In today’s competitive B2B landscape, lead nurturing has become a critical function in ensuring marketing and sales success. Yet, many organisations struggle to turn leads into revenue, not due to a lack of leads but through a lack of understanding of the marketing and sales chasm. The inefficiencies in how they manage and communicate in their lead nurturing strategies.
A deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities in lead nurturing can assist bridge the persistent marketing and sales chasm or gap.
The Finite Nature of B2B Leads
One common misconception is that leads are infinite. Depending on the industry, companies may only have access to a few hundred viable leads annually, with some businesses operating in markets where the number is even smaller. Given this scarcity, each lead should be treated with utmost care. Unfortunately, lead mismanagement often results in cherry-picking and neglect, leading to wasted opportunities.
This scarcity emphasises the need for alignment between marketing and sales in defining what constitutes a lead. While progress has been made, significant gaps remain. The lack of a unified definition often results in leads being undervalued or mishandled, creating a direct loss of opportunities and rendering lead generation investments futile.
Miscommunication on Lead Quality
A major barrier to effective lead nurturing lies in understanding the buyer’s journey. Sales and marketing often operate with different assumptions about where a buyer stands in their decision-making process. This misalignment stems from a failure to appreciate the secretive nature of the B2B buying process. Buyers often research solutions quietly, evaluating technical specifications, fit, and scope before they are ready to engage with suppliers.
Moreover, it is crucial to distinguish between different types of lead interactions. For example, an inquiry may come from a researcher or a user within an organisation rather than a decision-maker. This can lead to misinterpretation of intent, resulting in either premature sales engagement or missed follow-up opportunities.
Understanding Buyer Roles
To navigate the complexity of the buying process, sales and marketing teams must identify and categorise key players within a buyer’s organisation:
- Decision Makers: Hold the final authority to approve purchases.
- Influencers: Provide insights and advice to shape purchasing decisions.
- Researchers: Tasked with gathering information to support internal discussions.
- Users: Individuals who interact directly with the product or service.
- Agenda-Driven Individuals: May have motivations to disrupt or influence decisions.
By understanding these roles and the buyer’s internal vetting processes, companies can better align their efforts to meet the buyer’s needs.
The Pitfalls of Lead Scoring
Lead scoring systems have become a staple in modern marketing, tracking buyer behaviours such as website visits and content downloads to assign a numerical value to leads. Once a lead reaches a threshold score, it is passed to sales as a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). However, this approach often falls short because it overlooks critical factors like the buyer’s timeline and internal decision-making process.
For instance, a lead with a high score may still be in the early stages of internal approval. Sales teams often prematurely abandon such leads, labelling them as “uninterested.” This creates the marketing and sales chasm where valuable leads are lost due to a lack of timely human interaction.
The Need for Human Interaction
Automation can only go so far in nurturing leads. Human interaction is essential to gather nuanced information about buyers’ intentions and progress. Two critical elements of effective human interaction include:
- Open Communication: Encourage buyers to share insights through simple, open-ended forms during the content download process.
- Pre-Sales Advocacy: Assign a dedicated individual to act as the buyer’s advocate, offering guidance without the pressure of closing a sale.
The Role of a Buyer Advocate
A buyer advocate—or customer enablement specialist—bridges the marketing and sales chasm. Their primary role is to nurture leads by:
- Understanding the buyer’s internal processes.
- Providing relevant information to move the buyer through their journey.
- Positioning the company as a top contender when the buyer is ready to engage with sales.
Unlike salespeople, who are focused on closing deals, buyer advocates prioritise engaging leads, building trust and credibility. This approach is particularly valuable for complex, high-value transactions where pushing too aggressively can alienate potential buyers.
The buyer’s advocate is a person with high levels of domain knowledge, industry challenges and the ability to hold conversations that are seen as valuable to the potential buyer. The person must speak with authority and be capable of answering business-related and technical questions. Their goal is to increase the number of quality opportunities in the pipeline.
Balancing Team Structures
Implementing a buyer advocate role doesn’t necessarily mean increasing headcount. Instead, organisations can reallocate resources by shifting responsibilities from traditional sales roles to customer enablement. However, the success of this approach hinges on hiring individuals with strong domain knowledge, problem-solving skills, and the ability to build rapport with senior executives.
Challenges in Implementation
Adopting this new approach requires a cultural shift within the organisation. Sales leaders, in particular, need to resist the urge to revert to old habits of quickly passing leads to sales. Instead, they must focus on improving conversion ratios by allowing buyer advocates to nurture leads until they are truly sales-ready.
A Case Study in Lead Nurturing
A recent example highlights the challenges and rewards of implementing a buyer advocate role. A company with 850–1,000 MQLs annually struggled to manage lead flow among a small sales team. Most leads were being shifted to ‘not interested’ by the sales team and on reading CRM notes, there was no engagement as the person did not return their call after one or two attempts.
To address this, it was recommended that a buyer advocate be hired. An excellent candidate was identified, but the company prioritised cost over expertise. Another candidate was identified as more of a customer service administration-style person, which led to a poor hire and no progress. The company failed to restructure the team sufficiently to maximise the lead development and close the chasm.
The lesson? Investing in the right talent for lead nurturing roles is critical to unlocking the full potential of marketing-generated leads that will convert to the highest quality sales ready leads.
Moving Toward Harmony
To bridge the marketing and sales chasm, companies must adopt a holistic approach to lead nurturing. By integrating marketing, customer enablement, and sales into a cohesive framework, organisations can:
- Enhance lead conversion rates.
- Improve alignment between marketing and sales objectives.
- Reduce the inefficiencies and frustrations associated with traditional lead management.
In Conclusion
Revolutionising lead nurturing requires a shift from transactional processes to buyer-centric strategies. By understanding the buyer’s journey, redefining team roles, and prioritising human interaction, businesses can achieve greater success in converting leads into loyal customers.
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You may also be interested in reading these articles:
- B2B Revenue Generation: Why Marketing Leads the Way
- Are Your Salespeople Burning Leads by Only Picking the Best?
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