The short answer: because you want to nurture your leads, not to annoy them, to scare them away, or – equally bad – to neglect them.
We all know by now that lead nurturing is crucial for B2B marketers. Long buying cycles mean that many prospects take a long time and multiple touches to warm up to the point of being ready to buy. In the meantime, while prospects take their time making a decision and doing their research, you want to keep in touch with them, stay relevant, and make sure they remember you when it’s time to buy.
But to be successful, lead nurturing needs to be done right, and to be done right, it needs to be fine-tuned and tailored to each prospect.
Gone are the days of sending out weekly or monthly generic email blasts to all of your contacts. If you’re still doing that, you are risking getting more and more opt-outs, as B2B prospects are becoming more and more picky about the type of messages they are willing to receive.
Prospects now expect high quality, useful messages that are tailored to their exact business needs. They expect you to provide value long before they become customers and to never be too aggressive with them. The challenge for you as a marketer: If you pounce on a cold prospect, you risk losing them, but if you hold off on contacting a hot prospect, you risk losing them too!
Segmenting your prospects via marketing automation software helps you to avoid alienating prospects and losing them. It also helps you to avoid overlooking prospects that are ready to buy. By using tools such as prospect activity tracking and 3-D lead scoring, you get a real insight into your prospects and can tailor a sales plan which is focused on their needs and on their level of readiness. You are also able to automatically qualify potential leads by scoring each individual prospect based on their engagement with your company, demographic profile, and timing.
Segmenting prospects enables you to send different messages to different prospects that show different levels of readiness, and to adjust the frequency of your communication as well. The result is a lead nurturing process that truly nurtures leads rather than neglect them or scare them away. This type of fine-tuning can be done manually if you have a handful of prospects in your database, but for most companies, automated marketing tools are the only way to do lead nurturing properly.
Tags: Lead Nurturing, segmenting
February 24th, 2010 at 3:31 pm
I couldn’t agree more with the statements made. Most of the business that we are closing is a direct result of working with our prospects to meet their needs… that means when they are ready. Segmentation is a critical part of today’s smart B2B programs.
February 25th, 2010 at 11:25 am
Thank you for your comment, Peggy. “When they are ready” is key – and since each prospect behaves differently when it comes to their level of readiness, you can’t possibly group them all together and expect to get good results.