Lead Nurturing - Dating for B2B Companies?
No one enjoys blind dates. Whether you’re introduced by friends, the Internet, or your neighborhood matchmaker, it’s nerve-wracking to meet for the first time.
Conversely, everyone loves weddings. The flowers, the tradition, the drunken dancing at the reception, you can find something you like.
Everything that comes in between is the interesting part. When you’re dating, you’re learning about each other: what you like to do, the things he doesn’t eat, the stuff she does on Saturdays. And you’re discovering the things that you do well together.
It's no different when it comes to B2B marketing. You need to deepen your relationship with prospects over time, interacting in a variety of settings, learning more about each other's needs and capabilities while progressing seamlessly from one interaction to the next. And you need to know when to commit more resources to the relationship as well as when to pull back and give the prospect some space.
In the B2B marketing world, this “dating” process is called lead nurturing, defined as the process of building a relationship with qualified prospects who are not yet sales-ready, regardless of budget, authority, or timing – and of ensuring a clean hand-off to sales at the right time.
Read the rest of the white paper Blind Date to White Wedding: Best Practices for Lead Nurturing.
With a caveat that 'married' B2B organisations keep on dating, entering into engagements, ... A sense of betrayal from longstanding customers is sometimes justified.
Posted by: Hans | December 11, 2007 at 12:56 PM
Interesting analogy. Moving a potential customer through the lead nurturing process is indeed very similar to moving a potential partner through the dating stages. Fortunately, for lead nurturing anyway, we have technology to do a major portion of our thinking for us. With CRM's, power dialers, email campaigns, and other scheduled and automated prospecting tools available at a reasonable price, we are able to program the process we will use to "date" our lead at the click of a button. Now if us tech-sales guys only had a program to tell us how and when to actually date women!
Posted by: Unsung Zero | December 17, 2007 at 08:44 AM
Hi Kelly! Excellent post. May I please add a couple of observations.
In my 22 years of advising and training about B2B customer acqusition, I find that some companies have the will to "date" but not the ability. Companies like yours and mine can help.
However, other companies have the ability but lack the will. That is, their marketers behave like their sales people, focusing on here-and-now lead gen without due attention to nurturing for the long run. Again we can help, with the proviso that they first differentiate the functions so success can be possible.
Michael A. Brown
Business To Business By Phone
www.michaelabrown.net
Posted by: Michael A Brown | April 07, 2008 at 10:09 AM
To me, dating and getting to know someone is highly related to timing... you want a nice flowering of a relationship, rather than distance or too much too soon.
Posted by: Nicole | June 27, 2008 at 07:49 AM