Lead nurturing is a core component of successful MSP marketing and sales. It involves staying in touch with prospects even if they are not ready to buy. Lead nurturing is the process of tracking your leads, gradually moving them toward a tighter focus on your services until they are qualified to be passed along to your sales team for conversion. Here’s are some Lead Nurturing best practices that you can deploy.

• Identify the key areas that you want to educate your prospects/customers on. Examples include cybersecurity, cloud benefits, VoIP, etc.,  
• Your e-mails should offer value adding content to your readers…and not just sell your product/service 
• Ensure your campaign follows a conversational style and doesn’t sound like a one-way broadcast. The aim is to get the prospect to interact with you. This also means the e-mails in your lead nurturing campaign should have a natural flow to the content and shouldn’t feel like one-off e-mails that have been put together.
• Time the gaps between each e-mail based on your sales cycle. If it’s a longer sales cycle, you can make do with about 2 e-mails a month, where as a shorter one would demand more frequent contact such as once in 10 days.
• Make sure your lead nurturing campaign automatically adjusts itself based on prospect behavior—for example, someone who is very responsive shouldn’t have to go through the entire campaign and must be contacted by the sales rep sooner
• Ensure every e-mail that goes out bears your contact information  clearly on it and makes it easy for your prospects to contact you
• Also, make sure the web-links/attachments that you provide in your e-mail are tracked. That way you get a clearer picture of how interested your prospect is, in your e-mail. For example, someone who downloads the whitepaper that’s a part of your drip campaign is likely to be more interested in what you have to say versus someone who simply opens the mail and moves on. On the same note…
• Score every activity related to the lead nurturing campaign, so you know clearly which lead is ready to meet you and which ones need more time 
• Always use a permission-based list as this would mean that you don’t e-mail prospects unless they approve it.

The fact is, that approximately 80% of the leads you get are not ready to make a purchase decision immediately. The key is to always remain on their radar and help them make the decision—in your favor. Good lead nurturing campaigns help you accomplish this goal effectively. But, do you have the time and resources needed to invest in lead nurturing campaigns? Check out www.mspadvantageprogram.com for ready-to-use, MSP-specific, lead nurturing campaign content, tools and more!