The Future of Lead Nurturing

The Future of Lead Nurturing:from Wide Angle by Corey Mull
We’re a few months into our biggest project of the year for B2Bs, and one thing we’ve heard repeatedly is the need to really figure out lead nurturing and lead scoring.
As with lots of buzzwordy-sounding things, it’s worth unpacking what we’re actually talking about here. From our conversations, it seems that the goal of lead nurturing/lead scoring – the combination of which I’ll refer to going forward as “lead management” – is to identify prospective buyers, match them with information designed – however remotely – to motivate purchase, and score them on an ongoing basis on their receptivity to and engagement with that information.
And so it’s worth examining the underlying assumptions here a bit. Implicit in this view of prospect conversion are a few ideas:

• Likeliness to buy can be measured. Prospects can be identified by behavior or attributes observable by Marketing.
• Information consumption can be (to some degree) controlled. A given prospect can be exposed to information most likely to increase likeliness to buy at any given moment.
• Information consumption is a metric for likeliness to purchase. Receptivity to and engagement with information is a reasonable proxy for lead quality.
• Information consumption leads to purchase. Purchase can be motivated with information.

So, based on these assumptions, many B2B marketers have gone and built content, marketing automation platforms, and lead scoring schemes – all based on the idea, perhaps implicitly held, that information is the key variable in driving purchase. In this telling, engagement with information not only predicts the likelihood of purchase, it also increases the likelihood of purchase.
But we have the tools to measure information consumption – in the digital age, it’s easier than ever. And yet marketers still say that lead management is their biggest challenge – the systems they’ve built aren’t accurate, Sales doesn’t use them, and they’re not providing measurable value.
One hypothesis we’ve been kicking around is the idea that information consumption, the main variable lead management systems influence and measure, is not the right variable to build these systems around. In other words, that information isn’t the key thing driving group decisions forward: instead, it’s “softer” factors like buyer emotions, power/status competitions within the buying organization, cognitive bias, influence by fads in business, and that kind of thing.
That’s what we’re taking to you: why don’t lead management systems work? Is it because they’re measuring and inflecting the wrong thing? Or because they’re measuring the right thing inaccurately? Let us know what you think in the comments section.