Lead Nurturing is the latest buzz word going around the Demand Generation space today. Every Demand generation expert worth his salt is proclaiming lead nurturing as the be all and end all of your Demand Generation program. To understand what the whole fuss around this activity is, we are undertaking a survey later this month to understand Lead Nurturing, the role of Lead Scoring, the adoption of Marketing automation tools and the measures and metrics surrounding Lead Nurturing. We intend on uncovering the top challenges that tech companies face with their Lead Nurturing strategies through our survey.
As a preamble to the survey, I would like to put down my thoughts on what I understand about Lead Nurturing
When I started off as an Inside sales rep about 4 years back, my mentor at that time told me that the only way to succeed at this work was to build relationships. Over the first six months on the job, he went on to teach me how to initiate relationships, win trust, grow them and nurture them to fruition.
Typically relationships with prospects are initiated through a call, an email or a meet in person. The first contact is invariably of a very short duration and the continuity of the relationship completely depends on whether both of you are able to connect with each other in that short duration. I have seen that this is determined not only by business needs but can also happen due to shared personal interests, past acquaintances, common colleagues, etc
Winning trust is a function of genuinely being concerned of issues the prospect faces and trying all means to provide a solution (not your solution). Growing the relationship is a factor of periodically being in touch with the prospect (not only talking about your product/ service) and winning trust time and again i.e., every time the prospect faces a problem and you genuinely try to provide a solution (not your solution)
So what is lead nurturing?
Lead Nurturing is the process of doing all of this till the point of time your prospect is ready to buy what you are selling and even if he/she does not end up buying from you, you have ensured that your product/ service has been positioned to the right person in the right manner.
In a nutshell, Lead Nurturing is all about managing your relationships with your prospects in an organized manner.
I would like to know from all of you out there, what do you understand by Lead Nurturing?
Hari Raghunathan
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/salesleads
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/hariraghunathan
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