Qualifying leads isn’t about ticking boxes anymore. With the concept of SQLs gaining nuance, it’s time for a more sophisticated framework.

Your modern tech stacks collate data from multiple sources, which marketing uses to qualify leads to the next funnel stage as Sales Qualified Leads or SQLs. This qualification process is based on aggregated behavioral signals from email opens, subscriptions, responses, and chats.

But recently, sales have noticed a serious disjuncture.

Often, when SDRs approach the leads handed down by marketing, they hit a wall. These so-called SQLs don’t actually have buying intent or interest in progressing the conversation.

They were all false positives.

Imagine a lead downloads a whitepaper, opens three different emails, kicks off marketing’s score threshold, and is labeled as an SQL. When sales initiate contact, they realize the lead was merely executing competitor research or browsing casually.

This handoff was a dead end and a waste of time, eroding sales’ trust in marketing scoring models.

In the long run, this has caused observable friction between teams, inducing cross-departmental misalignment that results in low-quality leads that don’t convert.

This begs the question:

Is marketing really to blame?

The truth is that marketing’s approach is not entirely incorrect.

They are inaccurately analyzing the intent signals. It’s not about finding out that leads are engaging but about why they are.

This is known as intent context.

Most scoring models are straightforward. These traditional methods attribute specific scores to engagement signals. If whitepaper downloads are 10 points, subscribing to the newsletter is 20.

This might be a crucial step in the lead qualification process, but without context, these signals can be easily misread.

For example, an account might download your whitepaper or eBook, and signals are usually assigned a high score in traditional systems, but it is actually a competitor or researcher. There’s no buying intent.

Your SDRs end up wasting time and resources on leads that look great in the CRM but aren’t sales-ready.

A high score doesn’t equate to high buying intent, especially without context. And then comes intent, followed by sales-readiness. In simpler terms, MQLs’ qualification into SQLs requires precision.

But why?

Because sales-qualified leads aren’t just here for research or casual strolling.

What are sales-qualified leads or SQLs?

SQLs are leads who are past the stage of primary awareness or casual interest and illustrate a strong intent to purchase. They are sales-ready accounts that are ready to negotiate and talk numbers with your sales team.

At this stage, SQLs consume content that’ll help distinguish you as a potential vendor for their business challenges. So, they generally interact with case studies and pricing models to set your solutions apart from competing options.

An SQL generally demonstrates high-purchasing intent.

Sometimes, teams botch this up. Most teams use MQLs and SQLs interchangeably.

But they aren’t the same and shouldn’t be.

So, how do SQLs differ from MQLs?

The clear demarcation is the intent to buy.

MQLs are leads who are actively aware of your brand and have shown interest in knowing more. They are trying to research and gain knowledge about their own pain points while exploring other options in the market.

Their buying intent is almost null.

Meanwhile, SQLs fall on the other side. They demonstrate high buying intent. And at this stage, they are evaluating their options.

The content these two engage with is distinct. But how do you map your strategies in the first place without a complete grasp of the subject matter?

It all just leads to over-scoring and low-quality MQLs who never convert.

If the qualification process is where your leads take the blow, how will they ever progress further?

Structure a framework to accurately identify SQLs: what makes a lead sales-ready?

Qualifying framework to validate the SQL identification process

Start by asking the right questions and listening.

BANT is one of the most effective and powerful qualification frameworks out there. Developed by IBM in the 1950s, it has proved to be a treasure trove for modern marketing.

And every other framework, from MEDICC to NOTE, is a reiteration of BANT. But BANT has become obsolete in the modern landscape.

For example, take NOTE.

It poses a crucial advantage in today’s customer-first marketing landscape compared to the older models.

• N – Need: Understand the problem prospects face, i.e., what’s not working?
• O – Opportunity: What’s the upside if the problem is addressed and tackled?
• T – Team: Who’s pulling the strings for the final purchase?
• E – Effect: What would the short-term and long-term effects of integrating this solution look like?

NOTE underscores the long-term customer experience, while BANT has helped businesses efficiently close deals. It’s not enough to make a purchase; you need to assess whether the client is fit to adopt and integrate the solution into their systems.

This makes NOTE imperative for the modern buying landscape. It focuses not on the business’s need to sell but on the customer’s need for the solution.

Older qualification systems quickly push the sales process.

But NOTE acknowledges the organization’s need and timeline to ensure that SDRs gauge where the leads are in their buying journey. And whether this solution will set them up for long-term success.

If you think about it, the need for an appropriate budget is a single facet of qualification.

The newer model focuses on the nuances of decision-making, addressing its nonlinearity in B2B.

It isn’t about the obvious anymore. But truly listening to what leads are here for.

Nuanced qualification models help SDRs and marketing recognize the client’s growth potential.

And listen to understand what this purchase means to the leads.

By determining this, sales and marketing can move a lead toward being sales-ready.

Establish persona filters to segment relevant leads.

Most often, ill-fitting leads are still handed off from marketing to sales because they engaged with your brand.

This is where the disconnect begins.

Just because an account downloads the whitepaper doesn’t mean they are relevant. They might even hold purchasing intent, but are they in the market for your solutions?

This is where persona filters swoop in.

These filters, such as industry, pain points, and behavior, among others, help segment out the relevant accounts that fit your buyer persona or ICP. For example, the lack of budget may categorize an account as an MQL because they can’t afford to progress into a sales conversion.

Meanwhile, the wrong industry would establish that your solution wouldn’t help solve their pain points. This account is irrelevant to what you have to offer.

Persona filters help spotlight this demarcation.

And if the account continues to engage, they are likely doing so only for the information. They cannot move into being an SQL.

It’s not because they lack the budget, urgency, or authority, but because their wants don’t align with the industry you cater to. It serves as a qualification and an elimination process.

By focusing on leads that fit your ICP and buyer persona, SDRs expend their resources on high-intent leads with promising conversion potential.

Gauge buying intent from behavioral and third-party data.

Tech innovations have established a new channel for marketers to revamp their efforts.

It’s not about services that are marketable to a diverse section of the population. Each effort has become more niche, and the comms strategies are more targeted – the customer is at the center.

B2B buying was never linear, and it has become even more complex.

So, savvy marketers have invested heavily in leveraging behavioral data to understand their audience base, whether by studying the sequence of specific actions or even analyzing third-party data.

There would be two different scenarios here:

1. A prospect is researching queries related to your services on third-party sites – this is third-party intent data. These touchpoints are outside your jurisdiction, but they still illustrate that the prospect is in-market.
2. Another prospect from the same company is interacting with service pages across your website. And then, they proceed to download eBooks and respond to emails. These behavior sequences are direct proofs of engagement.

Both these data types help marketers pinpoint very different behaviors and also gauge the purchase intent of a lead. They facilitate marketers to move beyond guesswork and underscore buyer behavior with precision.

And when you combine third-party data with these behavioral sequences, specific patterns emerge.

The overlap is where SQLs emerge from.

Instead of relying on either internal or external signals, why not merge both for an accurate analysis?

Alone, third-party data often lacks context, and behavioral data doesn’t always signal sales-readiness. But combined, the data spotlights the relevance and timeline.

With this, SDRs get a clearer picture of what to say, to whom, and when.

CRM enrichment for confident sales qualification.

Traditional CRM systems entail basic information, such as industry, name, email, and company. By itself, this data cannot help you gauge whether a lead is sales-ready.

It requires contextual data that offers you better insight into who a lead is and what they are really in the market for. It could also be that they know the problem and are actively researching it, but aren’t confident where to look for solutions just yet.

This is where CRM enrichment can help your brand become the lead’s saving grace.

It helps transform raw lead data into actionable data by layering context to each data point. Each lead account is paired with contextual information that can’t be gauged from basic form filling or whitepaper downloads.

This additional data could actively change how you prioritize and qualify your leads.

Think:

A prospect enters your CRM through gated content. On the surface, you only know their name, email, and company. But what if CRM enrichment follows this up with – the lead is the IT director of a mid-market cybersecurity company? And your solution can perfectly integrate with tools in their existing tech stacks.

The company has growth potential and is actively looking to invest in new infrastructure.

So, they might not just be consuming your content, but could still be prospective buyers.

Moreover, CRM enrichment also works alternatively. In isolation, some data may flag an account’s engagement, but paired with context, it might not illustrate buying intent.

On the other hand, another account may be actively researching solutions in your market, but their interaction with your brand is quite limited. You can leverage this data from enrichment providers to help marketing reach out to them and nurture them forward.

CRM enrichment doesn’t add more data to an already exhausted database. It adds better data for sales to target the right leads at the right time, refining the sales qualification process.

Assess the lead source to gauge lead quality early on.

Not all leads are created equal, and neither do they come from the same source. When a lead enters your sales funnel, the channel they entered through gives the slightest clue about what’s their intention.

A lead arriving from a search for “best CRM systems” might hold far more intent than a like on a social media post. Both are at distinct stages of the buyer journey. While one is aware of the problem and is actively evaluating solutions, the other is casually browsing.

When these activities are tracked across past behavior, marketers come to see a pattern.

Leads from inbound marketing channels, such as content marketing and SEO, have higher conversion rates. They might move through the sales cycle faster or even have high customer lifetime value.

These patterns offer marketing and sales with predictive insight, improving the SQL identification process.

When paired with CRM enrichment, the collated data showcases that the leads from particular sources and channels have a higher possibility of fitting the SQL criteria. This helps marketing and sales develop a comprehensive understanding of what ‘qualified’ or ‘sales-ready’ actually means.

Overall, lead sources might not directly help with qualification. But it adds intent context behind the data available in your CRM. It enhances your qualification model and helps:

1. Prioritize high-quality leads early on.
2. Facilitate better segmentation.
3. Tailor nurturing for leads not yet ready.

Underscoring lead score gives you a head start on leads’ sales potential and helps your SDRs invest time in accounts with higher conversion possibilities.

The bottom line: The more information your teams have on a lead, the easier it becomes to qualify them as sales-qualified leads.

It’s not about closing deals per se. But elevating efficiency in a way that works best for your business.

And neither is it about segmenting SQLs and MQLs.

It’s about gaining a more strategic mindset that streamlines your efforts with the desired outcomes.

And finally, SQL qualification is also about understanding your prospective buyer.

With the advent of rapid digital transformation, the traditional definition of a sales-qualified lead has collapsed.

Today, there are more channels and touchpoints. And the concept has become more nuanced. So, the qualifying framework isn’t a lens to perceive leads as mere data points but to spotlight the nuances of the buyer journey.

A lead may be considered an SQL in the traditional sense, but it still requires passing through multiple criteria and nurturing stages before interacting with sales.

The focus isn’t just on demographic or firmographic data, though their significance remains. Behavior-based qualification has gained momentum, leading to more personalized experiences.

The buyer has come to occupy the central position in marketing and sales.

And owing to the subtle shift from forceful sales tactics to relational and consulting approaches, SQLs are no longer perceived as numbers.

They are now at a vital juncture in the customer-relationship-building process, alongside establishing marketing-sales alignment.

Propelling a much-needed shift in sales’ role: closing business deals to educating and consulting.

Your leads aren’t going to share information without something in return. Marketing is always quid pro quo. And there’s no better quo than a lead magnet.

Engaged prospects who are not ready to purchase just yet, what can move them? This concern has consistently afflicted marketers.

Between attracting a lead and finally closing a deal lies a rugged patch of land – MOFU. It’s packed with hesitance and uncertainty, the mundane nitty-gritty of every decision-making process. These may influence leads to either drop off, linger, or make a purchase.

Simply put, hesitance stands as an emotional barrier in MOFU and BOFU, potentially stemming from:

• Lack of trust in the brand
• Fear of wasting money
• Analysis paralysis
• Internal pressure to justify the investment to the stakeholders
• Doubt whether it’s the right fit for the organization

The purchase makes ample logical sense on its own. But the ambiguity and emotional risk influence buying committees to delay the final decision.

As a solution, marketers opt to create content that offers a playful nudge in the right direction – lead magnets.

The Basic Understanding of Lead Magnets

Often perceived as a freebie or bait, lead magnets are trust-building tools. They are primarily leveraged at the top of the funnel to engage and establish brand awareness in exchange for the lead’s contact information.

But its role transcends the initial steps. Lead magnets work wonders for leads even in the middle of the funnel. When crafted with the right intention, these content pieces can help qualify leads and nurture them closer to a purchasing decision.

It’s the psychological factor of reassurance imbued within the magnets that convinces a potential customer: “We understand your concern, but you aren’t wrong for considering us. Others have done it before you. Here’s how it worked out for them. And it can help you as well.”

5 Lead Magnets to Elevate Your Nurturing Strategies

Not all perform equally across all industries. Even across your ICP, each buying committee has individual preferences shaped by consumption patterns and professional backgrounds.

For the B2B audience, lead magnets are practical tools.

It should simply help justify the investments to the decision-makers and stakeholders. And grasp your target audience’s attention.

Not every lead magnet listed on the Internet is deemed crucial for businesses to succeed. But there are a few fundamental (best) must-haves for every B2B organization.

1. Webinars

Videos are gaining significance across marketing. And savvy marketers must leverage their maximum potential.

It’s the upcoming star in digital marketing, and with the market hungry for uniqueness, it will only gain momentum. For marketers, it’s one of the most interactive channels to grow their presence and also communicate with customers.

Why not utilize it in the form of a lead magnet?

Source: Forrester

Webinars as a lead magnet have a multitude of benefits to offer. In an attention-deficit economy, it’s sure to induce a ripple.

So, take this (barely) trodden path and offer curious content. It doesn’t have to be long presentations with the perfect voice-over.

You can convert blog posts or eBooks that are compelling into slides and creative visuals, using them as a springboard during your live talk. The reference could be any blog that establishes you as the subject matter expert.

And remember to add fresh insights that the blog doesn’t offer, with the recording serving as an additional resource.

The fundamental benefit: Highlight the people (humans) behind a corporate entity.

2. Templates

Sometimes, an execution requires a quick hack. It’s not always necessary to start from scratch.

This is why templates exist. These pre-designed formats are direct solutions for your audience’s needs as they require little to no modifications. And a means to save time and effort.

Using templates for, say, a Lead Generation Landing Page, marketers can save resources and focus on the next step.

Source: HubSpot

Through these templates, you’re offering your audience a channel to elevate their performance without the added effort.

Using a simple sign-up form before allowing the users to access the templates ensures that they are engaged enough to take this extra step. This might only be beneficial at the top of the funnel.

At the bottom, the sign-ups could be directed toward the newsletter rather than to collect email addresses.

Rest assured, offering templates is a sure-shot way of informing the users what you’ve in store for them.

3. Checklists

Checklists are a list of actionable bits of advice.

And they are very easy to create from already-written blog posts. Its content follows the ‘things to keep in mind’ pattern.

Taken from the main piece of content, these can be split into a significant number of steps to make the outcome more achievable.

You can also offer it in a downloadable/printable format so users can keep track as they complete a single milestone.  

Source: Forrester

Checklists are great lead magnets because they instill a sense of achievement and a positive feeling into your audience.

Think of checklists for your marketing campaigns – whether ads or conferences. You can create a checklist for a variety of them, covering the before and after as well.

Checklists are unique, concise, and easy to consume. And they offer ample, immediate value to users – download the relevant checklist and use it right away.

4. Free Tools

Numerous digital marketing businesses offer free tools that solve specific problems or make tasks more manageable. They are digital utilities that are (often) free to use.

Not only do these offer quick and tangible results, but they also provide instant gratification.

Take, for example, HubSpot’s ROI Calculator.

Every business wishes to know if its efforts are bearing fruit. Measuring the ROI is one way to justify the investment to stakeholders.

But most businesses aren’t sure where to begin. And measuring ROI follows a basic framework – starting with the right metrics that must be tracked. Amid the confusion, HubSpot offers a free tool to calculate the ROI.

It’s simple. You have to fill out the form, and voila! The calculator will provide a detailed and comprehensive ROI report.

This is why free tools have gained such momentum as lead magnets. They are genuine and strategic, without the need for aggressive sales tactics that overwhelm visitors.

5. Case Studies

Two of the prerequisites of lead magnets are offering value and being digestible. Case studies fit well and are one of the most commonplace lead magnets for B2B businesses.

Their significance has remained, even as several marketing trends come and go.

Source: HubSpot

Case studies are proof of a business’s capabilities and skills. They outline the company’s success stories with clients, also iterating how the solutions can help others, too.

It helps boost credibility and trust within a brand, especially in the MOFU, where buyer hesitance is high. Most businesses offer case studies on exchanging emails, especially when buyers are in the negotiation stage with SDRs.

By offering case studies to leads, businesses are illustrating their industry expertise and also convincing them that – yes, you’re making the right decision, as have others before you.

And the best facet of using case studies as lead magnets? They never expire.

6) Bonus: eBooks

Original content isn’t always a solution. And the market is filled with content of all types, with originality a thing of the past.  

So, marketers choose a middle ground – repurpose insightful content into another format.

Imagine developing comprehensive blogs on how technology has shaped marketing and covering every aspect from A to Z.

Source: Ciente.io

Given how crucial this segment is in modern marketing, you’ve to create more content around it. But how? Convert it into the ultimate guidebook.

Start by including all the articles around technology’s influence in the marketing landscape into one asset.

Yes, you would want to change the tone, add an introduction for each chapter, and publish it as a book. It’s informative, comprehensive, and offers enormous value.

To optimize their Martech stack, your audience can also revert to the guidebook and use it as a reference.

The Role of Lead Magnets at MOFU

At MOFU, lead magnets can offer clarity, address objections, and prove credibility. However, not every lead magnet can drive the desired results.

Some prove profitable in attracting the ICP, while some collect dust. So, it depends on the right lead magnet and what you intend it to do – generate brand awareness or nurture leads.

At the MOFU stage, trust building is the priority. And the audience is finite and segmented. So, the lead magnets are more targeted and valuable – ones that can help the lead decide between dropping off or purchasing the solution.

The general ones are whitepapers, templates, case studies, price charts, and product comparisons, among others.

But one dilemma plagues modern marketing teams. With marketing asked to do more with less, i.e., prove their investment, can they take a risk?

Lead magnets might work, but they don’t guarantee success. So, as a marketer, you might have to reiterate: Is investing your time and resources into lead magnets worth it?

The truth is that lead magnets hold significant value for B2B companies.

Imagine you’re a SaaS organization that doesn’t have lead magnets at all. Now, how do you track who your website visitors are, especially ones who haven’t signed up? You cannot discern how to communicate with these prospects because you’ve no idea who they are. Additionally, there’s no way to segment which visitors engaged and which didn’t.

But beyond outlining its space amid other marketing functions, there’s another burning issue across B2B – Do lead magnets work?

The answer is subjective.

While many marketers lean towards the stance that all content should be free to consume, some argue that the use of lead magnets in B2B is practical. Both arguments make sense.

The short answer is: Irrespective of the result, experiment.

After all, in marketing, it’s not the hacks and how-tos that matter, with mountains of online content outlining what to do.

But execution is where marketers falter the most – the essence of every campaign.

To get this right, focus on the basics – the three core components every lead magnet should entail:

1. Clarification – Address the specific pain point or objections.
2. Reinforcement – Reassure and build trust through social proof.
3. Personalization – How do your solutions fit their needs?

The final content piece might align with the brand’s voice. But at the molecular level, each lead magnet must entail those mentioned above in its framework.

It’s crucial to differentiate a regular lead magnet from a good one.

The traditional content playbooks outlined lead magnets as a PDF published with a form, highlighting it’s free to download.

However, modern marketers have changed the content game to adapt to changing buyer patterns.

A regular PDF wouldn’t serve the desired purpose. Instead, a quality lead magnet is built with intention – one that is meticulously crafted, well-researched, and addresses relevant pain points. And is shareable.

With half-heartedly developed and generic information, your lead magnets would fail to do more than compel leads to download.

What Makes a Great B2B Lead Magnet?

Align lead magnets with your core offerings

Lead magnets should be an extension of your brand solutions. If you’re offering content marketing services, the lead magnets could focus on SEO strategies or how to streamline content strategy with the stages in the buyers’ journey.

Talk about their pain point

One of the avenues where marketing falls short is focusing too much on selling. That’s not technically your job, but sales. Your assets should focus on how the solutions can help businesses address specific challenges.

Easy to consume

Decision-makers don’t have a copious amount of time to waste. If they need an answer, they require it stat without any hindrance. This is one of the primary factors of B2B lead magnets – they should be easily accessible, concise, and simple to go through.

Provides value

Lead magnets’ content needs to be directed and have a focus. They aren’t merely a means to get contact information. But assets that have to move lead in a particular direction and inform them. So, it must provide practical, actionable, and informative tools to the user.

Key Traits of an Effective B2B Lead Magnet

Creating unheard-of pain points

In the rush to deliver something unique, marketers derail from the core notion. The content is relevant only when it addresses the audience’s pain points and needs, not when it focuses on what personally interests marketers.

How are your lead magnets supposed to attract an audience when it doesn’t address their specific challenges? Cover genuine business challenges.

Lengthy production time

Lead magnets, when developed and distributed regularly, would have more impact. It demands simplicity and conciseness. So, taking weeks to curate one magnet is unnecessary. Focus on delivering value consistently.

Delivering false promises

Your lead magnets are neither bait nor a teaser. Teasing and withholding value within these content pieces is an incorrect strategy. Instead, instill value at full force and establish what you have to offer.

With lead magnets sometimes being the first piece of content that leads interact with, they should showcase your capabilities. So, they should be stand-alone resources that deliver practical solutions and outline the next step.

Publishing is the final step

Lead magnets such as whitepapers and eBooks are evolving channels. So, you should also prioritize regularly updating them.

In the current landscape, buyers, businesses, and the market – are all changing rapidly. Your lead magnets should align with the market conditions and audience feedback.

In short, lead magnets are a testing medium.

Your prospective buyers take you for a spin before committing to you – they are testing your expertise. And every time it’s successful, the lead comes closer to becoming your active customer.

This is why it’s a prerequisite to choose the right lead magnet.

Lead Magnets: An Innovative Nudge for Your Businesses

These are some of the fundamental and best lead magnets that currently give marketers a strategic edge. They provide a foundation for long-term value-driven relationships and set the tone for your brand — how uniquely do you approach problem-solving?

But as the marketplace evolves and digital innovation strengthens its roots, marketing assets must also transform. It’s simple — digital experiences demand that marketers innovate.

How long will the old playbooks offer leverage? There’s little space for them amidst modern practices. And this applies to every crevice of marketing – from strategy to execution and the intricacies.

Most businesses have already begun developing AI lead magnets and personalized assessments that drive more engagement and also offer community access.

Although sophisticated, these lead magnets demand a lot of care and attention from marketing teams. But the pay-off is quite satisfying, as these assets influence user perception and drive value.

And in exchange of this perceived value, the leads will gladly share their information for access.

After all, the goal is to illustrate audience understanding and reliability. What’s better to deliver these than the right lead magnets?

Customers want to feel brands care about them, but brands are stuck in a catacomb of run-of-the-mill strategies. How can they escape this stagnancy?

Relationships are managed, not marketed.

Today, savvy marketers tightly hold on to this modern philosophy. But it wasn’t the actual state of marketing in the 1950s.

The so-called traditional marketing took a more transactional approach, driven by valueless gimmicks and promotions. Marketing was perceived as an entirely separate segment.

The customer-centric philosophy branching across the organization didn’t expand to the marketing department. This means its sole purpose was to drive sales towards its goals rather than focusing on a continuous buyer-seller relationship.

The transactional purview of marketing rampant in the 1950s doesn’t offer the whole picture. When a contact is established between marketers and customers, exchange is only one of the components.

There’s so much that goes unacknowledged here. Oversimplifying customers’ decision-making under the want/need orientation is limiting. Customers are more than mere buyers, and their purchases entail nuances that traditional marketing often misses out on.

So, modern marketing has rewritten the old playbooks.

It’s focused more on customers and delivering quality than ever before. Marketing solutions aren’t about offering a quick fix anymore, but more of what the prospective buyer wants from you.

“It is not just that once you get a customer, you want to keep him. It is more a matter of what the buyer wants.”

By warranting this in your marketing strategies, the business deal becomes a promise of a valuable and mutually beneficial relationship between both parties. Among the relational dimensions of B2B deals, capturing and retaining customers are equally crucial.

Owing to this, marketing has made a 180-degree shift. It’s gradually evolving instead of remaining a static segue into closing deals.

In this landscape, lead nurturing has become imperative.

It’s an instrument for building and retaining long-term relationships, an implication of loyalty – a key fuel of business profitability and longevity. This marketing function’s significance has sneaked up on marketers to become the driver of a better bottom line for most businesses.

However, this isn’t the only reason why a more relationship-focused approach is paramount.

Nurturing relationships with leads accommodates customer diversity and tackles their skepticism. The prospective buyer only moves towards brands that deliver, not perform a charade.

The underlying practice? – Transform customers into more active recipients of marketing campaigns, rather than passive ones. And the key component here is personalized marketing functions. This way, both parties obtain value and benefits.

But this paradigm shift isn’t as straightforward as it sounds.

Marketing is no longer a subfunction of your organization. It’s a philosophy of doing business. Before diving into how lead nurturing elevates value delivery through your campaigns, let’s spotlight the lead-nurturing challenges.

Lead-nurturing challenges

Not every marketing technique works perfectly.

Across this landscape, experimentation could lead to more harm than good, resulting in a negative reputation. This is merely one obstacle marketers face.

With marketing being so dense and dynamic, each strategy doesn’t come into fruition overnight. It requires consistency and patience.

The same applies to your lead-nurturing campaigns. Its challenges are plenty. And ignoring any major ones could result in opportunities slipping through the cracks, costing your business a great deal:

1. The right time: Timing remains at the heart of marketing. It’s the one motto – sending the right message to the right audience at the right time.

Here, timing doesn’t signify a specific round figure. Time is about knowing when to communicate with a prospect in lead-nurturing and adjacent marketing functions. It’s crucially about the timeframe – give too much and you seem desperate, whereas interacting too little makes you seem uninterested. Both sides of the coin influence customer choices.

The simple idea – find a balance. There’s no rulebook or cookie-cutter approach, but you can study your customers for everything you require to build a working timeframe. Begin with the average time it takes for a lead on TOFU to become an active customer.

No marketer is all-knowing, but we all start somewhere.

2. The right frequency: Just like the right time, there’s no singular number stating the times a lead should or can be contacted. But this metric is where marketing struggles the most – it makes or breaks a sale.

Too many emails can overwhelm your buyers, and too few can make them go cold. Where exactly is the middle ground?

It’s your marketing team that decides it.

At a decent pace, leads appreciate and welcome relevant content, especially emails. But this depends on the quality, too. Email marketing has observed a significant dip in quality, even though it’s one of the most crucial marketing channels.

Three crucial but lacking components are effort, innovation, and research. Start from there.

3. The right content: Marketing has built its ship on resonance and relevance. Prospects gravitate towards solutions and content that understands them, why personalization has come to carry enormous weight.

Content marketing is one of the most effective channels of lead generation. It’s cost-efficient and promises to deliver value.

But not all content works. Each buyer is different, and at a different stage in the sales cycle, necessitating targeted content specific to their buying stage.

However, over 71% of marketers believe that curating targeted content is one of the most demanding aspects of lead nurturing. Informative content for developing brand awareness will never deeply engage the leads in the MOFU or BOFU.

How do they navigate this?

Start from the bottom and what is accessible: customers.

To create targeted and resonating content, understanding the prospective customer is paramount. It begins with outlining the buyer persona to accurately identify their desires.

These three components are where marketers face the most dilemma. At the nucleus of every well-designed lead-nurturing strategy, time, frequency, and content take priority.

Getting this right creates a seamless roadmap to building effective, ironclad lead-nurturing strategies. This is crucial to spotlight because customer relationships are multi-dimensional, consisting of positive and negative feelings. Just as it’s possible for customers to have a love-hate relationship with a brand.

So, conventional lead-nurturing processes might not be enough.

Its underlying strategies should be revisited regularly to fit customer requirements, especially if they want a particular relationship type with you.

Lead nurturing strategies to engage leads at every touchpoint

To begin with, nurturing leads requires not merely a strategy, but a clear vision. How can you convert leads without engaging with the same old tactics? Of course, it has to answer:

• What are you trying to achieve?
• What do these strategies mean to your department?
• Do they highlight the what, how, and when?
• How effectively can your plan be translated into actions?

If not outlined meticulously, strategies can be mistranslated, and failure to implement them could land the blame on you.

So, your lead nurturing strategies should invite cross-departmental collaborations and support necessary changes, from offering a valuable competitive edge to elevated efficiency.

1. Understand your potential customers

Personalization has become a significant tool in marketing campaigns. But how to execute it, doesn’t just come out of the top of one’s head.

It requires understanding your potential customers. And this starts with segmenting them according to their website behavior and demographics. Doing so will easily highlight their particular needs and preferences.

But segmentation has to be multi-layered. Merely segmenting leads based on their demographics wouldn’t offer jack-squat. So, move ahead – establish a three-step system:

1. Demographic (larger groups)
2. Customer psychology and behavior
3. Customer need (underlying motive for their engagement)

This multi-step segmentation technique is crucial for your business because the more you segment your lists, the more distilled view you’ve of your customers. So, while direct communication is still further down in the funnel, you get an idea about what they’re looking for.

Knowing this will help you understand whether both of you fit each other’s requirements – instead of wasting time and resources on a prospect that doesn’t lead anywhere.

Moreover, highlighting different customer profiles that fit into your business model will offer a more comprehensive view of your marketing functions. And how it aligns with the broader organization.

2. Personalize your communications

In 2021, McKinsey & Company published a report stating that organizations building customer intimacy robustly witness faster revenue growth.

And this echoes true even in the current market-scape. For brands to demonstrate that they really understand their customers, they must offer a relationship that suits the latter’s needs.

Not every buyer is the same – their preferences gravely differ. So, brands cannot bundle the same techniques and offer them to every segment.

Segmentation is vital, and every marketer realizes that, but when it comes to actually applying it? Marketing falls flat. This begins a long road towards unfulfilled promises and customer frustration.

Personalization has not just become a necessary tool but the default standard of engagement. Customers don’t just desire but demand it. So, it’s all embodied in the experience you offer them because if your brand doesn’t, they move on to one that will.

To strengthen your lead nurturing, demonstrate that, as a brand, you value and prioritize the relationship, not the final transaction.

Some of the ways to ascertain this include:

1. Offering relevant and customized service recommendations
2. Tailoring marketing messages and communication
3. Timely promotions or discounts tied to key moments
4. Celebrating significant milestones
5. Sending surveys and follow-up emails after a successful purchase
6. Personally addressed emails are sent periodically to keep them engaged

When the customers feel that you know them on a personal level, the positive experiences build a positive brand reputation.

3. Develop resonating content for hyper-focused targeting

Quality content can be a tool of persuasion when done correctly.

Imagine the different kinds of books available in the world – there are hundreds of genres. But not every genre resonates with readers. Some readers are more into fiction and others into non-fiction. Even when it comes to fiction, others prefer contemporary over classics.

It’s the same with the B2B audience. Your meticulously and well-crafted content wouldn’t serve much purpose if it’s not what your prospects are looking for. At the TOFU, the prospect seeks informative content, but offering them pricing charts and e-Guides might overwhelm them. Start with content that informs them who you are and what your brand does.

While content types depend on where they are in their buyer’s journey, it’s also based on the segment’s pain points and needs.

But this requires marketers to undertake a hyper-targeting approach. Generic content, just like generic techniques, doesn’t pack any punch – it sounds like your competitors’ messages recycled and packed in a different wrapper.

Or, in other words, “copy-paste” content that offers no real value, and is just an arrangement of hollow words that happen to make sense.  

It won’t do the prospects any good. Each has different needs and challenges they want addressed. While marketing and sales can ensure the messages are targeted, the solutions should back these promises.

Your curated content has to resonate with this.

So, it’s paramount to ensure targeted and dynamic content takes precedence in your lead-nurturing strategies.

4. Leverage email marketing automation

Doing content marketing right isn’t merely about content. If it were, marketing teams would assemble sub-teams and bombard their prospects incessantly. Something has to stick, right?

But content marketing isn’t just about content. It’s really about the right message sent to the right person at the right time.

However, marketing takes this too casually. Most still believe that integrating any trending tech into existing infrastructure will work wonders. Strategizing has really taken a backseat in the age of advanced tech. But email blasts aren’t the craze anymore.

Because its cons outweigh the potential pros. Your messages might not even reach a majority of your audience – bad timing or spam folder.

Amidst this rings the significance of email marketing continues to play in lead nurturing. And when paired with automated campaigns, this has proved to be quite fruitful.

Marketing has found a solution to traditional email marketing challenges – drip campaigns. Through these, it’s easy to stay on top of prospects’ minds and churn out long-term benefits.

But done manually, this can be really time-consuming. So:

1. Automate them with the right triggers based on the prospect’s behavior and ensure it aligns with your marketing and sales CRM.
2. Set up clear campaign objectives and time frames.
3. Write pre-written personalized messages for different segments present in your CRM.
4. Set the actions triggered by the specific behaviors and demographic data.

These are just the core elements available in all email drip campaigns. To curate an effective one, you’ll have to step into your customer’s shoes.

Your campaign is really a journey – realizing this will help you build a drip campaign that aligns with your customers, and not just what you believe is right. You’re looking to nurture and cultivate the customer lifecycle, not just engage them.

5. Align marketing and sales

Marketing and sales alignment is an integral component from TOFU to BOFU. Without their synergy, opportunities can easily slip through the cracks.

It’s not just that. Processes such as lead nurturing require marketing and sales to collaborate on almost every aspect, even definitions of what they think MQLs and SQLs are.

Because tailoring messages and strategies depends on these definitions. An agreed-upon definition spotlights where the leads really are in the sales funnel, elevating marketers’ and SDRs’ understanding.

Any lingering misalignment can result in a lack of trust and both departments working more slowly.

However, if they are accurately aligned, it could afford the business particular benefits:

1. Seamless and quick execution of changes.
2. Different perspectives contribute creatively to problem-solving.
3. Elevated respect and trust between departments lead to employee retention.

In simple terms, aligning marketing and sales technically means agreement, communication, and consistent feedback loops. Rather than working in isolation and as separate entities, both teams need to realize the extent to which their efforts are intertwined.

Marketing should support sales efforts and have shared objectives. Because even if their functional nuances differ, their goal is ultimately the same – ensuring consistent revenue and growth for the business.

These lead-nurturing strategies must work in unison.

Lead nurturing has many challenges, such as not getting the timing right. However, some key aspects can help marketers navigate this quagmire and start on the right foot.  

At the end, handling leads and nurturing relationships isn’t as easy as it sounds. Its multi-dimensionality has demanded that marketing transcend from its traditional playbooks and innovate.

Maybe marketers have grown too comfortable and refuse to budge. But modern buyers have moved the needle.

They need to see the efforts from the get-go and not just be offered empty promises. To tackle this, marketers are moving deeply towards lead nurturing. With this, modern marketers hope they know what customers really want.

So, they have boiled down the priority from being focused on the ultimate transaction to building relationships that matter. And unearthed that at the heart of each customer’s need is the need for value.

B2B industries want long-term relationships, yet they fail to move their buyers to action. Impatience? Yes. And an underinvestment in the necessary tools.

“People are moved to action by how a speaker makes them feel.”

HBR, The Art of Persuasion Hasn’t Changed in 2,000 Years.

Whether one’s selling a service or putting forth their point of view, influencing others has become a business imperative. And it’s become rooted in our daily lives.

Beneath the mechanical blocks of the B2B marketing processes, marketers are talking to people – those with their ambitions and fears. So, what moves them a step ahead isn’t just logic, it’s resonance – what they feel.

Lead nurturing is a significant driver for this.

The sales cycle can be looked at as an emotional arc. At every touchpoint, brands must build familiarity and reduce friction through emotional appeal. This is why across B2B buying, every marketing and sales role involves convincing prospects to take a desired action – one that’ll push them closer to the purchase.

But the modern buyer is skeptical and ridden with hesitation. This stems from years of unmet promises and recycled messages.

It’s one of the crucial reasons personalization has become paramount. The prospective buyer needs to believe in the brand – you’ll back your words with action. And if a brand fails to do this, it loses credibility and weakens the proposal.

So, for a buyer to actually consider purchasing your solutions, you need to keep this modular framework in mind:

1. Illustrate credibility: Why should the customers trust you?
2. Deliver a logic (data and evidence): Why should your audience care about your marketing messages?
3. Leverage the art of storytelling: Move prospects through emotions.
4. Turn the intangible value into tangible benefits: How will your solutions help the brand?
5. Start with your strongest point: What does your brand do differently?

In marketing and sales, remember that less is always more. In this economy of snackable content, attention slackens almost everywhere but at the beginning. So, your teams have minimal time to grab the prospect’s attention and consequently, transform their perspective.

As much as marketing is about persuading prospects to buy, it’s also about changing their perception of your brand. Once the lead is captured, these processes follow until the final conversion.

But there’s one nurturing mistake even modern marketers continue to make: Not analyzing prospect behavior across multiple touchpoints. Most leads are tech-savvy and intelligent, so they conduct their research and study solutions across several online platforms.

Although a rampant disjuncture, savvy marketing teams are determined to learn and innovate. So, they’ve embraced one solution – lead-nurturing tools.

What are Lead Nurturing Tools?

These tools help marketers guide leads along the buyer’s journey and convert them into active buyers. While this is something lead nurturing actually tackles, software solutions focus on the intricacies.

Most often, there’s a vital lack of a lead-nurturing strategy. How does the nitty-gritty work efficiently without a strategic implementation plan?

So, lead-nurturing tools instill a framework around free-floating ideas. While the original ideas around nurturing leads are retained, the tools help marketing teams curate a strategy. There has to be an in-and-out map for building and maintaining client relationships for a long, consistent period.

What is implementation without a strategy? A failed attempt.

So, lead-nurturing software helps. They monitor leads, examine their behavior, and cultivate a relationship with leads, functioning irrespective of where the leads are in the funnel. This allows leads to move through the buying journey at their own pace, while SDRs work on trimming unnecessary steps in the sales cycle.

This only becomes successful through underlying instruments to drive marketing and sales, lead-nurturing tools, and strategies.

Top 5 Lead-Nurturing Tools for Any Business

Each business has distinct working models and objectives. Following the trend will get you nowhere, but with the right software, you can reach the stars – leads nurtured to become active customers.

But how do marketers gauge which ones are the best in the market, and do they actually work?

This depends on your brand and its requirements.

But according to us, there are 5 lead-nurturing tools that have proved their worth across the marketplace, and irrespective of your nuances, can deliver optimal results for you.

HubSpot

Pricing: Free for up to 5 users. Paid subscription begins at $15 for every user/month and is billed annually.

Source: HubSpot Blog

HubSpot’s lead-nurturing software solution has one crucial edge: cross-departmental alignment.

To an extent, sales, marketing, and customer service indeed rely on each other. And HubSpot’s tool makes it possible to streamline this practice. It allows the teams to collate customer data and curate hyper-personalized and targeted experiences.

It helps teams focus on what actually matters by automating routine tasks and saving email templates for the future. The platform entails autoresponders, offers personalized email sequences, and holds robust integration capabilities.

Through this, you can track the campaign’s effectiveness and monitor the conversion rates.

Moreover, one of HubSpot’s top features is its intuitive interface. So, it can be seamlessly adopted across sales, marketing, and customer service, simplifying customer management.

Brevo

Pricing: $9 per month.

Source: Brevo

Brevo, an email marketing and CRM solution, is adept at running and managing multichannel campaigns. It allows marketers to automate emails to deliver them to the right audience at the right time.

Teams can streamline and manage SMS, email, and transactional messaging with a single account. The organization’s platform efficiently handles automation, lead segmentation, and third-party app integration.

Brevo’s lead-nurturing platform allows 24*7 connection with prospective customers – track, automate, and schedule meetings.

The platform also facilitates seamless lead management, offering a comprehensive view into marketing and sales interactions with potential customers. This decreases the need for additional apps, allowing you to engage prospects in real-time.

Pipedrive

Pricing: $14 per user/month

Source: Pipedrive

Pipedrive’s automation platform has one objective: to help sales close more sales. It entails customizable sales pipelines and real-time insights into ongoing deals.

The platform helps marketing and sales streamline and visualize leads’ progression through the pipeline. This way, it’s easier to track leads and optimize workflows, ensuring each lead is given the appropriate priority.

Additionally, it allows SDRs to refine their nurturing strategies through its unique and intuitive reporting features – lead segmentation and activity reminders. The intelligence interface with drag-and-drop options makes organizing and updating deal status straightforward.

Different departments can sync their data through robust integration and enhance their productivity.

The best feature? Pipedrive’s app integration works across all funnel stages. For example, once the deal is won, sales can use the tool to curate an engaging email instantly and send it off as a follow-up.

Omnisend

Pricing: $16 per month

Source: Omnisend

Omnisend‘s marketing platforms are popular for their minimalistic interface. It’s built for experts and beginners alike with easy-to-use features that require no learning curve.

Its lead-nurturing platform allows marketers to create aesthetically pleasing and compelling marketing campaigns and personalize the message. The tool hosts all the required features to nurture relationships with potential clients – track engagement, timely follow-ups, advanced segmentation, and automated workflows.

Omnisend has a partner program in place that allows freelancers and marketing agencies to close more deals and enhance their retention rate. It doesn’t require much focus and enables sales to automate most of their tasks, from post-sales follow-ups to reactivation emails.

Additionally, it aids in developing email newsletters by leveraging a drag-and-drop email builder, ready-made templates, and a built-in email list cleaner feature.

Omnisend is a simple choice for lead nurturing. Its best feature? In-depth analytics with heat maps and intelligent segmentation.

EngageBay CRM

Pricing: $13.49 to $89.99 per user/month

Source: EngageBay CRM

EngageBay CRM is a comprehensive marketing, sales, and customer support software solution. It integrates email automation, lead generation, CRM, and social media engagement.

This platform allows users to acquire, nurture, and close potential clients through:

1. Automating the distribution of email newsletters
2. Maintaining client relationships through the in-built CRM system
3. Design, execute, and manage marketing campaigns
4. Comprehensive customer segmentation for hyper-focused targeting
5. Creating custom web forms and landing pages for client websites
6. Maintain contact lists and store engagement history
7. Offer visibility into the pipeline and track leads

EngageBay allows marketing and sales to manage relationships and guide them seamlessly through the pipeline – all of this through a single platform.

Necessary Features of Lead-Nurturing Tools for Informed Consideration

While there are particular trends that even marketers aren’t exempt from, investing in these tools should prove valuable for your business.

Given the significance of this step, the software you adopt has to entail features that enhance and support your strategies. Remember, not everything works or is one-size-fits-all.

1. Email Marketing Automation

For creating drip campaigns that send emails (targeted content) to leads based on where they are in the funnel. Then, depending on their engagement (response), moves them up or down a stage.

The emails are sent periodically to retain lead interest. Like, when someone subscribes to your newsletter, marketing automation tools ensure they receive a welcome email on time.

This elevates engagement with existing customers and establishes brand awareness for new visitors in the long run.

2. Lead segmentation

Segmenting your contact list based on particular factors affords a structure to your strategies. When the accounts are segregated based on their interests, preferences, pain points, demographics, etc., it’s easier to engage with them.

This simplifies the process for your marketing team – tailoring and delivering content becomes straightforward. A commonplace marketing principle is underscoring how to send the right message to the right audience at the right time.

Your ICP wants content that resonates with, not recycled messages that seem like a template.

3. Lead scoring

Assigning scores has become an efficient way to qualify leads. This process gauges their purchasing intent and spotlights the relevant ones.

However, lead scoring has become too static. Businesses adopt scoring systems that don’t fit their requirement or overall working model. If scoring is done right, it can bring several benefits to your sales teams.

If your SDRs are aware of which leads should be prioritized, they can appropriately streamline their nurturing and communication tactics. Colder leads may require more persuasion, while hot ones may need resources that push them to the final stage.

So, lead scoring facilitates more personalized interaction between your team and potential buyers.

4. Behavior tracking

The modern buyer spends the majority of their time researching potential solutions to their pain points.

Think of the B2B buying committee. You cannot factor in the engagement patterns of just one decision-maker in the group. It signifies nothing. So, with the evolving consumer behavior, it’s become necessary to track the behavior of the entire committee, especially across multiple touchpoints.

The collected data from multiple touchpoints offers a more accurate idea of the lead’s intent level. This helps develop a basis for your strategies and highlights the most effective communication channels.

5. Integration with CRM

Lead-nurturing tools don’t function in isolated environments. To gauge its maximum potential, the software is integrated with CRM systems.

Lead-nurturing tools that allow seamless integration also facilitate more space for your business’s expansion. It works in synergy with existing infrastructure (not replacing it), improving lead management.

So, before executing the tool, ensure it has agile integration capabilities and can work in synergy with existing marketing and sales platforms. If correctly done, it can streamline and magnify lead data to better align marketing and sales.

6. Campaign performance

An effective lead-nurturing tool should offer a comprehensive set of functions around leads.

There are multiple channels and leads with different intent levels – how will you know what works and what doesn’t? With campaign management features in your lead-nurturing software, you can outline this.

Lead-nurturing tools offer a comprehensive view of your campaigns, helping you monitor and track them.

The nurtured leads must move through the funnel – either they drop off, move ahead, or stay stuck. This spotlights the communication strategies and channels that are actually working for you and that aren’t. The campaign’s performance analysis also affords you an answer – whether this tool is working for you. client communication. This helps businesses seamlessly convert website visitors into active buyers.

Lead Nurturing Tools Add an Edge to Your Communication Efforts

Nurturing leads is a crucial but easily ignored component of the conversion process. Most marketers who struggle with increasing their conversion rates often skip this step or don’t offer it much significance.

It’s an error that could cost them a punch.

Not gauging the full potential of lead-nurturing strategies can be detrimental to your marketing efforts. So, if you haven’t climbed aboard yet, it’s time.

Lead-nurturing tools offer the right channel to hook your potential customers and communicate your brand’s value. It’s a true marketing treasure trove, allowing you to keep the leads engaged until they are persuaded enough.

These software solutions aren’t merely a way to streamline your nurturing processes, but an instrument to deepen customer relationships. What actually matters is – a value-driven connection with buyers, keeping your pipeline hot, and brand growth consistent.

Business deals are all about relationships. And developing long-term loyal ones requires spearheaded attention and a lot of patience.

“Lead nurturing is about building authentic connections,” states Salesforce.

A marketer’s pathway to generating leads shouldn’t be hyper-focused on the transactional value. Your clients aren’t just revenue reservoirs. They are the nay-sayers of how your brand is perceived, influencing its reputation and marketing positioning.

It’s a two-way relationship.

While they need your solutions, you need them, too, to improve your standing.

However, the increased marketplace contention has elevated the dilemma for businesses operating within the same industry and target market: Why would they choose us?

The truth is, if the prospective clients don’t deem your brand credible and reputable, they’ll rarely look back. This is far from each business’s actual goal: to convert prospects into active customers.

But modern marketers must do things differently.

Approach the ‘conversion’ process as more than just ‘closing a deal.’ And undertaking a value-centric approach, targeting potential customers at every step of their buying journey. 

The only schism here is an innovative understanding of what exactly a “value-centric” approach is. And not just a conventional reading of the benefits you offer.

Marketing has to move beyond promoting the same services and products. This old playbook doesn’t work anymore. Instead, it should be about rethinking and engineering an agile marketing method for buyers.

The reality has reminded marketers that originality comes in waves, but being unique isn’t always about being original. In marketing, it’s about taking what exists and molding it in a way that facilitates your business to prove its value in ways different from traditional ones.

But to deliver this value and prove its worth, businesses must relinquish the presumption that clients are mere buyers.

Even marketing at large omits that customers aren’t just consumers.

In B2B, the decision-makers in a buying committee are also creators and developers, trying their best to navigate familiar business challenges.

So, marketing’s customer-first approach can only take root when it offers an end-to-end partnership. This means working ‘with’ the clients from the beginning till the end to ensure their experiences seamlessly integrate with the marketing solutions.

HBR’s assertion that “people are the new channel” can work as the underlying basis of your customer-first value-driven strategies.

This thinking underscores that your marketing team isn’t just a solution, or the customers aren’t mere numbers – both parties are extensions of each other.

This is what lead nurturing is about.

Lead nurturing means building and communicating value to prospective clients.

To offer you the general purview of how lead nurturing works:

What is lead nurturing?

Fundamentally, this marketing strategy entails offering valuable resources to leads, persuading them to advance further into the sales funnel.

First, marketers focus on capturing or grabbing leads’ interest through compelling and personalized assets. Then, the efforts are directed at deepening the relationship by addressing critical pain points and positioning your brand as the go-to solution.

During this conversation, your brand is centered as a friend and a consultant. You hear the potential buyer’s challenges and offer advice as the subject-matter experts. At the nucleus is the unique value proposition and the tangible value you can offer them.

Through the nurturing process, you’re making a promise: to be their end-to-end partner, not just a one-off deal.

And this is why the tone of communication takes much precedence. There’s much to do even before your brand moves to its sales pitch. Lead nurturing earns you the right to pitch your proposal. 

Outlining the lead-nurturing process this way makes it seem demanding. And the truth is, in the modern B2B buying landscape, it is.

Why is nurturing leads Important for conversion in the first place?

The expansion and emergence of B2B businesses have saturated and overwhelmed the client with analysis paralysis. And even when buyers end up making a deal, lackluster solutions and unmet promises have only ensued distrust. It has led to a generic hesitance when leads first enter the sales funnel.

They cannot progress down the funnel on their own. But a little guidance can help them. In this case, lead nurturing functions as a guide to those who already illustrate purchasing intent.

But, for curious onlookers, the nurturing process might be an informative session for getting to know the brand. It all boils down to active and ongoing communication across all active channels.

And, most crucially, making an impression.

It’s imperative to your brand’s success. Not everyone who enters your funnel holds purchasing intent or purchases right away. With B2B buying going digital, it’s likely the buyer found you through an online search. And even though most buyers have become self-directed and make decisions even before talking to an SDR, they need convincing to move in the right direction.

So, once the lead’s been captured, it’s time to cultivate it.

It’s likely that the lead is researching alternate options at this stage. And any small active interaction with your brand is a win. Every touchpoint gives you the opportunity to nurture that lead, and that’s how it should be.

Once the lead has entered the funnel, they shouldn’t feel ghosted, or else they get easily siphoned off by your competitors.

Lead nurturing illustrates how valuable a customer’s time is to you and that you’re with them at every step of the funnel.

The customer should believe in your brand’s capability to cater to them. Ideally, the lead-nurturing process should assure the buyer that you won’t waste their time.

If you look at the bigger picture, lead nurture is paramount to:

• Educate your buyers
• Elevate brand recognition and recall
• Develop an external relationship with your brand
• Improve conversion rates

Now that we have outlined why lead nurturing is a requisite for each business, we move on to its working model. The process sounds easy in theory, but the practical execution is where marketers miss their mark.

To navigate this, marketers must focus on the basic structure and strategic approach.

But before diving into the strategy, let’s get into the generic framework. What does the lead-nurturing process look like?

Lead nurturing process: the basic structure.

Primarily, there are the underlying factors required to kickstart your lead-nurturing efforts:

1. Segmentation

Personalization has become the heart of marketing communications. From AI to automation tools, every resource is used to curate targeted campaigns and messages.

To ascertain whether these efforts are successful, start by segmenting your customer list. It will straighten the tailoring and customization of your communication strategies. While not all customers resonate with the same idea and message, some do.

Segmentation will ensure that your marketing team isn’t blasting the same email to each potential customer. The segments with similar pain points and interests will obviously resonate with the same type of messages.

This will assist you in streamlining the marketing efforts and creating content that actually engages the audience.

2. The right content

Your ICP is diverse. And even the decision-makers within a single buying committee have distinct tastes. Not all can resonate with the same piece of content.

The first ingredient is targeted content. Find out where your leads are in their buying journey and curate content that aligns with the buyer persona. This is crucial and includes the multiple touchpoints each customer interacts with.

Imagine firing off messages that are known to every business in the vicinity. Most brands do this by taking a single generic message and reshaping it to sound different.

Certainly, you don’t wish to be one of them.

Underscore what works best for your brand, personalize, and experiment because what works for you might not work for your customer. And to make it easier to reach them, expand it through diverse marketing channels.

From podcasts to SMS, cover all bases to find the line that works for you. Uncover the cadence and frequency of messages to ascertain you don’t overwhelm the potential buyers.

And most of all, find the resonating sweet spot that intrigues your audience.

3. Unique buyer persona

How well do you know your ideal buyer? – A question that entails the building block of each marketing campaign.

Knowing what your best customer looks like is fundamental to creating these campaigns from the tiniest nub.

• Demographic details
• Common pain points
• Interests
• Preferred communication channels
• Underlying motivations

Identifying your buyer and creating a persona will help you optimize your strategy and build the process around it. Simply, you can ensure your nurturing efforts are more tailored and customized.

4. The journey

From a broader perspective, B2B sales cycles are lengthy, complex, and time-consuming. However, as a marketer hoping to improve the hand-off with sales and influence conversion, you need to narrow down your understanding.

Outline how long your business’s sales cycle is: What is the typical timeframe for a lead to move from the initial contact to the deal closing?

Every single touchpoint adds to this. Understanding the sales cycle length can help gauge when the customers actually get ready to buy, along with a brownie point: how your customers move through.

This helps study the buyer and their patterns better.

Lead nurturing remains the same across businesses. However, some details in your customer journey might influence the particularities.

5. Brand building

Your customers don’t want to communicate with or buy from an organization. They want to interact with a person. Rather than communicating with a concrete corporate entity, they want to gauge the brand’s personality.

That’s what makes the first impression – the personal brand.

This is why it’s so crucial for your business to have this front – a story and a narrative. Storytelling is vital in sales, and a story with intent can work wonders. This begins with positioning your business as a credible thought leader in the market.

But it’s crucial to showcase your knowledge and expertise to build this credibility. If your brand’s broader market perspective is positive, it’s easier for potential customers to catch up.

Here, lead nurturing becomes simple.

So, when creativity is a constant at the nucleus of the road mapping process, don’t think of it only blooming in ad campaigns or personalized messages. It should rather be a driving force, encouraging creation and reiteration in your buyer’s imagination.

Beyond these underlying factors embedded at the crux of every nurturing process, there’s a framework to it. You amalgamate all these aspects into a mix and then hope for the best.

Lead nurturing doesn’t work this way.

It’s about supporting your customers through their business challenges and delighting them. The lead-nurturing campaigns should ‘wow’ potential buyers and excite them to get in touch with you.

Without the slightest intrigue, the prospect fails to see the unique value in your solutions, becoming one with the cacophony of market noise.

Lead-nurturing best practices?

While progressing through the funnel, we understand that leads are at different stages of the purchasing journey – some have made up their minds, and some are still hesitant.

This is where lead nurturing grows into different branches, each for a different stage in the funnel:

1. In the awareness stage (Top of the funnel) :-

the lead is cold, cautious, and hesitant. So, the initial contact should offer them value that urges them to take action.

What can you do? – send emails and newsletters, publish blogs on relevant topics that address their pain points, and run targeted ads.

2. The next stage is interest (middle of the funnel):-

where the lead has undertaken substantial steps to understand who you are and what you offer. Most often, this turns out to be curiosity rather than actual purchasing intent. But now that the lead is captured, intent can be built.

What can you do? – Guide them towards downloading more services-specific content, such as e-Guides and whitepapers, or initiate a discovery call to gauge their pain points.

3. The consideration stage is paramount.

At this stage, the lead compares your solutions with the competitors’ – pricing models, tangible benefits, agility, and integration capabilities.

Once potential customers become aware of the brand’s services and agree with you, your brand becomes one of the many. So, now walk them through the nitty-gritty (features) and dive further into how they’ll solve their pain points and help drive results.

What can you do? – Offer detailed content such as demos, pricing sheets, a customized sales presentation, and relevant case studies.

4. Engaging Leads in the Evaluation Stage

Interacting with a lead in the evaluation stage signifies that they hold serious buying intent. For this, you get into the USP – brand differentiators. To further establish this, offer a sales proposal highlighting personalized solutions relevant to their business requirements and pain points.

But it doesn’t end with closing the deal. Follow-ups are necessary, even with existing customers. Closing a purchase with a first-time buyer doesn’t automatically mean trust or loyalty. It’s the second purchase from the same buyer that actually holds prominence.

It means they trust you. And this is what lead nurturing promises to achieve.  

These techniques directly impact a customer’s decision to purchase or not. This is why nurturing holds such an imperative space in the funnel. But without the right strategy, marketers lose their way to convert even the most active leads.

An efficient nurturing approach requires a synergy between innovative marketing and sales strategies. It has to be smart and move beyond the generic.

But reaching this mountain top requires taking the first step. This means underscoring some of the best lead-nurturing strategies.

The lead-nurturing strategies to earn customer loyalty.

1. Leverage multiple channels in your campaign.

In the highly digital landscape, customers can be reached through more than a single channel, whether it’s through ads, social media, or emails – each of them is paramount. The more channels, the easier it is to interact with potential buyers.

Digital transformation has made customer communication straightforward. While many nuances are involved, modern lead nurturing has to transcend generic email drip campaigns. It’s just one of the many in this digital age.

Generic emails don’t do it anymore.

It gets lost amidst the same recycled messages with no value or impact. But now, marketing automation tools can help you set up multichannel campaigns.

An effective and robust nurturing campaign includes retargeting ads, social media, email marketing, sales outreach, and tailored website content. And a framework that allows these to perform effectively and cohesively.

2. Conduct periodic and timely follow-ups.

Most businesses let the interaction soak in, but sometimes, this results in a significant gap between communications. This error can cost them a customer, but most SDRs still fail to acknowledge this.

Automated lead nurturing focuses on the quantity, but periodic follow-ups demonstrate that you care about them. They are still as valuable to you as they were beforehand. Because, as HubSpot asserts,

“The odds of converting a lead into a sales opportunity are exponentially higher when the lead is contacted immediately following a website conversion.”

Your team already has information regarding the prospect – you know what they are researching and their intent. This can help lead a really informative and in-depth call that isn’t as disconnected as cold calling.

You know the prospect’s current behavior, and a timely follow-up is one of the best ways to convert inbound leads.

3. Leverage aligned lead-scoring tactics.

Lead scoring is one of the best pathways to optimize your lead-nurturing strategies. Once aligned with the brand guidelines, the only thing left is utilizing these scores to focus on what actually matters.

Lead nurturing takes ample time – sometimes, it works, and then, it doesn’t. So, marketing and sales cannot just spend most of their time nurturing a cold lead. Here, lead scores play an integral role.

It helps segregate how much time and resources should be spent on each lead and which are relevant and must be prioritized. Not only will leveraging lead-scoring techniques simultaneously help you prioritize hot leads, but highlight the channels that work best for your nurturing processes.

4. Personalize the process.

A customer’s behavior illustrates their needs, interests, and preferences. And this matters to marketers, too. And truthfully, if the communications are tailored according to these, the engagement and conversion rates are higher.

It makes the customers feel heard and understood.

So, savvy marketers are meeting their digital buyers halfway. They use data and analytics to curate personalized and compelling strategies that hit the mark. It could include anything from customized email content based on past purchases and recommendations to the frequency of communications.

There’s another facet – dynamic content that targets buyers based on their position in the funnel, industry, or job. All of this boils down to a single aspect – experiences that feel unique to the situation and need.

The bottom line is that the customer needs to feel valued.

Marketing’s solution was to establish a relationship-driven, nurturing technique, not a transactional one. At the heart of this is engagement and communication.

There are innovative ways to carry this out, but not entirely original ones. What’s impactful is how your marketing creativity approaches lead nurturing without straying from the brand vision and motto.

Building a lasting relationship, loyalty, and trust isn’t built in the blink of an eye. It requires patience, and with the nurturing process, this is what takes the front seat – to see what works and what doesn’t.

There’s no hard and fast rule for any marketing strategy, just experimentation. The only play here is to recognize the core: customers and value.

In an intensely competitive marketplace, buyers also need assurance that their demands and challenges are pinpointed. Nurturing remains a sure-shot way to highlight less intrusive methods for showcasing that your buyers matter to you.

Lead generation doesn’t end at capturing leads but converting them into repeat buyers. And only a clear understanding of MQLs vs SQLs can spotlight how.

Buyers have chosen to become self-directed after never-ending cycles of analysis paralysis.

They are widely aware of recycled messages being reinforced through multiple channels, merely in a different tone. And they reeked of false promises.

To avoid it firsthand, doing all the work themselves was a simple choice and less of a hassle.

In return, marketing is aware of these changing patterns. So, their initial response – sending all leads from the organic interactions – turned out to be a dead end.

This realization gradually hit the marketing landscape: not every organic interaction cloaks a potential buyer with actual interest. So, another strategic framework has to take root.

While abandoning the old playbook is the primary step, marketing needs to adapt to the changing needs of the buyers and their role in it.

So, marketing’s working model has become more intent-driven than ever.

Amidst all available data, the intent to buy takes priority in segregating potential buyers and casual browsers. But intent isn’t all tangible data. It’s an amalgamation of intangible and tangible factors.

With many underlying motivations and desires driving prospects, marketers have little space for certainty.

But they can create it. With a simple addition, the addition of an umbrella.

The umbrella: a much-needed synergy between marketing and sales because –

Converting leads into active buyers is a relay race.

Turning prospects into customers includes passing the baton from marketing to sales. Marketing is the first runner, and sales is the second. See how crucial it is for each team to perform their best and pass the baton efficiently.

The marketing team focuses on engaging the prospect and instilling brand awareness – it’s all about making the initial contact. It requires a lot of patience and precision because the prospect they interact with should also fit the ICP.

There’s a significant nurturing process where the interest is generated to an extent.

For the sales team, the baton is the purchase intent. Once marketing has captured and nurtured even the tiniest interest, it’s time to pass on the baton. It’s the SDR’s responsibility to ensure this baton (the warm lead) crosses the finish line.

Handing off leads is a huge responsibility.

There’s no point in finishing the race without it – the lead is the priority.

Then, what if it slips through the fingers? Your brand loses potential clients.

This is crucially why getting marketing’s handoff to sales is paramount, and so is strategically converting an MQL into an SQL. But doing so requires getting the basics down – from underscoring what an MQL and an SQL are and their inherent differences.

What are marketing-qualified leads?

A Marketing-Qualified Lead has shown significant interest in your brand and has a higher conversion potential. These leads have interacted with your brand assets but aren’t ready to purchase yet.

So, they exist at the top of the funnel (TOFU), where the leads are captured and nurtured. Marketing teams ascertain this through curated and personalized content, targeted campaigns, and customized follow-ups.

Every little effort is directed towards moving the prospect towards the funnel. Before that, marketers underscore what their most promising leads look like.

This is discerned through specific preset behaviors and criteria that the prospect fits into. For example, traditional marketers segmented organic interactions as MQLs, but savvy modern ones have reiterated this. But today, this predefined set of criteria is more intricate:

• An ideal demographic fit
• The apt engagement level
• Past behaviors
• Lead scoring that aligns with brand objectives

And lastly, a crucial element in the modern marketing landscape – the MQLs need to illustrate purchase intent, not just engage with the brand. This has helped savvy marketers navigate market uncertainty and focus their efforts on prospects who actually want to buy from them.

The buyer behavior is so nuanced that marketers have tried their best to keep up. This is why MQLs existed in the first place – to bridge the gap between casual interest and sales-readiness. It made the marketing funnel smoother and wrinkle-free.

Marketing-qualified leads helped marketers spotlight which leads require further nurturing and are relevant for the brand.

Marketing’s gravitation towards quantity rather than quality caused the initial turbulence. When it sent MQLs further down the funnel, sales realized that most leads weren’t interested in a purchase.

The quality dipped.

And MQLs became rooted in a crucial marketing conversation: are they dead, or do they merely require reshaping?

However, the truth is that several traditional marketing tactics still rely on MQLs. They have their cons, but it’s only a matter of getting the crux right – to reiterate the very definition of MQLs, not erasing it from your strategies entirely.

Through a modified perspective, MQLs aren’t just the leads downloading your whitepapers. They must showcase interest in your offerings and be open to hearing from your marketing team.

A reliable lead generation service can help identify and qualify these prospects more effectively.

If not, they are not an MQL – this is the most basic understanding. With the ideal MQLs (who actually engage and illustrate the smallest of intent), your marketing strategies can work wonders. Quite seamlessly, personalized nurturing can take them to the next step to becoming Sales-Qualified Leads (SQLs).

What are sales-qualified leads?

An SQL is a sales-ready account illustrating significant interest in your brand and wants to talk numbers with your sales team. They’ve interacted with your brand and communicated with marketing materials such as pricing models and case studies multiple times.

An SQL isn’t just interested in the top-of-the-funnel content but also the ones that may help them consider your brand as a potential vendor. Their purchase intent is significantly high.

However, this depends on whether these leads have been carefully evaluated by marketing and deemed the right fit for sales engagement. Last year, SDRs had one crucial concern – the lack of quality leads.

Ill-fitting MQLs handed off to sales waste SDRs’ time and resources, and don’t actually end up converting. This could clog up the sales pipeline with irrelevant leads, hampering the business and brand reputation.

So, sales possess their own qualified methodology. They must:

• Fit the buyer persona
• Illustrate greater interest and a specific need
• Pass the BANT qualification framework
• Showcase purchase readiness
• And lastly, have executive buy-in

Once the account fits the ideal framework and is categorized as an SQL, SDRs focus on personalized outreach, address objections and pain points, and offer detailed information. This also includes proposals, negotiations, product demos, and offering additional pricing charts.

Nurturing isn’t the intent here, but closing the sale is. So, the SQL is vetted further, successfully converting into an active client. Hence, they are positioned in the later stages, i.e., at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU).

The end goal is building a relationship and finalizing the purchase after handling significant objections. This is what sales focuses on by leveraging data gathered by marketing in the MQL stage.

While we have underlined the fundamentals of what MQLs and SQLs are, understanding their differences is crucial, too.

Then how else will the marketing’s handoff to sales be smooth?

By gauging how MQLs and SQLs inherently differ.

Conferring from the detailed discussion on what MQLs and SQLs are points to one crucial difference: the intent to buy.

An MQL is a curious contact who has just warmed up to your brand. Meanwhile, an SQL is a committed and engaged account in the decision-making phase.

Let’s dive into some of the salient differences between MQLs and SQLs that one should remember:

Transitioning from MQL to SQL: The important metrics

Gartner’s research asserts that a mere 21% of MQLs actually convert into SQLs. It’s demanding because most self-directed buyers aren’t gravitating toward lackluster solutions anymore.

MQLs convert to SQLs through meticulous nurturing, i.e., building trust and providing value. The spectrum moves from initial (passive) interest (curiosity/engagement) to high purchasing intent.

Understanding this progression from an MQL to SQL is crucial for better allocation of resources and alignment of marketing and sales.

Even segmenting leads into these distinct classes is vital for the teams to operate efficiently. MQLs and SQLs are at different stages of the buyer’s journey – they require fundamentally different qualifying frameworks.

Whether it’s a lead scoring system or a benchmark, it’s crucial to make the right distinctions.

At the nucleus of this lies a strategic alignment between marketing and sales, significantly impacting conversion rates. This saves ample time for your sales team to direct their communications toward the right leads at the right time.

To ascertain that the transition from MQL to SQL is seamless and ends up drastically improving your sales outcomes, begin by keeping the following elements in mind:

1. Lead Behavior

Tracking the prospect’s actions is paramount to correctly differentiating between MQLs and SQLs. These behaviors should indicate a genuine interest in your brand’s offerings.

It must also offer observable metrics signifying that the lead is interacting with your website and social media channels and frequently visiting the brand’s pricing pages.

Are they discussing pricing and negotiating with your SDRs? Which pages did they visit, and in which order? How long did they spend on a single page? Are there any forms they’ve filled out? Did they sign up for your email newsletters?

Each action is necessary to understand where the leads are in the funnel and what their intentions are. If they partake in these actions actively, they turn into strong signs of a high buying intent.

2. Lead score

Lead scoring involves assigning numbers and points to a lead based on their online behavior, past purchases, and demographic elements. It includes interactions with your brand and the likelihood that they will make a purchase.

But remember, in modern marketing’s complex landscape, lead scoring isn’t just about tracking email opens or website clicks. It’s about gauging real intent. So, the scoring should be based on three crucial aspects:

• Who they are (demographic and firmographic data)
• Online behavior (email clicks, website visits, whitepaper downloads)
• Interaction with the brand (likes, clicks, comments, signups)

The total lead score crossing a preset threshold signifies the lead is ready for a sales conversation, indicating they are closer to a purchase.

3. Focusing on the BANT questions

Asking the right question is paramount. Irrespective of the department, your strategies and campaigns should be designed to qualify the relevant leads, pushing them through the sales funnel.

The budget, authority, need, and timeline will eventually define how ready your SQL is. And it’s based on these questionnaires that SDRs modify their sales pitches, which is crucial in building a meaningful relationship with the client.

It helps sales understand:

• If the client can afford the solutions
• Does the person in contact hold the authority to buy?
• The specific requirements of the organization
• Do the needs match the urgency and timeframes of both organizations?

BANT is both the oldest qualifier and the gold standard for every organization. And with every new framework being a variant of BANT, it continues to be an efficient tool for lead qualification.

4. Marketing and sales alignment

While this aspect is crucial to orchestrate the customer experience across marketing channels, it’s also significant to gauge prospect intent.

Marketing and sales cannot work in silos anymore. And it’s why marketing and sales alignment has become such a buzzword. So, marketing must also join sales in listening to the buyer – what actually matters?

The answer will only come when your teams have learned the ICPs inside-out and understand who they are selling to. So, it all boils down to listening to your buyers’ needs.

The bottom line? Lead management can streamline business outcomes. 

A significant portion, if not all, of the B2B buyer is carrying out their communications digitally.

And as market competition intensifies, brands seek a different route. They don’t wait for customers to step within their threshold anymore.

Instead, organizations have amped up their digital communications tactics in this buyer-centric age. By doing so, organizations wish to reach 90% of those who start their buying journey online.

Of course, marketing teams must choose to move beyond the obvious. And meet their prospects halfway.

Because let’s face it –

The buyer attitude has drastically transformed and now entails certain intrinsic qualities that concern marketing teams: self-awareness and cautiousness.