Why nurtured business leads buy more

There's one main reason why purchases made by nurtured business leads are typically so much larger than those made by leads that haven't been nurtured: nurtured leads buy more because they know more.

When you don't have lead nurturing programmes in place, salespeople tend to make judgements about business leads at face value

When a salesperson receives a list of unqualified leads, they tend to make judgements about the leads based on the scarce information available to them. If they don't recognise the company's name, they might spend a few minutes on their website finding out what they do, where they're based and how big they are.

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Based on what they can glean from five minutes on the company's website, the salesperson forms preconceptions about which products the company can afford and how likely they are to buy. These preconceptions will affect how the salesperson approaches the lead, which products they attempt to sell them and how much effort they put into closing the deal.

Because salespeople tend to make these sorts of judgements about unqualified business leads, they end up only telling the lead about the product or service that the salesperson assumes they need and can afford. The result is that while the lead may indeed end up buying a product that meets their needs, had they also been educated about other products, they may have bought more.

Lead nurturing programmes send business leads information based on their online behaviour

Lead nurturing programmes educate leads through the use of original, educational content. Integrating your marketing automation system with your website allows you to monitor leads' online behaviour and send them the most relevant communications based on which pages of your website they are viewing. In this way, you can ensure that each lead is fully educated about your products and services, especially those that their online behaviour indicates that they are interested in.

Imagine that a salesperson chats to a lead over the phone and tells them about a product - let's say it's a coffee machine. After the call, the lead visits the company's website and sees that they also supply water coolers. They click through to the water coolers product page and have a quick look at the features, benefits and prices of the water coolers on offer.

Without marketing automation, the salesperson would have no way of knowing that the business lead is looking at the water cooler pages. Because they don't know that the lead is potentially interested in buying a water cooler, they wouldn't pick up the phone to call the lead back and tell them about the different models of water coolers available.

With a lead nurturing programme in place, however, integrated marketing automation technology would automatically pick up that the lead has looked at the water cooler webpages. In response, it would immediately send them relevant information educating them on the water cooler products available, thereby making the lead more likely to buy not only a coffee machine, but a water cooler too.

Lead nurturing programmes are such an effective way to educate business leads that by the time a lead reaches the final stages of the sales cycle, they sometimes know more about the products they want to buy than the salesperson does.

Salespeople are able to do a better job when lead nurturing programmes are in place

When salespeople are only given nurtured, qualified business leads, they're able to do their job much more effectively. This is because they don't have to waste time sifting through lists of unqualified, poor-quality leads. Instead, they can focus all their time and energy on qualified, educated, high-quality business leads; ensuring that each customer makes as large a purchase as possible.