You look after the plant on your desk carefully so it can grow big and strong. If you forget to water and care for it, it dies. Customer relationships are similar: if you are too passive, they will not grow.
With informative and engaging content you have already turned prospects into leads. But what happens now? It is alarming: a large share of B2B leads are lost through missing follow-up. It does not have to be that way. For prospects to become satisfied customers, you have to invest some of your resources in caring for these contacts. The keyword is lead nurturing. Your plant needs water, fertiliser and sunlight; your lead needs relevant information at the right time.
Within lead management, the lead nurturing process deals with how the controlled development of leads (potential customers) should be handled.
Phase 1: from enquiry to marketing qualified lead (MQL)
- Lead: the prospect is initially interested in general information on solving a particular problem.
- Company: the company's task is to inform the prospect according to their needs. In this phase, interest in topics around the services and products has to be sparked.
Phase 2: from MQL to sales accepted lead (SAL)
- Lead: the prospect now wants to find out how their problem can be solved.
- Company: this phase is about establishing personal contact between the prospect and the sales department.
Phase 3: from SAL to sales qualified lead (SQL)
- Lead: the focus is now on the services or products that can solve the potential customer's problem. Details matter particularly here.
- Company: these details now have to be communicated to the potential customer by showing what value the company in general, and its services or products in particular, offer.
The top priority is the right content at the right time. The company has to define every step of the lead nurturing process in advance and build a dialogue with potential customers. It is essential that marketing and sales work together towards shared goals. Nurturing must also keep supplying customers who have already been won and inspire them to buy again.
Why lead nurturing matters for B2B companies
Your marketing department has won more than 1,000 leads with its new campaign. A full success! Now sales can take over and approach the new contacts. Sales, however, is only half as enthusiastic about the leads as marketing. Most are unqualified, others even unusable, so sales contacts only a fraction of the list. Marketing is annoyed with sales for simply ignoring the leads and wasting opportunities.
Slightly exaggerated as this is, it plays out exactly like this in many B2B companies: many salespeople complain about having too little information about the customer at first contact. The cause lies not only in fluctuating market dynamics but often in internal processes. Marketing and sales live side by side and work in silos. Another problem: marketing generates leads and passes them straight to sales to phone through the list.
You may wonder why that is a problem. To pick up the dating analogy from the article on B2B buyer personas and target groups again: on a first date you do not immediately ask whether the other person wants to marry you. In other words, a generated lead is far from being a sales qualified lead (SQL), let alone ready to buy. The lead may only be in the evaluation phase, researching possible solutions in general.
According to a Business2Community survey, only 3% of the market is actively buying (Turcotte, 2017). Marketing Donut also found that 63% of people currently researching a company will not buy within the next three months (Clay, 2013). Not much has changed since. Someone being interested in your company does not mean they are ready to buy.
Your company's task is now to make sure a lead thinks of you at the moment they are ready to buy. Before a buying decision goes your way, though, you have to build a connection and trust. Lead nurturing is how you do that.
The relevance of lead nurturing
With lead nurturing you start building the relationship after first contact. The art is to give the recipients of your messages relevant information at the right time and so guide them through the customer journey.
Although lead nurturing has a proven strong influence on buying readiness, in a MarketingSherpa study (n = 1,750) 65% of marketers said they do not nurture leads (MarketingSherpa, 2012). The reasons vary: lack of resources and poor or missing processes are often cited, as the Marketing Automation Report 2022 also confirms (Zumstein et al., 2022).
According to 235 B2B marketers, creating content based on buyer interests is the biggest challenge in lead nurturing (41%); for another 16% it is getting the timing right. 17% of B2B marketers also said they have problems with the sales team when it comes to following up nurtured leads (MarketingCharts, 2015).
The relevance of B2B lead nurturing can be shown with a few figures (Georgiev, 2021):
- 50% of all B2B buyers choose the vendor that responds fastest.
- With lead nurturing, companies achieve up to 50% more sales-ready leads at a third of the usual cost.
- According to Oracle, automated B2B lead nurturing can even qualify 451% more leads.
So why do only a few B2B companies establish lead nurturing consistently and successfully? Perhaps because its success is not immediately noticeable. Especially in B2B, sales cycles are usually longer than in B2C, often several months. Nurturing a lead for months only for them not to close in the end is therefore often dismissed as a waste of time. Accordingly, nurturing is often left out altogether or pursued half-heartedly. And so sales keeps phoning through whole lead lists, following the motto «more helps more»: one day someone will be seriously interested in the product and ready to buy.
The nurturing strategy
Nurturing leads by hand is still the status quo in many B2B companies. A well-thought-out process is usually missing. The lead list does receive newsletters fairly regularly, but often with generic content: embellished product presentations and praise for the «comprehensive all-round service», but rarely exactly the information that is relevant to the recipient.
The result: one click and your newsletter ends up unread in digital nirvana. Somewhat cynically, one could say: at least lead nurturing is happening. As the statistics above show, often no nurturing happens at all. And if just one customer results in the end, it was worth it, wasn't it?
It is a paradox: on the one hand, people only want to deal with leads that are ready to buy; on the other, they invest little in a sensible nurturing strategy that would help make leads ready to buy.
The components of a successful nurturing strategy
Every customer is unique, so the individuality of each one is the focus of a successful lead nurturing strategy. It is not about simply giving customers what they want but about genuinely understanding their pain points and interests. A successful lead nurturing strategy rests essentially on four components:
1. Understanding the customer journey
Knowing that the customer journey is individual is one thing; drawing the right conclusions from it is another. It is important to understand how leads interact with the company during their journey: where do they enter? Where do they leave and why? What questions do they have? What is their customer experience like?
Their behaviour and questions give you an overview of how your leads move through the customer journey, which actions they take when, and which leads are most likely to buy.
2. Marketing and sales alignment
Marketing and sales have different challenges and priorities, so in many companies they work separately. According to the Revenue Marketing Report 2021, almost half of the marketing and sales professionals surveyed say the departments are insufficiently aligned (Copper and Outfunnel, 2021). Yet close collaboration between marketing and sales is essential for successful lead management, and for lead nurturing in particular.
Sales, for example, knows exactly which questions are asked most often and why deals ultimately do not close. Sales is often close to the lead and gets first-hand information on pain points and needs. Marketing, on the other hand, knows which keywords leads use when searching for solutions, which target groups with which characteristics convert best and which content is most successful. More on this in our article on sales and marketing alignment.
3. Relevant content
High-quality content is the best way to demonstrate expertise to business customers. Relevance is the top priority. That the investment pays off was already shown by a Demand Gen Report study from 2014: 95% of B2B customers are more likely to choose the supplier who provides high-quality, relevant content throughout the buying process. The trust built through B2B content marketing can deepen business relationships and make them last longer. The research also showed that investment rose by 47% when B2B buyers had previously come into contact with content (Demand Gen Report, 2021).
4. Regularity
HubSpot's Demand Generation Marketing Survey (2017) shows that at least ten lead nurturing steps are needed for a lead to become a paying customer. Lead nurturing is therefore a longer process that requires stamina for the effort to pay off in the end.
Regularity is also needed in analysis. A lead nurturing strategy should be evaluated continuously and improved based on the data collected and the insights drawn from it.
Email marketing as the most important nurturing channel
Developments in 2021 show that B2B companies are increasingly turning to a high-quality content strategy. In lead nurturing, some clear winners emerged in 2021 when it comes to the best tools. Email marketing is the most efficient method for approaching and nurturing leads (Greene, 2021). The reason: it is relatively easy to automate and therefore saves time and money. Combined with personalisation, it can increase the conversion rate markedly. More on this in our article on email marketing for lead nurturing.
Successful B2B companies also use retargeting, content marketing and social media marketing in their lead nurturing strategy. Broad coverage of all touchpoints and channels is important to guide leads effectively through the customer journey.
But where are all the resources for nurturing leads supposed to come from? It is not only small marketing teams who ask this. In larger companies with bigger marketing departments, too, people and time are often the bottleneck for successful lead nurturing.
Automating lead nurturing
Lead nurturing is still considered one of the biggest time sinks in B2B marketing and is therefore often only tackled once many leads are already lying idle in your database. That is a pity, because it wastes enormous potential.
One of the clearly identifiable trends for improving lead nurturing in 2022 is marketing automation: software that automates marketing and sales processes. It collects and prepares customer data and, depending on a specific trigger, launches different preset processes that lead the leads to the desired goal. With marketing automation you can make B2B lead nurturing more effective without straining your resources.
The choice of marketing automation software is huge. According to the Marketing Automation Report 2022, the most popular in the DACH region include:
- HubSpot
- Marketo
- Pardot
- Mailchimp
(Zumstein et al., 2022)
Most marketing automation solutions are based on evaluating your CRM data and trigger certain actions based on specific triggers or segments. That is why you absolutely need clear processes, because automation works by rules. Done right, it brings several benefits:
- More qualified contacts and higher conversions
- Personalised marketing campaigns
- Better collaboration between marketing, sales and service on one platform
- Automatic adaptation of marketing activities to the needs and interests of the target groups
- Comprehensive nurturing of leads from the awareness stage to the loyalty stage as a customer
Speed and timing matter in lead nurturing. We all want an answer to our questions as fast as possible and do not want to wait long for a quote. The faster you respond, the more likely leads are to go through the sales process. Marketing automation helps with long waiting times. With defined workflows, such as email sequences, you can send leads a first reply in less than five minutes, leaving more time for a detailed answer.
Lead nurturing workflows
A lead nurturing workflow is a defined process you use to build the relationship with a contact. It is hyper-personalised based on your segmentation strategy. That means a lead with certain characteristics takes a certain action on your website, for example downloading a white paper on a topic. They are then added to a workflow and automatically nurtured with related content. This content can inform leads about topics connected to your services and so move them from the awareness to the decision stage. Popular workflows include:
- Welcome workflows: a lead's first conversion triggers this workflow, for example signing up for the newsletter or downloading a white paper. Welcome new contacts by giving them an overview of all your content. Such welcome workflows are a must, as they lay the foundation for the customer relationship that follows.
- Topic workflows: find out which topics your leads are interested in. Based on that, send them more content on those or related topics. Track replies and clicks cleanly, because only then can you improve the rest of the workflow.
- Asset offer workflows: these work like topic workflows but with a different intention: getting more information about a lead. If you know which content the recipient is interested in, you can send additional content offers that they can download by providing further data.
- Engagement workflows: these are meant for leads in the decision stage. You send content that positions your brand as the best solution.
- Re-engagement workflows: use these to approach cold leads again. Send content that reactivates dormant leads so you get back on their radar.
- Customer workflows: develop these to delight existing customers and collect feedback on satisfaction and more. They are also ideal for cross-selling and upselling.
The right marketing automation software is an important part of building your workflows. There are many platforms you can use. Software such as HubSpot and its workflows gives you many options to automate processes like lead nurturing to a large extent.
Process automation using HubSpot as an example
HubSpot's workflow tool offers many ways to automate your processes. It relies in particular on decision-tree logic, in which predefined triggers launch certain actions.
If you want to set up a so-called lead nurturing stream in HubSpot, you first define the starting point. This usually defines which specific segment should receive your nurturing emails. You can then send different emails depending on interactions with earlier content and plan fixed delays between them.
For example, you can define that all contacts in the list «Interested in lead nurturing» enter the nurturing stream. After five days you send them your first nurturing email and then wait another ten days before the next one. Before the second email is sent, HubSpot checks whether your lead has downloaded the lead magnet from the first email. Depending on that, you send either a reminder email pointing to the lead magnet again or an email with further information straight away.
The drawback of HubSpot nurturing streams is that they can quickly become confusing. To cover all strategically important topics along the entire customer journey for very different target groups, you have to create many emails and nurturing streams, often in several languages. Complexity rises quickly. The danger: only the person who set up the streams really understands them.
The whole construct becomes more and more error-prone. It is difficult, for example, to make sure a contact does not suddenly end up in five nurturing streams at once just because they met all the criteria. The criteria also have to be adjusted over time as new content, content offers and forms appear. So use workflows sparingly and only where they really make sense. Typical pitfalls are collected in our article on marketing automation mistakes.
