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Do Your Prospects Recognize You? If you were asked to rank customer equity and attachment, how would you do? More importantly, would your customers agree? As a benchmark, consider that Marketing Sherpa’s Business Technology Benchmark Guide 2007-08, found that 80% of B2B technology customers believe they found the vendor, rather than the vendor finding them. Which means you need to be in their sphere of recognition in order to be “found.” The concept of “nurturing” has never been more imperative than it is today. Nurturing can deliver huge returns by shaping the perceptions about you held by customers, prospects; and for your company’s reputation in the marketplace, as well. Nurturing is the effort you undertake to build relationships by providing insightful, relevant information perceived as valuable by your audience, most often by helping them solve urgent problems. You’re probably thinking, no, what a minute, what about the sale? The answer is, for a complex sale, you’re nowhere near the buying decision until you’ve engaged the prospect and earned their trust. And, unless you have insights about exactly what their most urgent problems are, you’ve got to explore your opportunities, and their interest levels. Nurturing is a process. It involves putting your expertise out there and then measuring and monitoring your lead’s response and behavior to learn how to tune your communications and content to garner more of their attention. As you get to know them, you’ll be able to assess interests and deliver content and communications that extend that interest. When their interest level escalates, you’ll know and be able to easily embark on a dialogue without missing a beat. The ability to determine relevant segmentation and assess interest levels are two of the payoffs of a good nurturing strategy. Segmentation: Everyone is talking about segmentation lately. Seth Godin, in his new book, Meatball Sundae, talks about an emphasis on niches and the importance of focusing on thin slices or reachable people and foregoing any idea of mass appeal. This is why your ability to monitor and measure responses on an individual prospect level can provide intelligence critical to driving outcomes from your marketing. What nurturing is not is one-off email communications that are all over the board. Choose a focus and stay with it long enough to determine who’s actively interested, cull them from your larger database and engage them by expanding the information and expertise you share with them in that area. You can segment by industry, by problem/solution and by opportunity. Slicing thin can also include focusing on trigger events that reshuffle priorities like compliance issues or industry innovations. Active Interest: All leads are not created equally. Some will gain momentum and some will not. Nurturing also has different levels. There are different reasons leads will read your information, which makes lead scoring a bit of a challenge. Your lead database can respond for a variety of reasons: • They like free information. • They’re researching. • They’re comparing you to a competitor. • They find your expertise valuable. • They have the problem your communications address. To name a few. The nurturing process can help you sift through the leads kicking tires and create momentum for the ones who are really interested in finding a vendor to engage with to help them solve an urgent problem. You can continue to send nurturing to your general database, but to increase momentum you need to focus on the highly motivated participants to your communications. Supplementing your online communications with personal touches can help you flesh out the profiles and intelligence you’re gathering about your leads. If your leads are really interested, they’ll talk to you because they feel they’ve gotten to know you through your communications. But, make sure you have a business reason to call them. The goal is to become a trusted colleague and valuable resource for information that your prospect finds valuable. If you do get them on the phone, probe subtly about what they found valuable in the last article you know they read and then offer to send them something else they may find meaningful. Every interaction you have with your prospects and customers should add value—from their perspective. Remember, that nurturing builds relationships based on the cumulative efforts of all your touch points. As Stephen M.R. Covey says in his book The Speed of Trust, “The way we talk about things can create a shift in how we see and how we behave, as well as in how others see us.” <<Go Back |
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