The 4 S's of Automated Nurturing

It was Marie Antoinette who said "There is nothing new except what has been forgotten". Everywhere I go I hear Nurturing as if it is some new concept that we have never heard of before. Sales people have been nurturing prospects for years. There is a word that is missing. Automated.



My issue is if you ask a Marketer how automated it is to target a segment,

identify a message, craft some creative and then time its delivery, especially one who is using one of our competitor’s tools and is knee deep in HTML I think they will tell you, "Yeah. Not so much". I see a lot of our competition trying to make this sound complex. I think for them it may be. If you only ever worked in Marketing, then you don’t know what sales did and vice versa. Our team is a blend of Sales and Marketing professionals and with a view from end to end we see the world somewhat differently.


If we are to maximize the returns from the multi-channel, automated nurturing that Marketbright does we have to understand what nurturing actually is. This is not new, ask any B2B sales person from the mini-computing days. Ask any poor soul who tried to manage their day and prospects with a Time Management System – anyone remember those? It is not a Black Art. There are four key attributes to Prospect Nurturing.
SegmentedIf you are selling more than one product, at more than one price point, across more than one vertical, and more than one geography, you better be targeting your message down to the most personal segment. Think about what every senior sales person has had to learn and should have a copy of in their bookmarks http://www.vitoselling.com/. Tony Parinello coined the phrase selling to the VITO – the very important top officer. What was the core element? Making the messaging targeted to that person. What is today’s equivalent when you get marketing to deliver this messaging? Segmentation. Take your products, your price points, how you plan to promote them and identify how best to promote them based upon your prospects. Email marketing is great if you have single products, single price point, single vertical products. If you want to be more personal than that you need to identify the best promotional tool to deliver your message. If you are Dior you want to get stars to wear your product. If your target is a C Level executive they are not going to respond to an impersonal generalized email.


Unless there is only one decision person influencing the choice of your product you need to build a systematic plan for Nurturing patter to the organization you are targeting and then to the people within it. Some will respond to email, some to SEO/SEM, some to direct mail, some to dimensional mailers, some to telesales, partners, analysts, etc all go to create the pattern you are going to create. Precisely the way sales people used to do this, you now automate the process using marketing, segmentation and personalized messaging. Not simply personalized emails, personalized promotions dependent on the prospect. This is at the core of prosultative selling, the transfer of tasks, activities and actions from sales to marketing and in the process their automation. Segmenting your messaging to the right person, to deliver the right content, at the right place using the right medium is a key part of Automated Nurturing.