Lead nurturing is a fundamental step for marketers in B2B sales lead generation. When you have well defined target audiences, you're essentially able to send the same message over and over again as new sales leads or prospects enter your sales funnel. You'll have to spend a little extra time building your nurturing campaigns on the front end, but will save countless hours once your nurturing system is up and running. Here's a few benefits of B2B lead nurturing.
Enhanced Prospect Targeting
Targeting the right B2B sales leads or prospects with the right messages is essential when nurturing those sales leads through the sales cycle. Thankfully, this is an area in which automated lead nurturing shines. Using advanced algorithms and quality scoring techniques, it can help marketing target the best prospects. Automated lead nurturing systems can pinpoint which prospects are most likely to buy your products and services, and using this information you can develop a high quality B2B sales lead with a multi-channel marketing campaign.
Shorter Marketing Efforts to Sales Cycle
Of course, automated lead nurturing can also help you to shorten your marketing efforts to entering the sales cycle. This is due largely to the fact that it helps with prospect engagement over time. If marketing knows which prospects are viewing certain types of content throughout their lifecycle, they are essentially educating themselves on your product or service; thus, resulting in a shorter marketing to sales cycle. This alone is reason enough for B2B marketers to consider an automated lead nurturing system.
Improved Customer Satisfaction
Maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction is paramount in B2B marketing and sales. Just one bad experience can influence the decisions of other sales leads or prospects. Automated lead nurturing, however, can improve customer satisfaction. If a customer requests more information about your products or services, or otherwise shows interest in your company's products or services, the system can notify you. As such, you can follow up with the sales leads in a timely manner to keep him or her satisfied.
Positive Return on Investment
Investing in automated lead nurturing system typically yields a positive return on your initial investment. According to a study conducted by Gleanster, 70% of companies surveyed reported a positive return on their lead nurturing investment after just one year. So, even if requires some initial financial investment, it will likely be returned in as little as one year.
SalesLeads Needs Similar But Different Approach
Here we mean SalesLeads not sales leads. The difference is that SalesLeads is providing you with identified projects based on your industry. In the Project Report you'll receive, it'll give you background information on the lead along with the project contact names, titles, phone and email addresses. This will need a different marketing tactic. Here's a couple of suggestions for marketers:
Choice:
1. You can pass the B2B sales lead directly to sales and take the win...or
2. You can call the B2B sales lead first, then pass it to the sales team.
Either way, this special grouping would be its own target audience, separate from the one's you've created. Then the marketing automation would ensure keeping in front of a active project, ensuring the sales lead that they are making the right choice in considering, deciding upon and purchasing your company's product or service.
As you can see, there are several benefits associated with automated lead nurturing, including better prospect targeting; shorter sales cycle; improved customer satisfaction; and a positive return on investment.
With that said, no “effective” automated lead nurturing system is 100% hands-off. You'll still need to perform some tasks manually, such as conducting actual follow-up calls. If you integrate these manual tasks with an automated system, however, it can prove beneficial for the reasons mentioned above.