Bridging the Gap between Marketing and Sales with Lead Nurturing

If you've read our blog posts in the past, you know that we advocate the importance of a strategic and coordinated marketing and sales approach. Getting your sales and marketing on the same page is crucial to maximize your return on investment, and that importance is nowhere more evident than in the concept of lead nurturing.

WHAT IS LEAD NURTURING?

As an experienced business professional, you have probably heard about the concept of lead nurturing sometime in the recent past. But for clarification, allow us to begin with a definition.  Oracle, a leader in digital marketing, describes lead nurturing as:

"The process of providing highly relevant educational content that helps build brand and product preference long before your prospects are ready to buy."

In other words, it's the process of gradually moving your future customers from simple passers-by on your website into sales-qualified leads who just need a final touch from your sales team to make their buying decisions.

THE ART OF LEAD NURTURING

Lead nurturing can take on many forms, but its most common appearance is in inbound marketing. Companies using this type of marketing focus their entire strategy on creating leads. They do this by getting website visitors to sign up on a form on their website. Once the visitors sign up, they become leads in the database. It's at this point that they are ready to be nurtured.

When a website visitor becomes a lead, they often enter into a type of communication flow that allows the company to send them targeted messages, often via email, which become gradually more specific. A website visitor might have originally signed up to receive a newsletter, but as a new lead, they might receive an email telling them about an eBook or a webinar that is relevant to the newsletter topic for which they originally signed up.

Of course, signing up to receive the new content will require just a bit more information from the lead, which in turn allows the company to market even more relevant information to him. As he moves down the funnel of increasingly targeted messages, the lead will begin to move closer to a purchasing decision. By the time he's ready, he won't need much more convincing–the strategic and targeted messaging has already done the trick.

WHERE MARKETING AND SALES MERGE

As we mentioned above, lead nurturing is generally thought of as a marketing strategy. But read the last sentence of the previous paragraph again, and you'll see how it can help the sales department. An agent who only needs a quick look at a lead's database file will have a much easier time selling a product or service based on individual need, especially if that lead is already well on his way to being convinced of the product's value.

In other words, a successful lead-nurturing campaign allows the marketing department to see its efforts bear fruit through the process, while at the same time producing more sales-qualified leads.

Of course, that situation is only possible if marketing and sales work together. As beneficial as lead nurturing is and can be, a misinformed comment by the sales team–confusing or  contradicting a marketing message that the lead received earlier in the nurturing process–can lead to cognitive dissonance and prevent the agent from closing the deal. Similarly, a sales call from an agent before the lead is successfully nurtured to the point of sales readiness may lower the agent's chance of success.

If executed correctly, a coordinated lead nurturing effort can significantly help marketing, sales, and ultimately, the entire company. With lead nurturing, bridging the gap between marketing and sales becomes a smoother process and will produce more sales-qualified leads and eventually more customers.