Are You Doing Enough to Nurture Your Sales Leads?

I'm familiar with a number of B2B companies that do a terrible job managing sales leads once they get them. The focus of the marketing team is almost exclusively on generating leads that can be passed on to the sales team. Generating leads is clearly a key marketing task in B2B enterprises, but if your marketing team is spending most of its time generating leads instead of managing leads, you're in trouble.

Most sales teams are expected to convert leads into sales RIGHT NOW. This month and this quarter. The sales team is probably operating with monthly and quarterly quotas that directly impact their paychecks. It is not reasonable to expect the sales team to have a long-term focus, which is what is required to nurture and develop sales leads and eventually turn them into customers. If the marketing team hands 100 leads to the sales team and only 20 of those leads are ready to buy RIGHT NOW, what happens to the other 80?

If I'm a sales guy, I want more of those "RIGHT NOW" leads. The heck with those 80 that need nurturing and time to develop. I've got my monthly quota and that mortgage payment I need to make.

It's the job of your marketing team to "own" those 80 leads that need to be nurtured. If your marketing team is not actively managing those 80 leads, you're missing a huge opportunity AND you're wasting a lot of time and money. Do you have marketing campaigns designed to nurture these 80 leads and develop them to the point where they are ready to buy RIGHT NOW? If your marketing team is not developing, testing, measuring and implementing programs designed to nurture existing leads, shame on you! If they are spending all their time generating those 100 leads, just so 80 of them can be ignored, shame on you! That's marketing insanity.  You're effectively wasting 80 cents of every dollar you're investing in lead generation activities.

In today's economic climate, when many purchase decisions are being postponed or scrutinized more carefully than ever, it is especially important to have an active and effective Nurturing Effort in place. If I've told you I'm a potential customer and you then ignore me to chase after only RIGHT NOW prospects, the odds are that you will NEVER get my business.  

Pay attention to those 80 leads now, when they're not quite ready to buy, but when they still need and want help in making their purchase decision.  Nurture them.  You'll benefit later.