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.
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