Close the Loop: How to Build an Effective Lead-Nurturing Process Chris Koch What do you do with the people who aren’t ready to buy today? You win them over with patience, pacing, and relevance. Services marketing expert Paul Dunay has developed a process for retaining the people who aren’t hot sales leads and nurturing them until they heat up. ITSMA: Paul, how do you define a lead at BearingPoint? Dunay: Here, five things define a lead:
We have had a conversation with the person The conversation is around a topic area that we can deliver on A need has been identified in the topic area we discussed A budget has been allocated A timeframe has been set
I can't deliver all five of those things to sales, but I can certainly deliver the first three with our lead-nurturing program. ITSMA: Explain your process for doing that. Dunay: Let’s say I have a person who downloaded something and he is in banking and security. I have a publishing calendar that’s going to tell me that we need to communicate with a very specific cadence—say, every two to three weeks—in order to nurture this person. The cadence has to happen at a pace that’s okay for the client and the content has to be relevant. That doesn’t mean the content needs to be completely personalized. You can put the client in certain groups. So, if this person is in the banking group and the security group, we are going to send any new pieces of thought leadership, case studies, podcasts, videos, etc. in those particular areas. ITSMA: How do you segment people so that the content is relevant but you aren’t running out of resources trying to serve too many different segments? Dunay: At first we went about segmenting in a very, very granular sense. You read books on marketing strategy and they talk about how you shouldn’t put people in big, broad buckets. But at the end of the day, we end up having to do that because your segments have to be in tune with what the organization can actually produce from a content perspective. So, for example, if security isn't one of your main thrusts—if you can’t produce something thoughtful about it every three or four weeks from within your
organization—then it’s probably too narrow and you need to combine it with something else, like risk management. I look at it like a buffet table. When you go to the buffet, you have a little soup, you have some turkey, you have some chicken, you have some steak, and maybe you have a little ham. But then you come back and have seconds on the steak. So your true need eventually emerges. For example, I can show you several profiles where someone exhibits a passing interest in technology, risk, security, banking, and compliance. But at the end of the day, he is a tech geek because he keeps coming back for more technologyoriented materials. Maybe he is weighing in on some specific technology projects and he wants to be better educated around that. Your true need emerges over time. ITSMA: It sounds like continuity is key. Dunay: Exactly. Continuity and sustainability. You have to be able to fulfill on this. Otherwise, if it’s a one-hit wonder, then you need to move on or combine the lead into another related track and try to keep him that way. So let’s say you closed a line of business. You are not doing airline reservation systems anymore, but you are doing customer-centricity kinds of stuff. You can try putting him in there and see how that works out. Of course, we check back with them as far as updating their preferences for content. We try to do it every six months. Once a quarter might be a little too much, but you have to do it at least once a year. Most of the time we see that people take more, not less, than what they are currently opted in for. But while consistency is important, you have to be aware of the idiosyncrasies in people’s lives. For example, just before summer begins, we will put together a “best of” package to send out before people start checking out. That’s so we are not pestering people every three weeks or four weeks with content, and it’s also because we slow down, too; we don’t have as many events going, we don’t have as much thought leadership flowing out.