Get Qualified Leads Ready to Buy with Lead Nurturing

One of the most powerful and sought after marketing concepts in the business world is lead nurturing. Lead nurturing ideally provides revenue from your working database of leads and potential buyers. While you may have several qualified leads in your sales funnel, chances are that they are not ready to buy. According to a Gleanster Research study, 50% of qualified leads are not ready to buy.

Lead nurturing is the process B2B marketers use for developing relationships with qualified prospects, all the while moving them through the sales funnel, closer to the buying stage. As a marketer, you must inform your prospects and prepare them to make a buying decision, keeping “your brand front-and-center” in order to be at the forefront of their mind when they are ready to buy.

 Traveling the B2B Buying Cycle Journey

B2B businesses have a longer buying cycle than B2C businesses. During their sales funnel, the prospective B2C client will wait 18 months or more to commit to buy, all the while comparing your services to your competitors’.

With lead nurturing, the best way to actually nurture your leads is to understand them and have an understanding of your ideal buyer. When you show that you understand potential customers and you provide for their needs with information and services, you are in the process of taking a qualified lead to the next level of someone that is ready to buy.

A Few Tips for Lead Nurturing

• Decide how often you want to contact your potential buyer.
• Nurture leads further down the sales funnel by making specific points of contact: Share a report with them, offer them a paper for notes, then invite them to a lunch-n-learn or a webinar.
• Use personalized emails and check for your prospect’s activity on your site or them trying to contact you or your team. (Marketing automation platforms like Act-On, Click Dimensions, and Orbtr have real-time notification capacity based on prospect activity.)
• If you think they are ready for you to contact them, consider picking up the phone and calling. (Lead scoring and triggers can help with this.)

A lot of lead nurturing is about timing, but it’s very important to have a specific process in place that dictates what the next step is. Lead nurturing can be as complicated or as simple as you need it to be, but the key is to always focus on what your prospect needs to move to the next stage in their buying journey.

If you have any questions or if you would like some assistance with your lead nurturing campaigns, please contact us.

(DemandLEAP is an Act-On Apex Partner, as well as a certified Orbtr, Click Dimensions, and Exact Target partner.)