Thanks to the shifting to online communication channels, the fragmentation of the media, and the constant emerging of new digital techniques to obtain data from people – like online webinars, surveys, social media, etc. – a lot of marketing departments receive more leads than ever before.
Besides the classic offline lead generation techniques and traditional online strategies like email marketing, search engine advertising and blogs, marketers dispose of various new lead generation sources as well.
Therefore, for a lot of companies the question about how to generate leads is no longer a question. Instead, the questions are how to lower the cost per lead (through inbound marketing, amongst other things), and especially how to make sure those leads are being followed and nurtured effectively.
Lead nurturing is an important task for marketers. Its ultimate goal is of course to convert prospects and suspects into customers. In other words: sales.
And, even though the borders between sales and marketing are getting thinner and both must work together more than ever, those borders still do exist. Most of us, at one time or the other have experienced situations where leads were “forgotten” or not being acted upon properly. This is of course a waste of both time and money.
Fortunately, there are many platforms (CRM, marketing automation, lead management, analytics, etc.) working together these days to ensure that the follow-up and “nurturing” of a lead happens in the best way possible.  
A lead is a human being
However, it is not the only technology taking care of that. Lead scoring, nurturing, and management is above all a matter of correctly analyzing the data and offering the information desired by the prospect at the right moment.
Also, keep in mind that a lead is a human being. In these times of social media, neglecting a lead can cause negative word-of-mouth.
But the marketing department has yet another challenge: making sure that the leads are also followed by sales. There are different ways to accomplish this. Quite a few companies, especially in B2B, have digital technology at reach for their sales people, so that they can follow their leads optimally. If that technology is simple and efficient, it will actually be used. If not, sales will quit in no time.
The most important way to ensure that leads are being followed effectively by sales is of course making the leads as qualified as possible for follow-ups. At most companies, sales people won’t do anything with leads that they don’t feel like being worthy of their time because they offer too little information.
Through lead nurturing and integrating different techniques and systems to make the leads as qualified as possible, lead scoring (literally assigning a score to a lead) makes it possible to call in sales only when the lead is ready to make that important next step: selling.
And, in these social medium times more and more .. buying. After all, the focus is clearly shifting from selling to buying.