James D. Lenskold, Jim to friends, the author of the excellent book Marketing ROI, recently shared the results of the 2010 edition of the B2B Lead Generation Marketing ROI Study, from his consultancy company Lenskold Group.

Earlier this month Jim wrote an article on MarketingProfs where he published some details and explained how one could indicate and develop the ROI of ‘lead nurturing’.
Lenskold, who published his book Marketing ROI in 2004, explains how online channels have made it easier and cheaper to distribute content in a world where potential clients can personally search for information and stand open to interaction.

Engaging prospects in the early stages of the sales funnel and generating leads can obviously be done through various techniques, wherein content is often crucial as written before on this blog.

According to the study of the Lenskold Group especially nurturing so-called “stalled leads”, interested prospects that are not yet ready to buy, is the most underfunded marketing aspect, according to the respondents. Especially if you look at the potential value that such marketing activities can produce.

Lenskold writes that lead nurturing has an especially large potential value if you have prospects that are not yet ready for purchase. If you have no lead nurturing tactics for this target group they will instead of being leads simply return to being prospects.

Nurturing stalled leads is underfunded

According to Jim the opinion of the interviewed marketers about the potential large profit of the nurturing of such leads is simple to understand.

They feel that contacting, educating and engaging those leads that are not yet sufficiently ‘qualified’ or stalled in the sales pipeline can increase the conversion ratio’s and value per customer via low-cost marketing interactions. Doing this, also shortens the sales cycle.

58% of the interviewed marketers said that nurturing stalled leads is underfunded if you look at the potential value.

Most marketers also found that marketing tactics for nurturing leads by educating and engaging them were the most efficient in relation to more sales oriented tactics.

More about the survey here.

J-P De Clerck is a content, conversion and social media consultant. You can connect with him on Twitter or via his blog.