(sales x marketing) to the power of technology = extraordinary results

Does your lead nurturing system listen?

I’ve mentioned before how today’s long sales cycle has changed from a time when just demonstrating your qualifications and product benefits could often close a sale. Nowadays successful sales often come from learning more about your prospects than they know about you.

Listening needs to hold an important place in your marketing and sales organizations’ practices. I’ve seen organizations try to put a lead nurturing system in place and fail because they either don’t have the ability to listen and respond to the information that comes in or they have that ability but don’t use it nearly often enough. (Generally, however, it’s the first: a “lead nurturing” system that doesn’t listen.)

How do you know if your system supports listening? There are two major areas to look at. The first is always how well your technology is supporting your sales and marketing teams to listen. For the foreseeable future, a human being will always listen better than a computer. Is a sales opportunity triggered in your system when a lead clicks through an email and visits other pages on your site? (Do you know whether they did? Does a live person get that information?) Or if they took the time to watch a demo? Are they flagged if their title is at the executive level? There are patterns that can be watched for, and activity that can be captured that makes it easier to create meaningful conversations with that lead.

If you are interested in nurturing your leads, the tools must go beyond just sending an email and tracking opens and click-throughs. The second place to look is for the listening built into your technology. Do your lead records grow as you gain more information from a prospect? And, are you prepared to react accordingly – for example, automatically sending them information relevant to a web page they’ve visited 10 times? Is it easy for a sales rep to tailor a value proposition to a particular prospect’s interests?

These days, great sales & marketing is as much about how you listen as it is about what you say.

So you want to be a Thought Leader...

Welcome to 2008!

In the new world of marketing and sales, lead nurturing requires that instead of talking about your products and then more about your products, you actually need to talk about the issues and opportunities facing your customers and prospects, and help them think about how to address those issues and/or opportunities.  You no longer lead with your product -- because it just doesn't work from a lead nurturing perspective.  You've got to gain trust, and you've got to get the attention of your customers and prospects and their respect; you have to begin by listening to their issues just to get the opportunity to discuss and sell them your wares.

In short, the new world requires a degree of thought leadership.  I googled "thought leadership" -- and got a bunch of responses about the subject.

Wikipedia has this to say:
"Thought leader is a buzzword or article of jargon used to describe a futurist or person who is recognized among their peers and mentors for innovative ideas..."

I found a pretty great blog article on the subject (published in 2004, and still very relevant in 2008), which says:

"What’s a thought leader?
A thought leader is a recognized leader in one’s field. What differentiates a thought leader from any other knowledgeable company, is the recognition from the outside world that the company deeply understands its business, the needs of its customers, and the broader marketplace in which it operates.

Trust is built on reputation and reputation is generally NOT built on advertising. It is built on what others say about you. Become a thought leader in your field and it won’t matter as much how big you are. Companies will look to you for insight and vision. Journalists will quote you, analysts will call you, websites will link to you."

And then it goes on to say how you could become a thought leader... all great ideas -- but it's item #5, "Use your Website" that got my attention.

For many companies embarking on a lead nurturing initiative, the ability to use their website for articles, etc that would help a lead nurturing campaign is mostly impossible.  Why?  because it takes practically an act of God to get something published to the site in a reasonable time frame.  Many large companies' websites require a minimum of 2 weeks to get anything posted or updated on the site.  This makes it impossible to run an effective lead nurturing campaign, where articles, thinking, whitepapers, eBooks, etc are published and made available within a quick timeframe  -- ALL of which you want to have optimized by the search engines.

Given the lead nurturing imperative -- a new imperative goes hand-in-hand -- the ability to easily publish and manage a thought leadership/lead nurturing microsite (and landing pages) that marketing can create, manage, optimize and use easily.  That way, your lead nurturing camnpaigns can leverage the articles, eBooks, white papers, etc. you write.  You need a microsite that has it's own domain name, allows you to track the effectiveness of the content you make available, and can also point to the larger corporate marketing site. 

Otherwise, the already slim marketing resources that are charged with increasing revenues, sending truly qualified leads to sales, or gaining market share, have their hands tied by corporate bureaucracy -- something that will cost some market leaders their leadership position.

To read the blog post on becoming a thought leader, click here.