Nurturing is an asset all B2B marketers should have in their toolbox, regardless of the complexity of their products or services and of their average time to close or sell. The reasons for this are simple.
- B2B markets are saturated and if you don’t reach back to stay top of mind for your audience, others will.
- You can’t expect every single person who encounters your content to be ready to buy. It’s utopian.
I’ll say it again, it’s not because someone downloads an ebook that their contact details should land on your sales team’s desks. Your job is to show them why they should be interested in your products or services with nurturing.
Why spend the next 5 minutes reading this
There are many ways to deal with nurturing, and the way we do it at Advance B2B probably won’t work as-is for your organization and audience (no one-size-fits-all and all that, you know the drill).
And so I can’t say for sure that you should do what we do. However, I’ll walk you through how we deal with nurturing, knowing that we mostly deal with one of the worst possible audiences when it comes to marketing: marketing professionals. That must be worth something!
As a marketer myself, I hate being marketed to. I may be too harsh, but I feel that most companies reaching out via email, Inmail, or targeting me through ads don’t put enough effort into their messaging and targeting. They are wasting their money on me and, worst of all, wasting my precious screen time.
Back to the topic: If your nurturing is smooth and spot-on, it won’t be perceived as such. It will be welcomed as a “nice thing” and likely generate engagement. And that’s what we’re trying to do.
In this article, I’ll show you everything, from what the purpose of our nurturing is, to who it’s targeting and what we’re telling them.
- A few disclaimers
- Why you need email nurturing
- The tool we use (HubSpot)
- Segmenting your audience
- Our big and secretive B2B nurturing plan
A few disclaimers regarding lead email nurturing
Don’t expect nurturing to generate immediate results
Regardless of your market, products, and services, nurturing takes time.
The idea of nurturing is to provide targeted bits and pieces of information to slowly bring your contacts to maturity.
Of course, depending on the complexity of your market, or the starting criteria for your workflows, your nurturing program can last from a few weeks to a few months, or even years.
Don’t expect high conversion numbers from nurturing
Manage your expectations; You need to accept that you won’t be able to bring all your contacts to maturity.
In fact, you’d be insanely successful if you even bring 5% of them to maturity through email nurturing. That’s simply because a singled-out conversion doesn’t mean someone is even remotely interested in your services - they may just be interested in what you had to say at a precise moment in time.
Of course, it depends on how people convert in the first place. If your contact form is the only conversion point, people reaching out are likely aware of what you do and may respond positively to your nurturing.
But if that’s your only conversion point, you’re likely not receiving many inbound leads either. If — like us — you also produce ebooks, host webinars, organize events, etc., your contacts will range from “I absolutely want to work with you” to “uh? Advance B2Who?”.
And this is why you need nurturing.
Why all B2B marketing teams should implement email nurturing
Effective lead nurturing is the process of developing and maintaining relationships with potential buyers throughout every stage of the sales funnel. The goal is to provide relevant, valuable content and information at the right time to encourage prospects to move from one stage of the buying process to the next.
Unlike in B2C, where purchasing decisions can often be made quickly and on impulse, B2B sales cycles are longer, more complex, and involve multiple stakeholders.
As a result, B2B nurturing requires a thoughtful, sustained effort to keep leads engaged while addressing their unique needs and concerns.
However, nurturing isn’t as simple as just sending a few follow-up emails. It requires a strategic approach, thoughtful content, and the right tools to automate and create relevant, personalized interactions.
Why B2B nurturing matters so much
Revenue. That’s why.
Nurturing usually targets the middle of the funnel.
The tool we use for nurturing: HubSpot
HubSpot is only one of many tools for nurturing leads into customers, but it’s probably the best one for B2B companies.
HubSpot has made B2B nurturing more accessible and effective for marketers by offering an array of features that allow for personalized, data-driven nurturing campaigns.
Whether you're nurturing top-of-the-funnel leads or re-engaging cold prospects, HubSpot's comprehensive toolset streamlines the process.
Below is more on our secret plan and how we currently use HubSpot features to nurture our fresh and cold(ish) leads.
Segmenting the audience to place the right message in front of the right people
Segmenting the audience in a B2B marketing context is crucial for effective email nurturing because it will make you more accurate and, therefore, more relevant.
The idea is simple (and pretty straightforward):
- Increase engagement with on-point messages based on your segment specificities.
- Appear more relevant, faster.
How to segment your audience for more efficient nurturing
This is a tough one to cover in a blog post because the right segmentation for your organization depends on your unique audience, products, services, and use cases.
The real challenge for you is to create a nurturing machine that’s relevant for your most valuable contacts, target market, industries or use cases without spreading yourself too thin as nurturing requires maintenance and regular optimization.
Once you’ve put your segments on the paper, a simple way to do this in HubSpot is to create lists using specific criteria.
See a random and simple example below:
How to personalize your nurturing workflows for the right audiences
There are different ways to get this done.
Create a workflow per segment
This is pretty straightforward. Simply create a workflow for each segment and distribute content that’s relevant to a specific audience.
The advantage of using this method is that you can easily track the performance of your nurturing workflow per target segment.
The disadvantage is maintenance, as you’ll need to keep track of multiple workflows.
Create one workflow for all segments
This one is a little bit more advanced than the above method, but the idea is the same. The only difference is that you add a branch to distribute your contacts based on the segments you pre-defined earlier.
The advantage of this method is easier maintenance, as you’ll be able to monitor the performance of your nurturing program in one place.
The disadvantage is that you will need a few extra steps to measure the performance of your nurturing program for each segment (something you can easily do with specific lists and custom reports).
Use HubSpot’s smart content features
This is not really an alternative method, but rather an add-on to bring more contextual messages, content, and CTAs in your emails.
Smart content features in HubSpot let you personalize your emails (or pages) based on who receives your messages or visits your pages.
Simple examples of this are:
- Calling your contacts by their name (if and when you know it)
- Signing and sending emails from the most relevant contacts.
- Giving a chance to book meetings with specific experts.
- Including specific CTAs or content.
- Etc.
The possibilities are nearly endless.
Our big and secretive B2B nurturing plan
Well, it’s not going to be so secretive after you read this (don’t tell my boss). The way we see it, nurturing is not a destination; it’s a means to an end.
How we use HubSpot workflows
With workflows, you can create a series of automated actions triggered by specific behaviors, such as form submissions, specific page visits, or email clicks.
Workflows can be designed to:
- Send a series of personalized emails based on a lead’s behavior
- Automatically assign leads to sales reps when they reach a certain stage in the funnel
- Adjust a lead’s lifecycle stage based on their engagement with your content
- Trigger additional nurturing actions based on lead scoring
- Send information to other tools you use
The list could be really long.
Now, there are good nurturing workflows and really shitty ones.
Here’s what I got (verbatim) when asking ChatGPT 4o to give me a structure for a nurturing workflow for a B2B tech company (to be fair, I was fishing for this, and my prompt wasn’t extremely specific either).
—
Let’s say a lead has downloaded your eBook on digital transformation. You can set up a HubSpot workflow to automatically send the following series of emails:
- 1. Day 1: A thank-you email with the eBook link.
- 2. Day 3: A follow-up email offering a case study on how other businesses have achieved digital transformation.
- 3. Day 7: An invitation to attend a webinar on the topic.
- 4. Day 14: A personalized message from a sales rep offering a free consultation.
This automated series ensures that the lead stays engaged with your content and gradually becomes more sales-ready without requiring manual input.
—
Please don’t do this. This will NOT work (or I’d be very surprised if it would).
You need to be contextual and relevant, and most importantly, consider the time it takes for your audience to learn about the value you can provide. This is why our nurturing program at Advance B2B is split into 3 major steps.
Step 0. Contextual nurturing based on the entry point
Main goal: Get new newsletter subscribers.
Our visitors can turn into contacts in multiple ways. They can download our content, attend our events and webinars, or simply reach out. The point of entry will determine what type of content you’ll receive from us. The objective is the same; show you we know our craft and get you onboard with our newsletter.
Step 1. Nurture our new leads into newsletter subscribers
Main goal: Get new newsletter subscribers.
It’s utopian to think that a few emails will turn people who vaguely know you and the value you can bring into done deals. It doesn’t work like that. As mentioned above, it’s about creating a relationship between us and you — our target audience. However, nurturing flows eventually end.
By securing newsletter subscribers, we give ourselves a chance to regularly share fresh content with our target audience (with their freely given consent).
As a marketing agency, knowledge accounts for a LOT of what we sell. So, if someone shows interest in our services, we can expect them to be interested in what we have to say in our monthly newsletters, blog posts, or podcast episodes.
Step 2. Nurture our subscribers into Marketing Qualified Leads
Main goal: Qualify contacts into MQLs
This is where the serious stuff begins. If someone has shown enough interest in our agency and services, we will give them more attention, with more targeted messages addressing their potential needs and what we can do to help them.
Here’s how our program works.
How to exit our nurturing program
The short answer? Optimized lead scoring.
Not all leads are created equal, and some will be more ready to engage with our sales team than others. HubSpot’s Lead Scoring feature helps us assign points to leads based on their behavior, demographics, and interactions with our content.
This allows our sales and marketing teams to prioritize high-quality leads and tailor their nurturing efforts accordingly.
How scoring works on HubSpot
HubSpot’s lead scoring is actually a combination of two scores: engagement score (visiting high-intent pages like pricing, opening or clicking on multiple nurture emails, etc.) and fit score (job title, company size, industry, etc.).
- You assign points based on engagement triggers or fit attributes
- You decide what the threshold should be for each scoring (meaning, what score should one reach to become of interest). Note that unless you own an Enterprise license, the maximum score for each scoring is 100.
- Depending on the threshold you defined, your contacts will turn into MQLs when they reach both
How we do it
As much as we’re trying to target our ICP audience - B2B tech companies seeking a partner to grow their business through marketing - our (exceptional!) content obviously attracts marketers outside of this bubble.
Now, our purpose is not to clog our sales pipeline with nurtured contacts and deals that have no chance of landing. We don’t care for generating leads, per se, we want to nurture the right people and move them down our funnel.
To limit the amount irrelevant contacts landing on my colleagues' desks in sales, we are dynamically scoring profiles based on who they are and what they do.
The challenge here is to 1. identify qualifying attributes and behavior, and 2. quantify them.
1. Identify qualifying attributes and behavior
For us, some positive qualifying attributes and behaviors are:
- Contacts from target markets and organizations
- Contacts engaging with our key pages
- Contacts engaging with our nurturing emails etc.
2. Quantify them
Oh boy, there’s been a lot of trial and error there.
You won’t get lead scoring right in a few hours. You’ll get it right in more time than it takes to go through your entire funnel. For us, this is a constant point of optimization.
Quantifying lead-scoring elements
It's the same story here. You have to start somewhere, and you won’t get it right, right away.
We recommend always having two nurturing scores: one for behavioral indicators (website visits, form fills, etc.) and one for qualifying good-fit companies (company size, industry, etc.).
Another tip is to add "behavioral" points when the contact moves forward in the customer journey.
Example:
- Awareness stage: Blog post visit = 1 pts
- Activation stage: Ebook download = 2 pts
- Activation stage: Pricing page or product page visit = 3 pts.
That way, you won’t move contacts down the funnel too quickly based on simple awareness stage article reads, and instead alert sales if someone interesting starts checking out your product page or pricing pages.
Another piece of advice I can give you is to favor lower scores to begin with. That means that instead of attributing 10 points to a key web page visit and another 10 for downloading an ebook, start by giving it 1 point and see how that affects your contacts' scoring.
Remember, with HubSpot's latest iteration of the lead scoring tool, you can't set up scores higher than 100 points unless you own an Enterprise account. This is yet again another reason to be careful with your point attribution.
The above advice is for housekeeping, in case you make a mistake and attribute too many points to an unimportant action. Even though you can edit your contacts’ lifecycle stage on HubSpot, retroactively updating many contacts at once will be tedious (speaking from experience here).
Disqualifying contacts using lead-scoring
It’s also important to note that there are two ways to disqualify contacts from lead scoring on HubSpot.
The legacy way and the new way.
The new lead scoring tool doesn't allow for negative points, only the legacy tool does.
- The legacy way: And so, to disqualify irrelevant contacts, you can use the legacy lead-scoring tool to assign negative points to disqualify attributes and specific behaviors.
- The new way: If you use the new lead scoring tool, you can decide who HubSpot calculates the scores for and whom to leave empty. So you can set up a list of people, e.g., your own employees or job seekers, and then add this list to the score settings so that it won't score them at all.
Align what we do with sales (and optimize)
The worst thing you could do is send a shitload of unqualified leads to your sales team.
They will lose trust in you and will likely ignore even good leads in the future.
You need to ensure that what the marketing team considers qualified (MQL) is aligned with what the sales team considers qualified (SQL).
We recommend sitting down with your sales team, explaining what touch points you can measure from engagement (chances are, they don't know all your web content by heart), and asking them: What would a lead need to do for you to consider it a qualified lead?
Then, do the same exercise for the lead's profile (company firmographics, job title, etc.).
Here again, no magic formula. Just frequent catch-ups and constant fine-tuning.
Analytics and Reporting for Continuous Improvement
Yes, revenue is the end goal for your nurturing program (and if you play your cards right, your nurturing program should contribute to filling your pipeline). But there are other indicators showing the benefits of B2B nurturing:
- Increased conversion rates: Nurturing leads with personalized content helps move them down the funnel faster.
- Higher engagement: Regular, targeted communication keeps prospects engaged and informed.
- Shortened sales cycles: By providing the right information at the right time, nurturing will shorten a lengthy B2B buying process.
- Reviving contacts you’d have otherwise lost: one interesting use case of nurturing is to revive your dormant contacts - or contacts who were once showing interest in your product or service and somehow got lost in the way.
Measure the performance of your nurturing flows
With HubSpot’s reporting, you can measure:
- GOAL SETTING: one of the most common mistakes made with HubSpot workflows is not setting a goal. When creating a nurturing workflow (or any workflow, really), set a goal! This will tell you whether or not your workflow works as intended and, of course, let you know how well it performs. My recommendation is to create a HubSpot list to include contacts meeting the goal and create a custom report.
- Email engagement (opens, clicks, and conversions)
Example performance for one of our short workflows.
- Revenue attribution (identifying which nurturing campaigns contributed to closed deals)
- Lead scoring updates from your nurturing (and how accurate your scoring model is)
Inspired to nurture your contacts?
There’s no magic formula to get anything done (even if you use AI).
Having said that, I hope this has inspired you to build a nurturing program that makes sense for your organization and target audience.
And if you’d like to discuss this further, you can always reach out.