Why nurturing your leads makes sense because only a small percentage of prospective buyers are ready and able to buy right away. Most need nurturing, to help leads become highly qualified prospects that are ready to buy. Marketing is the act of educating and preparing someone who qualify themselves by responding to calls to action. If a lead generation department is sending your sales team unqualified leads, this causes sales presentations to have lower closing ratios.
It is far better to receive three highly qualified appointments than fifteen who turn out to have needed nurturing before the sales appointment was set. Intelemark works on this premise of qualifying strongly to identify the lead prospects who are ready to buy, and setting up a high value appointment. By Mike Kristiansen
Why do businesses need lead nurturing?
- 73% of all B2B leads are not sales-ready. (Source: MarketingSherpa)
- Only 27% of leads are legitimate and should advance to sales. (Source: MarketingSherpa)
- 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance. (Source: MarketingSherpa)
- It takes, on average, 10 marketing-driven “touches” to progress a lead from the top of the funnel to the top line (i.e. revenue). (Source: Aberdeen Group)
- Buyers can be 90 percent of the way through the buying process before they reach out to a salesperson. This change to the buyer’s journey has made nurturing even more important. (Source: VentureBeat)
- 80% of sales are made on the 5th-12th contact. (Source: Sellingly)
These stats help demonstrate the power of lead nurturing for B2B companies. Company decision-makers are increasingly going online to research companies and to determine whether their solutions hold potential value for them. Many of them begin reaching out to companies (i.e., becoming inbound leads) before they are 100% ready to move forward with their purchasing decisions.
Excerpt from-SteamFeed: “Why Lead Nurturing Makes Sense for B2B Companies”