Posted by: Christy Roth, Project Manager

If only about a quarter of new leads are “sales-ready,” then the obvious main objective of lead nurturing for the manufacturing industry is ensuring that they’re qualified and mature enough to be handed off to sales. In other words, after pushing each lead through an offer flow and engaging them in higher level offers as they go, we are then able to push them to sales at their most ready. The benefit? Saving the sales team’s time and money and ultimately closing more sales.

A key to the process flow is thinking about the target audience. In the case of industrial manufacturing, we focus on the needs of design engineers (on the OEM side) and plant managers and operators (on the MRO side). That’s why we carefully select educational offers that will interest them on the right level without sending them so much information that they’re overwhelmed or so little that they become cold. It’s all about finding the right balance.

In the early stages of the buying cycle, we present our client (a B2B manufacturing company) as the solution provider and send leads low-involvement offers to understand their respective levels of interest. As we continue down the process flow, we have to evaluate our available offers and decide which level of engagement each entails. For instance, a lengthy white paper is going to be a higher involvement offer than, say, a product brochure. The white paper is more likely to be of educational value and referenced repeatedly in the purchase cycle, whereas the brochure is most utilized in the very beginning of the cycle – during the “evaluating information” phase.

Each lead travels a unique path, which is why careful profile building and the most customized process flows result in the warmest leads.