The lead nurturing movement

Attended an interesting webinar today with the Funnelholic, Craig Rosenberg, and Tony Jaros of Sirius Decisions. If you don’t know those men, you should. Though this topic I know inside and out, I still heard some interesting insights from Tony.

Craig started with an interesting story. His grandfather needed a new car. In the past, he’d head to a showroom. But thanks to the Internet, he walked into the showroom with the cars he wanted to look at and what he was willing to pay. The salesman was dumbfounded. But that’s the world we live in today and why sales is such a tough business now.

Companies probably have more raw leads than ever, simply due to better lists and technology. But he says there is too much focus on lead generation and not enough on lead conversion.

Tony described the Demand Waterfall:

Inquiries
Marketing Qualified Leads
Sales Accepted Leads
Sales Qualified Leads
Closed/Won

Then he talked about the three kinds of lead nurturing.

Pre MQL — this is base level qualifying of incoming leads
Recycled — these are the leads that sales rejects as not ready to buy now.
Reconstituted — these are the leads that died on the vine. Dragged on and on.

There’s so much to think about here, but one thing that Sirius Decisions did that every company should do — created a flow chart. This showed a decision process step by step to illustrate how lead nurturing is done.

While lead nurturing is critical, I strongly suggest you begin by learning about your target customers. John Petralia, former Chief Marketing Officer of Iron Mountain, in a podcast with me said that learning about customer personas was the most important step you can take.

For companies looking for best practices in b2b lead generation who wish to improve the way they acquire new customers, Find New Customers is the place to go. CSO Insights says companies need to improve the way they generate leads and implement processes for business to business lead generation.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, a lead generation company, who helps businesses create lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers.