It is easy for well-intentioned lead nurturing efforts to turn sour if not handled properly. Prospects that are irritated with your contact points will opt out of your contact list – obviously not the desired outcome of prospect marketing. How do you create a lead nurturing plan that will do what it is supposed to do, and build a long-term relationship with your prospect?

Lead Nurturing Defined

Lead nurturing is a sales technique that involves caring for the business-prospect relationship regardless of whether the prospect is ready to make a purchase. Regular, ongoing communication with a prospect that is genuinely viable will ideally lead to a lasting relationship, so when it is time to buy, they come to you. The goal of a lead nurturing effort is a sale and a loyal customer.

The Right Way to Care for Prospects

The best way to nurture your prospects is to pay attention to what their concerns are, and counter act them with valuable information. This can be in the form of phone conversations, emails, newsletters, white papers, webinars, or direct mail.

Generally speaking, prospects prefer to receive information in bite-sized chunks rather than in long, information-dense documents.

Many people have strong preferences regarding how they receive information. Depending on their technological capabilities, your contact can come via phone, voice mail, email, snail mail, events, or fax.

In Anne Holland’s Chief Marketer post “Lead Nurturing: Why Marketers Should Stop Relying on House List E-Mail” , Anne points out the drawbacks to email-exclusive lead nurturing. She gives three reasons why email is not conducive to building a relationship with your prospects:

1. Email does not always get to the right place, thanks to company filters and delivery problems.
2. Not every prospect prefers email over other forms of communication.
3. E-mail is sterile and impersonal.

For quick notes, offers, and news, e-mail is a great medium. For building a warm, lasting relationship, you must engage other senses. The sound of a human voice, the touch of a human hand, a direct eye-to-eye glance … these are all more profoundly engaging than a visual message in an already crowded in-box…

For the human voice, consider investing in more business radio PR, podcasting, and trade show speeches. For the sense of touch, start sending physical mail again. That’s right — instead of white-paper PDFs and e-mail newsletters, send snail-mail printed pieces to top prospects. For eye-to-eye encounters, change your trade show and road show focus from lead generation to lead nurturing. For example, instead of a bigger booth, invest in an intimate “best prospects only” show brunch or dinner party. (And don’t rely on e-mail alone to invite people!)

Answer A Question Each Time You Make Contact

Put yourself in their shoes. Prospects have questions - from “who is this?” to “why me?” so your nurturing efforts should answer at least one of these questions every time you contact them:

1. Is it a good value and why?
   
2. Does the company have a good reputation?
3. Is this product or service what I really need to make my life better/easier?
4. Is this company the best, or are the competitors a higher quality?
5. Do I even need this? (Weren’t things going well before?)
6. In what ways will this help me?

The #1 Lead Nurturing Error Committed by Even the Most Experienced Marketers

Lead nurturing is not about constantly “checking in” with prospective customers to find out if they want to buy from you yet.

True Story - I recently heard a story about a busy training department in a large Ivy League university. On occasion, the department would purchase management curriculum. They regularly received more than 20 calls per week from training curriculum companies that were “checking in.” It became so irritating to the training manager that she began avoiding the companies that had been harassing the department. When it came time to make a purchase, she chose a company she had never heard of before because she feared that the “lead nurturing” from the other companies would only get worse after the purchase.

This reaction to overzealous salespeople is common. Only a handful of the dozens of companies that were calling the department ever asked how she preferred to receive information about their company. They never built a relationship. Even if they answered the “six essential questions”, their frustrating tactics shut off two-way communication with the prospect before it even started.

How to Get Started on the Right Foot

Follow these tips to build lasting relationships with your prospects:

• Let the prospect tell you how to communicate with them. Ask how you can keep them informed about your business – what communication method is most convenient for them?
• Limit the number of times you contact the prospect.
• Make sure you are working with the right person
• As an organization, develop a plan for lead nurturing. Include what communication tools will be used, what content will be included, and how many times a prospect will be contacted.

Brian Carrol gives a great detailed sample of a business-to-business lead nurturing schedule in “How Lead Nurturing Improves Lead Generation ROI” as well as an example of how to start a nurturing effort.

You Might Like This Simple Method Better

Lead Nurturing is really only complicated because you are trying to do it on a large scale (and probably lead other people do it as well) while recording your actions and progress as well as managing all the other tasks you in your usual schedule. At its very heart, lead nurturing is about forming a deeper relationship - a friendship - with clients so simplify it in your mind and just make friends of your customers - and mean it. Learn about what they like and what they need for their business and for their success and help them with those things.

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