As a marketer, your most important job is to generate leads for your business.  But what good are those leads if they’re not managed properly?  These 7 statistics show that if you’re not taking advantage of lead nurturing, you’re losing customers and revenue, and very quickly.

1. Only 25% of leads are legitimate and should go to sales.  50% are qualified but not ready to buy. (Source: Gleanster Research)

Nearly half of your leads will not be ready for a sales call immediately after their first conversion.  But that doesn’t mean you should just ignore these leads or throw them right out the window along with the bad leads.  A key component of a good lead management system is implementing lead nurturing, which allows you to develop relationships with your leads in a timely and effective way by setting up targeted email campaigns.  By following up with these leads and providing valuable content to further educate them about your industry, company, and product or service, you move them farther down your sales funnel until they are ready to become customers.

2. Lead nurturing emails get 4-10 times the response rate compared to standalone email blasts. (Source: SilverPop/DemandGen Report)

The true power of lead nurturing lies in its two most important features – timing and targeting.  You should plan the timing of your emails based on your typical sales cycle, and experiment with different times to see what resonates best with your audience.  Arguably more important, though, is the targeting of your emails.  You should place your leads into appropriate campaigns based on their previous actions on your website, and send them content that is relevant to that topic.  The more precisely and effectively your emails are timed and targeted, the higher your response rates will be.

3. 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. (Source: InsideSales.com)

One of the many benefits of lead nurturing is that you can establish contact with your newly converted leads immediately.  This is crucial because response rates decline rapidly as the age of a lead increases.  By setting up your lead nurturing emails to run automatically, you no longer have to worry about forgetting to follow up with your leads right away, and you make the whole process much simpler and much more effective.

4. 66% of buyers indicate that “consistent and relevant communication provided by both sales and marketing organizations” is a key influence in choosing a solution provider. (Source: Genius.com/DemandGen Report)

Another important benefit of lead nurturing is that it allows you to maintain consistent communication with your leads.  Oftentimes, it takes more than one email to effectively bring your lead from being unqualified to ready for that sales call.  With lead nurturing, you set up your emails to send automatically at strategically determined times.  You can then collect data about the behavior of each lead and the actions they take with respect to each email they receive, and use this information to plan the next steps of your email strategy.  The idea is to not lose contact with your leads unless the likelihood that they can be nurtured to become qualified for sales is severely reduced.

5. Segmented emails get 50% more clicks. (Source: MarketingSherpa)

The importance of segmenting your leads into appropriate nurturing campaigns cannot be stressed enough.  Find segmentation opportunities based on the lead intelligence data you collect, such as their first conversion event (i.e. did they become a lead by downloading your ebook?  Signing up for your free trial?), what parts of your site they have visited, and so on.  Figure out what topics or aspects of your product they seem most interested in, and send them content that reflects that topic.  By closely mapping your content to your leads, you increase the likelihood that they will click through in your emails.

6. Nurtured leads have 9% higher average deal sizes and 23% shorter sales cycles. (Source: Market2Lead)

By adequately preparing your leads through nurturing campaigns, you are refining the list of leads you hand over to your sales team to include only those that are qualified, or sales-ready.  This makes the sale easier on both sides, since the lead is already educated on your company and product, and presumably ready to buy, which of course makes the sales pitch easier.  This reduces the sales cycle, thereby making your sales team and your entire funnel far more efficient.

7. Only 33% of B2B marketers say they have an effective lead nurturing process. (Source: Executive Benchmark Assessment Survey/DemandGen Report)

Most marketers aren’t nurturing their leads, and many of the ones that are aren’t doing it right.  Lead nurturing is an extremely powerful tool.  After all, with all that effort you put into generating leads for your business, why would you want to put half of them to waste?

Start building better relationships with your leads, stay ahead of the competition, and turn more of your leads into customers with effective lead nurturing.

Are you using lead nurturing?  What would you say is the most critical part of your lead management strategy?

Many marketers who have discovered tips or tricks about their field keep those items close to their chest. It’s understandable why they would want to preserve these secrets, whether for competitive advantage, job security or simple jealousy. They use these strategies to help create leads for their sales teams, and watch their secret tools or methods mature over time and find ways to improve them or get a little more out of them. A lot of these hidden tools and tricks are around finding ways to pull in more leads to the top of your marketing funnel, whether to increase your social media reach, list size, or any other attribute that you are being measured on as a marketer. Here are five steps that you should be doing to make your B2B marketing efforts more effective online.

Network More Efficiently with Followerwonk

Followerwonk is a Twitter networking tool that helps you identify other Twitter users with specific interests, sorted by how popular they are. There are a number of tools out there that do things that are similar to this, but Followerwonk is better than them for a few reasons: You don’t need to sign in or give it information about yourself, it’s very fast, and it doesn’t just do the basics like “Find users like me”. As marketers, we usually aren’t trying to find more people who are just like us, but instead trying to find people in certain segments or topic areas.

Their sorting and ranking is also useful because it places the likely influencers and predictors of the field at the top of the rankings very reliably, and so you can quickly assemble the list of 10 or 15 primary people that you would like to reach out to. You can reach out to them directly from Followerwonk once you’ve established who in a specific field that you want to contact, and engage with them. If you’re instead just trying to build followers, you can also do a search for the people who follow the most people, and then follow them from Followerwonk – They are the people most likely to end up following you back.

Make Sure Your Social Media Presence Has Forms

This is a mistake that a lot of marketers make when using in social media – Forgetting to include the lead form. We frequently get caught up in the other parts of social media like “conversing” and “engaging” and “joining the conversation” that we forget to include our own motives in our work. Make sure that some of your tweets go to landing pages on your site or refer back to content offers that you have. A good rule of thumb is that if you’ve made ten tweets but haven’t linked to something that could generate leads for you, it’s the perfect time to do so. Some marketing automation software packages can also help you track this and handle it for you. If you have other interactive tweets and actions happening, that means that you have the engaged following that you need to be successful with this.

Special Offers To Your Unengaged Recipients

Build a mailing list segment of people who haven’t been responsive to your last five emails to them, and then send them a special offer and ask them what they are looking for but haven’t seen. You can get very valuable feedback and advice, and generate leads that were otherwise unresponsive. Consider this a different type of lead nurturing campaign, customized to an unresponsive set of leads or prospects.

In one test, a re-engagement email was sent to otherwise inactive contacts that included a final offer and asked them for feedback on what they’d received so far. Almost 5% of those emailed “woke up” and became actively engaged in some way, by responding to the question or following through on the offer. While that may not seem like a great number, these were previously inactive subscribers, and so were basically dead weight on the mailing list. By getting some action out of them, they were more valuable than before, and the marketer was able to remove the other emails from the list, maintaining list health and reducing the cost of future campaigns.

Make Sure Your Website Is Optimized

This can feel like an obvious item to be aware of, but it’s tricky – It’s too easy to lose track of old pages and outdated offers on your website when you’re a busy marketer. Twice a year, take a quick inventory of your offers and their conversion rates, and then check pages on your site that haven’t been changed in the last six months. If they’re displaying offers or forms that are not converting well anymore, consider switching them out with newer offers or ones that are proving more effective. By getting into a regular six month cycle of this, you will be more aware of what is succeeding or flopping on your website, and better able to turn around pages that aren’t delivering on their potential value to you.

Check Your Historical Analytics

Finally, hand in hand with the previous point, make sure that you are consistently examining your analytics, not just against the previous month, but also against last year’s month and the year before that, if available. Look at your growth, accomplishments, and the milestones that helped set you along that way. If business hasn’t been as strong as the past, carefully review what different segments of traffic and activity looked like in past years. Is it traffic or leads from a particular source or type of source that has decreased? This can help you better understand where you need to focus your efforts to grow again, or where your real problems lie.

What other tips or ideas do you have for success in lead generation?

Photo Credit: Flickr: Some rights reserved by boklm

A tweet caught my eye yesterday and it got me thinking.

What does “high quality lead” mean anyway?

Doesn’t every B2B marketer and VP of Sales have a different definition? Does it have to do with the stage of the buying lifecycle our prospects are in or the target market/demographic?Both? Neither? Is it even a specific enough goal?

What if we started using a new venacular? How about if we tried this as our number one challenge?

• Generating interest from the people that match our buyer personas.

or

• Attracting and keeping the attention of the people we would like to have as customers.

Would that be a better target? Would we act differently? I think we would.

We wouldn’t we care about what stage of the buying lifecyle a person was in. We would develop a content marketing strategy that would nurture that individual (and his or her organization) through the buying lifecycle. Don’t you think? I do.

Would this seemingly insignificant  change in our thinking and vernacular, make a difference?  Do you think that would help us become better B2B marketers? I do.

I’m really seeking your help and insight on this one. Am I off base? Is it too trivial? Or could it have a profound impact and truly alter our way of doing things.

Tell me what you think. As I am starting to feel like chasing “high quality leads” is shooting for the wrong target.

This week’s #B2BChat was yet another fast-paced exchange of insightful input as our participants tackled the ins and outs of lead nurturing. The chat zoned in on hot questions that dealt with the various lead nurturing strategies that would work, the kinds of content that would have the most impact and success, the significance of lead scoring, the tools that can be used, etc.

This is a summary adapted from the complete transcript and if you want to read the full version then you can just drop by here.

What strategies work for lead nurturing, what doesn’t, and what could be improved upon?

@asuthosh: Nurturing implies constant and strategic engagement and that’s the fundamental basis of nurturing

@fearlesscomp: Story telling process – problem to solution works. Random messaging does not work. To improve, develop deep buyer personas.

@paige_oneill: thought leadership and best practices work well in my experience

@utollwi: Understand the buyers cycle and stage – test the message and call to action – optimize and repeat.

@shelleyryan: Most marketers think of webinars as lead GENERATION events, but they work for lead NURTURING, too.

@andrewspoeth: also, build your lead nurturing strategy around customer trust. High trust = low risk.

@kseniacoffman: Research & understanding the customer – always better than throwing darts in the dark :-)

What content works well for lead nurturing? How can it be effectively marketed?

@NathanRKing: Content needs to be new and relevant to your target audience.

@fearlesscomp: Tough question. Good content appeals to the recipient and is in the media they like. That’s why insights so critical.

@robbtrost: Provide solutions for the participants. Intriguing content w/ brevity will keep ‘em coming back

@paige_oneill: our best performing pieces by far are all “top 10 steps” “best practices” Everyone hungry for how-tos.

@asuthosh: Content that customers can use, not blatant marketing collateral. Content that helps solve their problems. Trust follows

@andrewspoeth: Use different content for different stages of the purchase cycle in lead nurturing

@utollwi: Good educational content pertinent to the buyer persona and the stage they are in. ROI examples, 3rd party expert info etc.

@chadhorenfeldt: we’ve found from benchmark data that not only content is important but the timing. If it’s timed well, response increases

@ExoPoirier: educating with content on marketing operations basics, helping prospects build their marketing dept, works well for my targets

@kimgeralds: Monitor the conversations to determine what customers are discussing. LinkedIn groups r great. Use content to respond.

What and how significant a role can lead scoring play when nurturing leads?

@fearlesscomp: IMHO Scoring is critical. Cannot know status of nurturing unless we can watch for the “hand raise”

@AGB2BPro: Lead scoring helps determine how far they go along the nurturing path/how much content they receive

@joezuc: Scoring is critical – after all, the nurturing is all about “grooming” the lead for submission to Sales.

@fearlesscomp: Lead nurturing and lead scoring need to be married. Work best used together.

@b2bento: Lead Scoring is the bridge between Marketing and Sales silos too. It’ V.V. Important!

@utollwi: It can be important if honest lead scoring is done recorded Helps set budget for each segment of leads

@joezuc: Lead nurturing w/o scoring serves the firm no purpose. It must always be about moving the ball to the goal (conversion/sales)

@joezuc: and scoring tells the marketer whether to keep nurturing the lead ( to get to sales eventually) or to dump it.

What lead nurturing tools are you using/considering to use? What have the results been to date?

@mcbru: We use intelligent dialogs that survey customers about whether *they* think they’re a hot lead.

@ExoPoirier: hubspot and Sugar CRM tightly integrated

@andrewspoeth: I’ve mostly used Marketo. Very easy to build lead nurturing campaigns and track results. Q4

@fearlesscomp: Marketo is great, but pricey, which is why we use Genoo.

@paige_oneill: That’s what we do (@aprimo) (www.aprimo.com) so I’m lucky to use it. Challenge is adapting people to processes. myself included.

@sharonmostyn: I attended @Eloqua (www.eloqua.com) conference in ’08 & was impressed w/them-I’m sure they’ve made even bigger strides but new emplyr can’t afford

How do you want to see lead nurturing evolve? What’s your wish list?

@joezuc: I want to see lead nurtuing truly become personalized w/content that is individually tailored to a buyer rather than impersonal

@cuferg: More integration of tools, combine offline and online analytics.

@fearlesscomp: My hope is that B2B companies will finally go beyond the bare minimum and craft highly personalized campaigns.

@utollwi: better reports in the tools and always better training for all teams sales & marketing…make them believers

@joezuc: I hope that mktrs consider variable data publishing to include personalized direct mail also during a drip marketing effort.

@sharonmostyn: Lead nurturing wish list: inexpensive automation that easily delivers personalized msgs to the right person at the optimal time.

@ExoPoirier: Lead nurturing OUTSOURCED to specialists like us! Client B2B sales team concentrating on hottest leads. Tried it and it works

@jeremyvictor: Let’s make it “customer nurturing”. We are starting the relationship wrong by calling human beings “leads”

@jeremyvictor: Let’s make it about them not us …

As expected, it was an insightful session indeed. Many thanks to all who participated. Join us for next week’s #B2Bchat, Thursday, August 19, at 8pm Eastern (5pm Pacific, 8am Aug 20 in Singapore). Follow @B2B_chat for updates.

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About the B2Bblogger:Anol Bhattacharya (@B2Bento) is CEO of GetIT Comms, a marketing and communications consultancy for hi-tech and telco’s, where he helps clients (Cisco Systems Inc, IBM, IDC Asia Pacific, HP, Datacraft etc) in the field of B2B marketing, demand generation, lead nurturing, social media strategy & implementation, interactive digital media for marketing initiatives and user experience design.

Anol is one of the key contributors at B2Bento.com and has had his articles published in various media in the region.

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Not all prospects are ready to buy immediately, especially in B2B. Lead-nurturing campaigns therefore become imperative for transforming prospects into sales-ready opportunities. Success hinges on planning, creativity and technology working in tandem.

In this week’s #B2BChat, we cover lead nurturing, an area that’s getting a lot of interest from the B2B field. Here’s a snapshot of what’s up for discussion:

• Strategies for lead nurturing (what works, what doesn’t, what could work if improved upon)
• Content marketing for lead nurturing
• Lead scoring and best practices
• Lead nurturing tools
• Wish list (hey, it’s a field that’s evolving every day – seek and it may just be granted)

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Actual questions to be posted:

1. What strategies work for lead nurturing, what doesn’t, and what could if improved upon?
2. What’s the sort of content that works well for lead nurturing? How can it be effectively marketed?
3. What and how significant a role can lead scoring play when nurturing leads?
4. What lead nurturing tools are you using / considering to use? What have the results been to date?
5. How do you want to see lead nurturing evolve? What’s your wish list?

Bring your opinions, experiences and questions for a lively discussion with other B2B marketers.

Join us for this week’s #B2Bchat on Lead Nurturing Best Practices, Thursday, August 12th, at 8pm Eastern (5pm Pacific). Follow @B2B_chat for updates.

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About the B2Bblogger:Anol Bhattacharya (@B2Bento) is CEO of GetIT Comms, a marketing and communications consultancy for hi-tech and telco’s, where he helps clients (Cisco Systems Inc, IBM, IDC Asia Pacific, HP, Datacraft etc) in the field of B2B marketing, demand generation, lead nurturing, social media strategy & implementation, interactive digital media for marketing initiatives and user experience design.

Anol is one of the key contributors at B2Bento.com and has had his articles published in various media in the region.

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Craig Rosenberg, @thefunnelholic, in preparation for the Focus Virtual Summit on Mastering Lead Management, Tuesday, June 29th, asked Focus Expert speakers and sponsors to supply him with 4-6 tips on Lead Management for an article on his blog titled: Lead Management: 67 Tips From The Biggest Experts In The Field.

The list of experts included some of the most well respected people in the industry, (some I knew and others I didn’t), including David Raab, Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems, Howard Sewell, Spear Marketing, Maria Pergolino, Marketo, Ardath Albee, Marketing Interactions, Carlos Hidalgo, Annuitas Group, Brian Solis, Future-works,  Mac McIntosh, Sales Lead Experts, Mike Damphousse, Green Leads, Anthony Carraturo, Merit Direct, Adam Needles, Silverpop, Mark Feldman, Netprospex, Craig Stouffer, Pinpointe On-Demand, and Parker Trewin, Genius.

I thought I would join in the fun and continue his list of 67 lead management tips with six more.

Six Lead Management Tips

68. Be extremely careful that your automated lead nurturing messages are for *someone* not *everyone* – (it’s not one size fits all – use your buyer personas and give your messages a personal tone).
69. Just because you are saving time with marketing automation, doesn’t mean the human beings you are sending the messages to can’t tell the messages are automated. Make your content helpful and useful or risk the dreaded unsubscribe and or even worse – a failed relationship.
70. Be sure your messages are timeless. Mistakes like this are dead giveaways that a machine emailed your content and not a person.
71. Don’t believe that your lead management process and marketing automation system will accelerate / hasten your buyers to move faster through the buying process. Only your remarkable content is capable of that.
72. Listen. Listen to your buyers, listen to your metrics, and listen to your sales team. Don’t forget the important role listening plays in improving processes, communications, and relationships.
73. Today’s B2B buyers are busy. Your marketing and products are not the center of their universe. Keep your messages concise, meaningful, and addressed at their needs not yours.

I urge you to read the first 67 lead management tips as the experts provide really good food for thought on lead management, marketing automation, and building relationships with today’s B2B buyers.

To close I’ll quote Craig,

The main thing is that lead management is absolutely essential to ROI-conscious marketing departments.  If you don’t have a lead management process, get one.  If you do have a lead management process, you should always be optimizing.

Visit Craig’s blog, The Funnelholic, (and read it regularly) to stay informed on B2B demand generation, lead management, and online media. He is a B2Bblogger shaping the future of B2B marketing and one that you should be paying attention to, I am.

What are your tips for lead management? Can we get to 100 tips? As B2B marketers, we can use all the lead management tips we can get, no?

There’s a methodology that needs to be adapted in order for Marketing Automation software to be completely effective. By design, it’s a software program to help better align marketing and sales to improve efficiency by automating repetitive tasks based on specific criteria about leads, opportunities and prospects.

But it doesn’t stop there, marketing automation software offers a number of benefits to help funnel better leads.

1. Demand Generation

Marketing automation facilitates demand generation through targeted marketing programs that drive awareness for a product or service. With a marketing automation platform, you can develop integrated marketing programs including, but not limited to email marketing. This will extend your reach, giving you more opportunities to engage and connect with customers and prospects. Some systems have additional features that allow you to leverage social media as a demand generation tool by providing trackable links that add to the prospect data and can affect the lead score–giving a more clear representation of the prospect’s interests and engagement with your brand.

2. Sales & Marketing Alignment

Marketing automation also enables better communication and collaboration between Sales and Marketing. One of the biggest challenges for Sales and Marketing is making sure that Marketing is really handing off good leads. With a marketing automation platform, sales and marketing can agree on a universal lead definition, then the system will enable both Marketing and Sales to track the status of leads, so that when leads are qualified correctly (based on behavior and specific activities), Marketing can hand them over to Sales (and Sales will be happy).

3. Lead Nurturing

One of the most noteworthy features of marketing automation is lead nurturing. Many times leads are ignored, or not given the right information at the right time resulting in you losing them to a competitor. Lead nurturing is a content-focused process that allows you to always be relevant and constantly provide value. Lead nurturing through a marketing automation platform can be done pretty effectively, since it becomes an automated process. These systems will help you organize workflows that send prospects information based on their profiles and behavior. This information can be in the form of an email, newsletter or even an event invite, but it’s important to know where prospects are in the buying cycle, so you are sending them the right message. Marketing automation helps you set up content paths for segments of people and these paths can vary depending on the prospect behavior, meaning they can be automatically moved to different paths. This is where marketing automation and lead scoring become extremely important.

4. Lead Scoring

I talked about this is greater detail in an earlier post, but lead scoring with a marketing automation system just makes perfect sense. A lead score is the number that tells you where prospects are in their buying cycle. It’s a number that is based on profile information and behavioral information. It’s always changing and evolving either through action or inaction. It can be done manually, but for any company that has a good list of prospects, and a relatively large sales force, there simply wouldn’t be enough time or resources for this kind of manual labor.  This is why the software is really important, not only will it automate the updating process, it will do it real-time and with very little effort giving both Sales and Marketing the opportunity to know how far along in the cycle in one prospect is at any time.

5. Analytics

Most good marketing automation systems have a pretty robust set of analytic tools that can be used to determine how interested prospects and clients are, or how they respond to different messages. It’s usually web analytics that show you where traffic is coming from, or built-in analytics about specific campaigns and where people click-through etc. This helps drive better leads because it helps you to better understand who you are dealing with, how they behave, and what they are really looking for. If you are trying to engage people, and you don’t have data about how they behave or respond to things you send them, it’s almost impossible to continuously add value. This is why analytics through marketing automation can help you drive better leads, because you’ll know for sure what you are passing to Sales are qualified and you’ll have the data to back it up.

There are many other ways marketing automation can drive better leads, so these are just a few. Things like consumer research, and defining your personas are just as critical to the success of your marketing automation campaigns as they are to any other inbound or outbound campaigns.

Marketing automation is about improving efficiency and productivity, it’s not going to be effective if you don’t know your customers, but it will help you get to know them much better, and once you do, it will help you stay engaged and relevant to them.she learns.