How to Nurture your Engineering Leads so they are Ready for Sales

Last week I wrote about how marketers can get credit for their leads by nurturing them further through the sales process.  In this post we’ll explore – with graphics! – how to nurture engineering leads. 

Some marketers think of lead nurturing as nothing more than email communication. We prefer to think of it as a workflow; a series of communications in which each step has a clear objective to move a prospect to the next stage or to engage with a sales person.

The beauty of nurturing the engineer further through the purchasing process is that it ensures your marketing team will get credit for the leads.  It also helps your sales team and your prospects by not:

1. Wasting sales time qualifying engineers who are only at the awareness or consideration stage and;
2. Upsetting your prospects who don’t want to talk to sales until they have reached the decision stage

Let’s say you have three types of content for your prospects:

1. A white paper that you can use to generate awareness and top of funnel contacts
2. Case studies that show your product in action in several different industries
3. A pricing guide and/or specification sheets

You can match your marketing content to the engineer’s thought process as you nurture them along their buying journey:

But creating excellent nurtures for your marketing campaigns to engineers is more than just content.

To run a good lead nurturing campaign you need:

• The right kind of content for each stage of the process
• A standard work flow for the prospect to follow
• Variations to the work flow depending on how the prospect responds
• Clear calls to action every step of the way
• To ask for only the data you need at each stage to build the profiles progressively

Putting it all together: an example workflow for nurturing leads

This work flow relies heavily on marketing automation.  If you don’t have a system that can send the emails automatically, it is worth investigating or reaching out to an engineering publisher for help. 

Engineering purchasing decisions are highly nuanced, so we have to be careful not to fall in love with any specific workflow we create.  Some engineers, for example, will want to move through your workflow faster than you planned.  For those people, be sure to include ways for them to download the next piece of content or even contact sales on every landing page.

We are currently experimenting with running this kind of campaign completely within ENGINEERING.com, right up to the point that the prospect asks to be contacted by sales.  (If you need some contacts to start your own nurturing workflow, our media guide is a great place to start.)  I look forward to sharing the results.  In the meantime, if you have comments or questions, use the comment feature or send me a note on Linkedin or to jhayes@engineering.com.

Thanks for reading,

John