David Gearhart Analyzes Marketo's Thoughts on Lead Nurturing

I am a huge fan of Marketo's products and services, and I get even more excited about the blog posts.  This post by Marketo is worth posting again to get more people to read their wisdom.....

Your demand generation programs are running, bringing lead information into your SFA system or other database. What do you do next? Send the raw leads directly to your sales team to qualify?

Isn't this like throwing out the baby with the bath water?
Instead of immediately handing leads to sales, marketing should make it a practice to nurture the leads, setting up a program of activities that provide information on topics of interest to your target and that focus on the value of your solution. Sending and tracking the response of successive lead nurturing activities also lets the lead self-qualify. You can assume that the more information requested, the stronger the lead.

Entire Post from Jon Miller's Marketo Blog: http://blog.marketo.com/blog/lead_nurturing/index.html

The post continues to outline the different types of nurturing programs.  At SugarCRM, we use several types of nurturing programs, and we have an excellent VP Marketing, Tara Spalding, who really works hard to pull people through the sales cycle via nurturing.  I will run through Marketo's nurturing examples and quickly highlight the value of each nurturing example.

Emails – Email campaigns are an excellent way to nurture your buyers.  Jon Miller once did a speech back at Epiphany where he discussed how absurd it would be to call up a group of women and tell them that they were analyzed based on their propensity to marry and then propose to each woman.  Crazy!  Of course, we all take for granted the concept of dating and relationship building in the human world, so the concept of building a relationship via marketing communication and email in this example is no different.  After receiving several different emails with each one building on the prior email, buyers feel that they have developed a relationship with the vendor.  At this point, the buyers are not ready to "buy", but they do feel that they have entered into a relationship and will be open to listening to further nurturing highlighted below.   

Newsletters & Blogs – Marketo highlights newsletters and blogs.  I think blogs are helpful for SEO, but I am not sure how much nurturing they provide to the vendor lead process.  However, I think that newsletters are very valuable.  Software vendors can continue to nurture via email and direct mail newsletters than contain links to online demos, webinars, and trial downloads.  Newsletters are like a monthly table of contents or site map for nurturing. 

Webinars – I think Webinars are very helpful for selling products and services that are generally understood by the buying community.  However, when Jon Miller and I worked at Epiphany, we tried to educate the market on a product called the Interaction Adviser.  It was a product that utilized real-time decision via Bayesian classification to determine the most appropriate offer.  Most people were familiar with real-time offers based on using Amazon, but they didn't truly understand how the collaborative filtering used by Amazon was basic product pairing compared to true real-time self learning engines.  In any event, the webinars were not very effective in educating the market as the buyers didn't understand enough to register for them in the first place.  Conversely, with products like SFA and Call Centers, the buying community is very aware of the general concepts and capabilities and really wants to understand the unique differentiators of "your" solution.  When selling more commoditized products, webinars are a critical piece to the lead nurturing puzzle.  In fact, at high volume SFA vendors like Salesforce.com and SugarCRM, it is safe to say that a substantial amount of the overall sales demo's are delivered via online demos and webinars without the involvement of an actual sales rep or sales engineer.  Now, that is lead nurturing at its best.

Calls – The Marketo list includes calls which is something near and dear to my heart this week as I am performing follow-up calls on leads received.  The most effective lead follow-up will always be a follow-up call, but as email becomes more accepted, I am seeing higher response rates with email on a daily basis.  However, I find the most effective call program to involve a phone call (inevitably a voice mail message) accompanied by a follow-up email.  I always send a short follow-up email summarizing my voice mail as many people don't take down phone numbers and names when they listen and delete voice mail messages.  If I had to guess, I would say that phone/voice mail + email follow-up yields a 50% increase in response rates.  Now, this increase response rate often equates to someone returning your call or email with a "not interested" message.  However, anyone doing prospecting and lead generation will tell you that any response is positive and appreciated.

Custom Landing Pages – I don't have anything to add to the custom landing page overview, so please refer to Marketo's answer.

In summary, the post by Marketo lists all the key areas of lead nurturing.  There are a also few other programs such as white papers and analyst reports which can further nurture the buyers.  All in all, I agree with the post and can speak from experience that lead nurturing is the key to effectively moving buyers through the sales process and engaging sales teams when the buyers are ready to purchase.   

Isn't this like throwing out the baby with the bath water?
Instead of immediately handing leads to sales, marketing should make it a practice to nurture the leads, setting up a program of activities that provide information on topics of interest to your target and that focus on the value of your solution. Sending and tracking the response of successive lead nurturing activities also lets the lead self-qualify. You can assume that the more information requested, the stronger the lead.

Entire Post from Jon Miller's Marketo Blog: http://blog.marketo.com/blog/lead_nurturing/index.html

The post continues to outline the different types of nurturing programs.  At SugarCRM, we use several types of nurturing programs, and we have an excellent VP Marketing, Tara Spalding, who really works hard to pull people through the sales cycle via nurturing.  I will run through Marketo's nurturing examples and quickly highlight the value of each nurturing example.

Emails – Email campaigns are an excellent way to nurture your buyers.  Jon Miller once did a speech back at Epiphany where he discussed how absurd it would be to call up a group of women and tell them that they were analyzed based on their propensity to marry and then propose to each woman.  Crazy!  Of course, we all take for granted the concept of dating and relationship building in the human world, so the concept of building a relationship via marketing communication and email in this example is no different.  After receiving several different emails with each one building on the prior email, buyers feel that they have developed a relationship with the vendor.  At this point, the buyers are not ready to "buy", but they do feel that they have entered into a relationship and will be open to listening to further nurturing highlighted below.   

Newsletters & Blogs – Marketo highlights newsletters and blogs.  I think blogs are helpful for SEO, but I am not sure how much nurturing they provide to the vendor lead process.  However, I think that newsletters are very valuable.  Software vendors can continue to nurture via email and direct mail newsletters than contain links to online demos, webinars, and trial downloads.  Newsletters are like a monthly table of contents or site map for nurturing. 

Webinars – I think Webinars are very helpful for selling products and services that are generally understood by the buying community.  However, when Jon Miller and I worked at Epiphany, we tried to educate the market on a product called the Interaction Adviser.  It was a product that utilized real-time decision via Bayesian classification to determine the most appropriate offer.  Most people were familiar with real-time offers based on using Amazon, but they didn't truly understand how the collaborative filtering used by Amazon was basic product pairing compared to true real-time self learning engines.  In any event, the webinars were not very effective in educating the market as the buyers didn't understand enough to register for them in the first place.  Conversely, with products like SFA and Call Centers, the buying community is very aware of the general concepts and capabilities and really wants to understand the unique differentiators of "your" solution.  When selling more commoditized products, webinars are a critical piece to the lead nurturing puzzle.  In fact, at high volume SFA vendors like Salesforce.com and SugarCRM, it is safe to say that a substantial amount of the overall sales demo's are delivered via online demos and webinars without the involvement of an actual sales rep or sales engineer.  Now, that is lead nurturing at its best.

Calls – The Marketo list includes calls which is something near and dear to my heart this week as I am performing follow-up calls on leads received.  The most effective lead follow-up will always be a follow-up call, but as email becomes more accepted, I am seeing higher response rates with email on a daily basis.  However, I find the most effective call program to involve a phone call (inevitably a voice mail message) accompanied by a follow-up email.  I always send a short follow-up email summarizing my voice mail as many people don't take down phone numbers and names when they listen and delete voice mail messages.  If I had to guess, I would say that phone/voice mail + email follow-up yields a 50% increase in response rates.  Now, this increase response rate often equates to someone returning your call or email with a "not interested" message.  However, anyone doing prospecting and lead generation will tell you that any response is positive and appreciated.

Custom Landing Pages – I don't have anything to add to the custom landing page overview, so please refer to Marketo's answer.

In summary, the post by Marketo lists all the key areas of lead nurturing.  There are a also few other programs such as white papers and analyst reports which can further nurture the buyers.  All in all, I agree with the post and can speak from experience that lead nurturing is the key to effectively moving buyers through the sales process and engaging sales teams when the buyers are ready to purchase.   

Comments

[Darin Dixon]

Thank you for the additional insight on nurturing new leads. We have been trying to get the word out as well on the need to close the gap between marketing and sales. We at InsideSales.com call this ‘Lead Response Management’. Wringing every last ounce of value out of your expensive leads and tracking a true ROI from your lead sources.

This forgotten oasis of opportunity may just be the next frontier of web marketing . It lies hidden somewhere between the Lead Generation Process and the Sales Process or right where the handoff commonly occurs between the Marketing Department and Sales. It’s the pain that everyone feels.

What do you do with leads once you generate them? It is often the cause of failure in what would otherwise be effective web marketing campaigns. The common-sense answer is easier said than done: Have your best employees respond to them quickly and consistently to qualify them into prospects.

Our research shows that the average salesperson only makes four to five attempts to contact them the first week. This means only 55% of a company’s web leads will actually get contacted.

There are solutions available that trigger callback attempts within seconds. They will continue to make twenty or more attempts at different times of the day and different days of the week to boost contact rates above 85%. Also, these solutions can automatically market to these leads and continue to generate prospects every 3-4 weeks for 2 years or more.

Speed is critical. We are finding that most leads sit somewhere between forty-eight and seventy-two hours before the salesperson actually attempts the first live contact. Much of the slowdown in routing leads is because there isn’t a pre-defined process to decide which salesperson get’s to work the lead. Many sales managers still dole out leads by hand after taking time deciding who is best suited to work each of the leads.

Bottom line: Acquire a system that immediately and systematically pushes the leads to the best qualified salespeople. A system that also allows the salespeople to immediately and frequently respond to leads and turn them into prospects. Again, this simple but overlooked approach can boost net results by 20 to 200%.

[Jon Miller]

Thanks for the nice comment, Dave.

Darin -- The point of lead nurturing is that you don't always call a lead right away, just because they watched a demo or downloaded a whitepaper. Calling buyers too early in the process wastes both the prospect's and the sales rep's time. The trick is to be able to figure out when a prospect is sales read -- and they call them right away. If the reps aren't busy calling non-ready leads, then they should be able to react to the hot ones faster!