Revenue Disruption: Game-Changing Sales and Marketing Strategies to Accelerate Growth

Building Engagement and Developing Relationships with Lead Nurturing

Virtually every business will have some prospective buyers who follow a fast and direct path from the start to the finish of their buying cycle. They almost drop out of the sky, with a clearly identified need, money in their pockets, and their minds made up by the moment they first give you their contact information. For them, marketing has already done its job. These are leads that should be in a salesperson’s hands right away, and there’s no need to slow them down with over-communication. But these “fast movers” probably represent just a few percent of all the names you capture in your wide net through inbound marketing and other early-stage customer acquisition efforts.

Lead nurturing is about staying in touch with everyone else—those buyers who have opted to give you their names and contact information, but have neither made up their minds, secured a budget, nor done enough research to decide whether they’re actually in the market at all.

What lead nurturing is not about is sending out a generic e-newsletter on a semi-regular basis, randomly calling leads every few weeks to see if they’re ready to buy, blasting your entire database with new case studies, or pushing content that promotes your products and services but is irrelevant to your prospects’ interests or needs at their particular stage of buying. Instead, lead nurturing is just like building any long-term relationship—perhaps the one that started unexpectedly ...