Lead Nurturing: Automate or Bust?
As a B2B marketer, I know that lead nurturing is the right thing to do. Given time, the right nurturing activities, and a little luck, can turn inquiries to leads that you’re happy to turn over to sales. And amazingly, sales is happy to take them from you. And commends you for them. Interesting concept, huh?
But lead nurturing is a difficult task. I’m happy to segment my leads by product interest, and by their point of entry (PPC, website, webinar, etc.), and by their place in the process. The problem comes when I’m trying to set up the nurturing campaign. Where’s the technology that can nurture without requiring a big outlay of money upfront, the use of internal IT resources, and a consultant to set up and train?
RainToday.com just published an excellent report entitled 'The One Piece of Advice You Can't Generate Leads Without.' The report includes several excellent articles on lead nurturing, especially those by Laura Ramos of Forrester Research and Brian Carroll of InTouch and the Start with a Lead blog.
How are you automating your nurturing activities?
- Nothing – I don’t nurture
- All manual, baby
- Salesforce + an email vendor
- A marketing automation vendor
Don't forget to contact your leads immediately, especially web leads. We have noticed that contact rates, and thus qualification rates, have increased 3 fold when "leads" are contacted within 10 minutes of submitting their information. Why some people still "age" their leads is beyond me.
Posted by: Darin Dixon | November 29, 2007 at 03:22 PM