Are You Nurturing Your Leads or Just Being Annoying?

Bestselling author and sales advisor Kendra Lee shares three steps to improve your B2B lead nurturing campaigns and take your prospects from cold to sold.

 
Recently, OpenView Labs rounded up 22 of the most influential sales leaders on the Web and asked them to weigh in with their B2B sales predictions for 2013. Ultimately, that survey yielded a treasure trove of great insight from some of the most trusted minds in the B2B sales universe, including this prediction from KLA Group founder and president Kendra Lee, the author of The Sales Magnet: How to Get More Customers Without Cold Calling.

“One of the most important things companies must do in 2013 is to create lead generation campaigns that are personally tailored to, and nurture, their target segments. There are more people utilizing Internet-centric marketing vehicles than ever before. You can no longer expect to be heard above the noise without a nurturing approach that integrates digital, collaborative, and personal activities and distinguishes you with your target prospects.”

Lee officially piqued our interest, so we asked her to elaborate on her prediction. Specifically, we were curious what steps expansion-stage companies can take to establish a more effective B2B lead nurturing approach.
Ultimately, Lee came up with three things that B2B businesses must do to improve their lead nurturing campaigns:

1) Divide Your Market into Microsegments

Executing lead nurturing campaigns with a one-size-fits-all approach against a huge industry or market is not effective.
To get the most out of your nurturing efforts, you need to be able to segment your addressable market into a specific sweet spot that shares similar needs, interests, and pain points. Once you’ve done that, you can create a lead nurturing campaign that is tailored specifically to that microsegment.
Ultimately, that will multiply the effectiveness of that campaign and ensure that your B2B lead nurturing activities resonate with each buyer.

2) Tailor Your Content to Your Microsegments

You want your prospective customers to feel like everything you do was designed for them. If you’re content is too broad or vague, it won’t have the impact that you need it to, and very few people will pay attention to it.
So, once you have identified your microsegments, be sure to tailor the content you create in a way that uniquely speaks to each one.
For more details, see “How to Map Lead Nurturing Content to Each Stage in the Sales Cycle” by Corey Eridon at HubSpot

3) Don’t Over-Communicate

Lead nurturing is all about striking a balance between staying top of mind without being annoying.
If you bombard your prospects with e-mails, calls, and content, you run the risk of drowning them in noise and pushing them further away, instead of reeling them in.
Finding the rhythm that works for you and your prospects will take some work, but try not to communicate through any one channel more than once a day (and even that might be too frequent depending on your product and its buyers).

Additional Resources

Grande Guide to Lead Nurturing from Eloqua
Lead Nurturing Resources from HubSpot Academy
Best Practices in Lead Nurturing by Marketo

What are the B2B lead nurturing tactics or best practices that have worked best for you?