I don’t seem to be able to attend a meeting without someone wanting to talk to me about Nurture Marketing.   Understandably as it is a critical part of ProSultative Selling.

As we often see with nascent ideas and concepts, Nurture Marketing is often known by a multitude of other terms including Drip Marketing, Push Marketing, and many more. In the past year, the discussion has reached a crescendo with vendors, and all we seem to be hearing is Nurture, Nurture, Nurture.

Of course, when you only have a hammer you only want to talk about hitting nails, and Nurture Marketing should be much more than a point product– we believe it must function as an integral element of the holistic approach brought to bear in a ProSultative Selling environment.

One thing we all agree on is the fact that Nurture Marketing is about pushing information proactively to prospects. Effective sales and marketing teams have been using this concept for many years, although the difference now is that it is finally now being automated.

In today’s businesses, Nurture Marketing as a concept must be separated into two distinct processes– Passive Touch Marketing and Active Touch Marketing.  Passive Touch Marketing can be defined as when a prospect is contacted with no expectation of agreed next steps.  While the objective is to find clear next steps, there is no explicit expectation.  Passive Touch Nurture Marketing flow is built to iteratively and proactively push information to a contact.

Unfortunately, Nurture Marketing often stops here because most companies focus too much on simplistic email marketing.  Successful Lead Nurturing must be a multi-touch approach otherwise it is merely annoying spam. Businesses must learn to create productive information conversations with prospects and use all of the channels available to build and enhance the conversation.  Email is as good a place to start as any, however it is very far from the end.

Nurturing must incorporate all contact points, email, events, sales people, Website information, direct mail, partners, advertising, integrated search– anything less is merely a stream of chatter.  You will not build a nurturing relationship if you keep saying the same thing in the same way and expecting a different result.

We recommend you see Lead Nurturing as incorporating every interaction a prospect makes with you as you work with them to educate them on the benefits of your product.  Certain prospects will be satisfied with email interactions, others will move through your nurture flow faster and more successfully by self-serving information from the Web, from attending Webinars, reading direct mail, via partners, etc.

The most efficient way to gather the information that defines the best method is to automate the information gathering as much as possible. The more information you gather, the better the quality of your decisions. The quantity of information has a network effect on your marketing investment, and the more information you gather the more trending data can be incorporated into creating the most effective nurturing strategy.  Only when you gather all of the interaction points, as with Marketbright, can you really create a full picture of the prospect, learn from the data, and convert prospects to successful and happy customers.