Are you sitting on a goldmine?

If you’re a diligent B2B marketer, you should have a valuable asset at your fingertips. 

Your prospect base. 

Earned and built by doing the hard yards of lead generation activities, attending trade shows, networking, making calls, taking countless meetings, responding to RFPs and, of course, through your authority-building content marketing program (you have one of those, yes?).

In an ideal world, your prospect base is an organic, growing and powerful sales and marketing engine that moves people from interested to engaged to customers during the (often long) B2B purchase cycle.

Use it or lose it

But as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And what started as a detailed plan to capture and nurture qualified leads might have devolved into a major (and unproductive) headache. 

There are many reasons why this happens. Not least of all is the time and commitment required to work and maintain an up-to-date prospect base. Not to mention the effort required to write email sequences, produce relevant content, send the emails, measure the results, tweak the approach, refine email copy etc. 

It’s a lot.

So here you are

Over time, your prospect base has gone from golden goose to a pile of doo-doo. Content links in your email sequence are broken. Copy is weak and uninspiring. Prospect data is aging and becoming irrelevant and unusable. Little or no analysis is being done, so you are not iterating and refining to improve results. 

Sure, your prospect nurture box is ticked, but there is nothing good coming from it. Nor is it reaching the potential and results it promised when you set it up in the first place. And that prospect list you worked so hard to build? No longer a valuable asset, it’s withering on the vine.

It’s not a pretty picture. But there is hope! 

With a bit of TLC, some focused attention and a plan, you can reinvent your prospect nurture program and start to drive increased engagement, more meetings, more opportunities and ultimately more sales. 

Start with a copy review. Make sure links are live and pointing to the right content. Check prospect information, and make sure contact details are updated. Look at your stats including unsubscribes and bounce rates. 

Importantly, consider the purchase cycle of your category. Does your nurture sequence take this into account, or does it burn bright for a week or two and disappear from your prospects’ inboxes forever? 

If that sounds like too much work with everything else you have on your plate, you can talk to us. Nurture sequences go hand in hand with content marketing programs, and it’s a service we can add to a content program or look at as a standalone activity.  

Either way, it’s time to reinstate that valuable asset and get it working for you again.