The big and almost free marketing initiative almost no one is doing today

What marketing initiative

• costs very little
• delivers a 20% increase in sales and
• is currently being used by less than one out of ten business to business sellers today?

It’s lead nurturing, and a study by DemandGen Report (who recently published an article from this blog) did a study in late 2008 and found that only 8% of respondents currently have an automated lead nurturing strategies and processes in place. The remaining 92% have failed to establish a process for longer term leads and are leaving money on the table but allowing prospects to leak and buy from competitors. Since companies are looking for low cost lead generation, lead nurturing is a great way to do it.

“We’ve become better at improving the percentage of prospects that are moving successfully though the pipeline and we need fewer prospects to satisfy our sales targets.” says John Watton, VP of Marketing at ShipServ. “The result is a massive 225% increase in the volume of prospects that convert to sales opportunities, a massive validation of the effectiveness of greater collaboration between marketing and sales.”

In order to achieve maximum results from lead nurturing, it needs to be combined with a lead scoring system. This ensures that only the best propects enter the lead nurturing funnel. BANT (Budget, Access to Power, Needs and Timeframe) combined with other factors lets you personalize the lead nurturing content used.

For a great write-up on this, I invite you to download this white paper from my partner, Marketo, on our lead nurturing page.