Lead Nurturing, or, Everything Old is New Again

When trumpets were mellow
And ev'ry gal only had one fellow
No need to remember when
'Cause ev'ry thing old is new again

Peter Allen & Carol Bayer Sager

By Larry Kilbourne

The latest innovative practice associated with lead generation is lead nurturing.  But before looking at what this entails, let's take a look at its ancestry.

Nearly four decades ago a then-revolutionary concept arose in the sales world: consultative selling. The idea was that successful selling was rooted not in putting one over on a hapless customer, but rather on collaboration between seller and prospect.

With its acceptance and gradual ascendancy, consultative selling transported the business of sales from a heritage popularly associated with hucksterism to one that had more in common with white-collar business consulting à la Bain and McKinsey.

Consultative selling was a concept whose time had come for a number of reasons. For one, it recognized that successful sales organizations in the modern world could not operate on the basis of a philosophy of "take the money and run." For another, it acknowledged a fundamental truth about selling; namely, that people buy from people they trust. Trust is predicated on an established relationship; hence, selling was about building relationships as much as pushing product (or whatever).

The subsequent mind-shift in sales techiques was revolutionary: instead of focusing on product features you focused on uncovering prospects' needs. In place of carefully crafted sales pitches was a well-defined process of questioning that allowed problems and needs to surface and be identified, and ultimately, solutions proposed.

Then, just a decade ago, the essential truth embodied in consultative selling was transported into the world of marketing with the publication of a book entitled: Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers by now-marketing guru Seth Godin.

Godin's then-radical notion was that marketers, instead of bombarding prospects with advertising and marketing collateral (what he calls "interruption marketing"), should reach out to them to establish a relationship in which they would give their consent to receive ads and marketing collateral about subjects that interested them. Handled properly, over time you could, as Godin's title explicitly puts it, "turn strangers into friends and friends into customers." Pitch was replaced with relationship at the core of marketing activities.

Permission marketing, in its approach, was stunning similar to the concept of consultative selling, even as it was received in the marketing world as apostasy and a threat to the established order. Today, it's difficult to conceive of permission-based marketing as a novel concept. Or to remember that it's only ten years old.

Now comes the latest iteration of relationship-based transactions in the relatively new practice of lead nurturing. Like consultative sales and permission marketing, lead nurturing is firmly rooted in the concepts of relationship building and collaboration between solution seekers and offerers. It is, in the words of Brian Carroll - perhaps its foremost proponent - "all about having consistent and meaningful dialog with viable prospects regardless of their timing to buy." Lead nurturing is a process, he points out, "that converts more inquiries into qualified leads and qualified leads into sales."

What strikes me as relatively novel about lead nurturing is the extent to which, in its application and execution, it is dependant on fairly sophisticated processes (read software) that enable companies to:

1. Identify which stage of the buy cycle prospects inhabit based on a variety of (usually web-based) behaviors they exhibit (lead scoring)
2. Engage prospects at each stage through dialogue or collateral (and via a variety of media) that is relevant to their needs/interests at that particular stage (nurturing)
3. Track their movement as it flows either toward or away from a sale (also lead scoring)
4. Maintain records of these myriad transactions and conversations that allow marketing forecasts to be made

To my way of thinking, there is a level of technological complexity involved in lead nurturing that isn't necessarily present in consultative selling or permission marketing, or, for that matter, in traditional lead generation activities (read email blasts).  Lead nurturing, in its use of a variety of media in establishing and carrying on dialogue with prospective customers is also very definitely a Web 2.0 activity.

But in its conception and essence, lead nurturing is simply the latest iteration in the evolution of sales and marketing as they have moved in the last forty years from a product-centric to a consumer-centric focus.  As the song's lyrics go:

We'll order now what they ordered then
'Cause ev'ry thing old is new again

Copyright © 2009 by Larry Kilbourne, Ph.D. Dr. Kilbourne is an independent marketing consultant. He may be reached at lkphd@yahoo.com.