 B2B Marketing: Why Lead Nurturing Requires Agility and a Diverse Contact StrategyToday’s B2B marketer wants more than high-volume, “top of funnel” leads. They are seeking lead scores, project plans, purchase timeframes and further insight to advance leads inside the funnel.
By: Qualifa Accepted wisdom suggests that companies can deploy a marketing automation system, to build an email campaign with content assets targeted at buyers and their stage in the purchase cycle, in the hope to deliver nurtured, sales-ready leads. But given that much of B2B lead generation revolves around high-tech products and services, it’s clear that this thought process is over-simplified. Complex IT projects integrate technology from multiple vendors, require a variety of technical skillsets, and, often support varying IT architectures – including cloud and on-site equipment. To correctly evaluate lead nurturing’s potential, it’s also important to understand how nurturing addresses key stages in the buying cycle, and which channels are optimised to reach leads at each stage: Early stage – also known as marketing-ready, these leads have some level of awareness of a product or service Optimal channels: email marketing, web page discovered organically, social media Mid-stage – individuals who are BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe) qualified. Optimal channels: email marketing to identify timeframe and budget authority; telemarketing for details on budget and needs. Late stage – BANT-qualified and willing to talk with a salesperson Optimal channels: direct phone call to set up an appointment / discuss next steps in collaboration opportunity, or email if contact has already been established. It’s entirely possible that a single marketing channel (email, telemarketing, website, etc.) could be leveraged to advance a lead from early stage to late stage and, thus ultimately result in a transaction. Still, we believe it’s not at all common for a lead to follow a straight path down the funnel. In an ideal scenario, telemarketing is used in addition to email marketing by placing phone calls at key stages of the nurturing process to capitalise on the best of human contact, in order to advance a lead closer to sales ready status, or to full sales-ready status. For a more detailed look at how we think email and telemarketing work together in a lead-nurturing scenario, please download our White Paper (http://qualifa.co.uk/ Written by James Burton, CEO & Founder of Qualifa — For all Press Enquiries, please contact Becky Rowland via email becky.rowland@ End
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