How Selling is Like Romance: Why Nurture Marketing Beats Cold Calling Any Day!

A Question for You: Given the choice would you rather choose to go out on an endless series of blind dates or slowly over time develop a wonderful relationship with someone who had all the qualities you were looking for and could ultimately prove to be a perfect match?

I suspect the latter. Well in the world of business development I guarantee you that it is better to consistently court qualified prospects than it is to continually go on the "blind dates" of cold calling.

Not to say that you shouldn't always be making new contacts but I find most salespeople and business owners focus so much energy trying to fill their pipeline (regardless of whether or not their efforts are effective!) that they overlook the critical business development aspect of nurturing relationships with existing qualified prospects. These existing relationships will often turn into trips to the altar over time, but ONLY if you keep the romance alive!

How Nurture Marketing can Boost your Selling Effectiveness and your Bottom Line

Effective nurture marketing moves beyond using a CRM tool to remind you to call a prospect that is a good fit for what you do but legitimately can't do business until sometime in the future. Nurture marketing is about building and keeping top-of-mind presence, developing credibility and building a relationship that takes the prospect from knowing you to liking you to trusting you and ultimately to doing business with you.

Guess what, occasionally calling a prospect and leaving messages on his voicemail is no way to nurture a relationship! Think back to your dating days. Were phone calls enough to keep the romance alive? Of course not! Your nurture marketing included dinner dates, flowers, cards, candy, walks in the park, letters and gifts.

In order to capture the heart, and mind of your prospects you need to just as diligently nurture your relationships with them as you did when you were pursuing your significant other.

I have found the following 5 imperatives to be the essential elements of a successful nurture marketing campaign:

Be creative
Use variety
Create value
Demonstrate a personal touch and finally,
Be consistent but not predictable.

So few business development professionals get all 5 of these imperatives of success correct that if you do, you will quickly distinguish yourself in your prospect's mind and heart.

Let's Take a Look Closer Look at Each Imperative

Be Creative How can you hope to capture mind share if your communications look and sound like everyone else's? You merely have to flip through your stack of "junk" mail to see multiple examples of lack of creativity. Any generic thank-you's in there? How about a generic newsletter? Any trite gimmics such as "a penny for your thoughts" or "some tea to enjoy while you think of me"? The biggest offenders of this imperative? Real estate agents, mortgage brokers and financial services professionals.

Use Variety Mix it up. Keep yourself interesting by using multiple mediums. This is important because some prospects respond more favorably to email, some to letters, others to fax's, some to referrals or introductions and some to phone calls. Variety keeps you interesting while ensuring that your message gets through.

Create Value Keep your prospect up-to-date on what is going on in his industry, with his competitors, within your company. Communicate the latest solutions you're delivering to your clients or trends in his customer's industries. The best way to capture and control mindshare is by delivering value.

Make it Personal What get's delivered to your prospect should look as though it were created just for her. Sometimes that will be the case, and at other times it will not. The key is to have it seem as though your message of value was created just for her. Nothing grabs more mindshare and carries more value than a highly targeted and personalized message.

Be Consistent but not Predictable The correct frequency of your touches will depend upon a number of factors but in general somewhere between every couple of weeks and once per month is enough for your nurture marketing campaign to slowly capture the heart and mind of your prospect.

However, just like in a good romance or marriage, spotaneity keeps the spark alive. Don't let your nurture marketing campaign get into the worn ruts of "expected" and "predictable". Be consistent but mix things up enough so that when your "nurture" packages arrive they carry enough excitement to get opened rather than be left rotting on the front porch.

There you have it. Whether you're trying to land the love of your life or the next big deal, put the above 5 romance imperatives in your efforts and you will become tremendously more successful.