etc. that may be of use to your leads. Not only does this help position your team as a trusted advisor, but it also gives you the opportunity to provide value in the form of meaningful and relevant data to your lead instead of just another sales pitch.
Consider building custom lead nurturing “tracks”. For example, a CEO lead may get “targeted email #1″ in Q1, followed up with a phone call in Q2, and a personalized invitation to an executive briefing in Q3. If you can match these to your lead’s business cycle, even better.
At a minimum, you should probably contact your leads on a monthly basis (with meaningful and relevant content, of course!)

Here’s Brian’s presentation: