Giving Sales an "Out"

Any of us who work with longer sales cycles have experienced the leaky funnel. Laura Ramos at Forrester talks about it a lot, as do most other luminaries in B2B, and at Eloqua, it's one of the most common things our clients ask us about.

So, as marketers, what can we do to "plug" it... not a simple task, as leads leak out of the funnel for so many reasons; interest wanes, priorities shift, or sales connect too early or with someone without enough pull to get something done. Mostly, these leads just go quiet. Sales is hesitant to call it "dead" right away as it might not be, and by the time they're sure it's dead, they're unlikely to dig back into their lead pile and set a status on it.

So, how do we as marketers help?

One trick is to give sales an "out" - build one or more "rewarm" nurture campaigns that are designed for cold leads. Give sales a simple (ie, one click) way to add a lead to that campaign from where they are (ie, their CRM system, most likely). When a lead is suspected to be dead, all they need to do is throw it back over the fence to you in marketing and you'll nurture it until it pops up again as a hot lead due to lead score.

I blogged about a simple way to think about Nurture Marketing the other day here: http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/nurture-marketing-vs-pachinko.html