Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

I recently experienced firsthand what a big turnoff it is when a vendor pounces on you even though you’re still at the very first stages of research and are in no way ready to commit.

I saw a promotional video that I loved, and immediately thought about a friend who has been looking to add a video to their Web site. So I found out who made the video and contacted them, figuring I would then give their contact info to my friend.

What I envisioned as a short phone call turned into several phone calls and emails. They have set up an account for me so that I could watch more videos, several people at the company became involved in the chain of emails, and then a sales rep was copied on one of the emails and of course immediately wanted to set up a meeting.

During this flurry of activity, which wasted almost an hour of my busy day (what can I say, I need to learn to say “no”) I basically felt as if they were getting it completely wrong. I was obviously not ready to make any purchase – I was merely inquiring on behalf of someone who doesn’t even know they exist yet. It was nice of them to set me up with an account (getting my details, of course and thus entering me into their database) – but the pouncing that followed, and especially the call with the sales rep, was a waste of time for both she and I.

Frankly, I felt so uncomfortable, I don’t think I would recommend them to my friend.

It got me thinking about the delicate balance between neglecting a lead and basically handing them off to the competition, and pouncing on them so hard when they are not ready that – again – you end up losing them.

Both are NOT good scenarios, and both can be avoided with a proper lead management system. That video company would have done much better identifying me as a cold lead, placing me into their database (as they did) and nurturing me for a while, making the sales call only when realizing from my reactions that I am ready to buy.

“Just like a good relationship between a man and a woman; when there is open communication and an honest desire to reach a common goal then your probability of success is much greater,” said Anthony DeAngelis, one of the participants in a recent LinkedIn discussion, and I couldn’t agree more.

I love the comparison between a personal relationship and sales/marketing relationship. In fact, I think B2B relationships – sales/marketing and also the relationship between businesses and prospects – are not that different than personal relationships, and the comparison is beneficial because it helps to explain, and to understand, why these relationships are so complex.

Aligning Marketing and Sales to agree on the same goal and to define that goal, then work together to achieve it, is a lot like aligning mutual expectations in a personal relationship.

Patiently nurturing leads in a long buying cycle, getting to know them better and tailoring your communication to their needs is very similar to nurturing a long-term personal relationship.

The idea is simple: in the B2B space, we’re not dealing with a single, quick sale of goods. We’re typically dealing with complex, expensive transactions that take time. It takes time for the buyer to decide to buy, and as a result the business needs to be very patient while the buyer takes their time, while remaining top of mind for the buyer. Not an easy task!

This also reflects on the Marketing/Sales relationship, because the complexity of these sales requires a lot of cooperation between Marketing and Sales and a highly knowledgeable Sales rep when the time finally comes to make the sales pitch.

The complexity of these relationships in the B2B space means that automation is very important – without automation, efficiently managing these long buying cycles is nearly impossible. The beauty of Marketing Automation systems is that they enable not just lead nurturing over long periods of time, but also a much better relationship and understanding between Sales and Marketing.

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.

She lands on your site, browses through a few pages, then leaves. She’s VP Marketing in a young startup – your ideal customer. You have her email address in your database now. But is she ready to make a buying decision? Should you ask your sales rep to contact her or would he be wasting his time?

Surveys show that in the vast majority of cases, your website visitors are not ready to make a purchase – yet. This is not to say that they will never buy from you. If they bothered to visit your site and browse for a while, they likely have a pain that your solution might be able to solve – but the buying process itself may take some time.

Life would certainly be easier if corporate buying decisions were made instantly. But the reality is, corporate buying decisions are becoming gradually more, and not less, complex. More people in the organization than ever before are now involved in each decision, and the process – which used to be passive and led by your marketing team, is now active and involved. Organizations are researching their options online, often for several months, before they are ready to buy.

Obviously, you don’t want to drop these prospects. They may not be ready to buy right now, and some of them will never buy, but the majority of them WILL make a purchase at some point (there is a pain to be solved after all) – and you want them to buy from you, not from your competitors.

So in the meantime, you nurture these leads. Lead nurturing is the process of building and maintaining a relationship with prospects that are not yet ready to buy, via timely and targeted delivery of engaging, relevant educational materials such as White Papers, eBooks, tutorials, demos and more.

Ideally, you want to nurture your leads with the content and at the rate that are appropriate to their readiness level. Segmenting prospects becomes a crucial part of lead nurturing – you send more emails to “warm” prospects who are opening your emails and clicking on your links, and you send them content that is relevant to their specific issues, as determined by their browsing patterns on your site.

Needless to say, lead nurturing is an extremely complex process. Nurturing your leads manually is so costly and time-consuming, it’s nearly impossible. This is why B2B companies are turning to Marketing Automation solutions to speed up the sales process and reduce their costs by automating all aspects of the marketing process, including lead nurturing and lead scoring.

The best part? When the prospect is sales-ready, the system emails a real-time lead alert to your sales rep, enabling him to contact the prospect immediately, with the confidence that can only come from knowing that the person is interested and is ready to buy.