Am I ready to implement lead nurturing?

In B2B sales, the journey from prospect to client is rarely a straight line. It is often a complex and long sales cycle that may involve several stakeholders, that is highly dependent on trust and timing.

Most prospects are not ready to buy at the time of first contact, and the overwhelming majority of new leads never translate into sales without effective and sustained follow-up. 

For a Sales Director, this represents a massive pipeline leakage and a failure to capitalise on marketing and outreach investments.

So how do we make sure closing deals is not left to luck?

Lead nurturing is the strategic answer to this inefficiency. It is the systematic process of building relationships with prospects over time, guiding them through a complex buying journey until they are ready to purchase. This includes setting up advanced strategies like:

• Lead Recycling: re-engaging old or cold leads

• Account-Based Marketing (ABM): targeting high-value accounts with personalised outreach

When done right, nurturing transforms your sales pipeline: 

• More revenue via:

  • More SQL meetings for your sales team

  • High sales velocity

• Leaner organisation via:

  • Lower CAC

  • Improved sales team pipe

  • Higher data quality

• A stronger brand

But how do you know if your organisation is ready to move from luck-based selling processes to nurturing frameworks that drive high levels of ROI?

I) The ROI perspective: Who needs nurturing most?

Before diving into the technical aspects of nurturing, let’s start with assessing if nurturing is actually a strategic lever for your business.

While almost every B2B company can benefit from improved lead engagement, businesses with high stakes and complexity will likely benefit the most from an efficient nurturing system.

You know you need a dedicated nurturing system if your business profile fits one or more of the following categories:

Long and Complex Sales Cycles

When a typical sales cycle spans weeks or months (common in enterprise software, industrial equipment, or complex consulting services), prospects require 5 to 20+ touchpoints to mature and convert. These leads need continuous engagement and relevant information over time.

In this scenario, lead nurturing ensures your brand remains "top-of-mind" and establishes trust across repeated interactions.

Implementing nurturing will shorten sales cycles, accelerating deals that would otherwise stagnate or even sign with the competition.

High-Value or Complex Solutions

For businesses selling solutions with a high Annual Contract Value (like SaaS platforms, B2B professional services, or technical manufacturing systems), purchases require significant education and trust-building efforts.

Because the buyer is investing substantial capital, they demand continuous and insightful content that demonstrates expertise and value. 

Nurturing provides the sustained engagement necessary to justify the product or services value and to address complex questions and objections over time.

Multi-Stakeholder Deals

B2B purchasing is often a shared decision involving many stakeholders, ranging from technical evaluators to executives and procurement.

If a sales process requires engaging with multiple personas, a generic nurturing campaign may not be optimal. Advanced frameworks like ABM are built specifically for this challenge, enabling personalised outreach to each member with tailored content (ROI case studies, technical specifications, compliance etc…).

This should shorten sales cycles and improve closing probabilities by increasing chances each stakeholder is on your side and advocates for your solution.

Industries Requiring Trust and Credibility

Sectors like finance, healthcare, legal, or any B2B field where credibility is paramount will benefit from nurturing. When a prospect requires a high level of trust (due to critical operational impact, strict regulations or large financial expenditures), a nurturing programme that consistently provides insightful content helps establish your company as a trusted advisor.  

Effectively warming up the relationship for the sales team will result in higher acceptance rates for connection requests and in higher chances to be shortlisted.

Inbound or Content Marketing-Driven Leads

If your marketing efforts produce a lot of inquiries via content downloads, webinar attendees, or website contact forms, nurturing is essential to capitalise on that interest. 

Typically, only a small fraction of inbound leads are ready to buy immediately. In fact, less than 5% of visitors aren't ready to buy on their first visit, so the remainder need to be nurtured until they are sales-ready. Nurturing fills this crucial gap, maximising marketing ROI.

Large Lead Databases

Over time, most B2B companies accumulate large databases of past inquiries, freemium sign-ups, or lapsed interactions: leads who showed initial interest but never converted.

This untapped database is a great opportunity. Leads often go cold due to bad timing, budgeting limits, or a change in personnel, regardless of your product’s value to the company.

Lead Recycling, the framework for re-engaging these inactive contacts with new content, is far more cost-effective than generating brand new leads from scratch. Indeed, converting old leads amounts to only a fraction of the cost of new lead acquisition.

If a CRM is full of promising contacts that went cold, it is probably worth implementing a recycling framework to revive those opportunities.

All B2B Sectors (when sales are not instant)

The advantages of lead nurturing are not limited to a particular industry. Whether in technology, manufacturing, professional services, finance, or healthcare… if a sales process involves complex decision-making, relationship-building or trust, nurturing will most likely boost revenues.

If a B2B business faces situations where buyers don’t immediately convert (which is the case in most sectors), it will benefit from lead nurturing frameworks. The more complex a sales process is, and the more content the buyer needs, the higher the impact will be.

II) The internal diagnostic: operational readiness

The decision to implement advanced nurturing, whether via Lead Recycling, full-scale ABM, or AI agents, is a foundational project for any organisation. Its success requires a few key operational and technical pre-requisites.

1) Sufficient Lead Volume

Manual, one-to-one nurturing is feasible only for small volumes of deals. However, for most growing B2B firms, the volume of marketing-generated leads will inevitably exceed what sales can handle individually. 

When your lead flow hits a critical mass from campaigns, trade shows, or website inquiries, you face a significant problem: a vast majority of those prospects are not ready to buy on their first interaction. 

If these leads are neglected, the original investment in generating them is wasted, leading to substantial pipeline stagnation. Therefore, if you are generating leads and observing that only a small percentage convert quickly, that is a technical signal that a scalable automated system is required to develop the rest. 

This transition shifts your focus from simply chasing every new lead to nurturing your pool of opportunities to generate more sales-ready leads overall.

2) A data-driven lead scoring

Nurturing works if sales reps engage with the prospect at the right moment. This requires a quantitative, objective definition of what a "sales-ready" lead is.

It usually requires the following elements:

• A weighted scoring model: A robust scoring system that blends objective criteria with demonstrated behavioral intent. A widely used ratio for this score is 60% based on behavioral intent (actions like website visits, email engagement…) and 40% based on ICP and persona (job title, company size, industry…).

• Clear thresholds: criterion to determine team ownership, for example with Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) for a lead who fills out a high-value contact form or achieves a 75-point score, and Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) for a lead who requests a demo, or achieves a 100-point score.

• Data integrity: Clean and up-to-date data is also necessary for any automation system, although AI agents can now still deliver decent results with incomplete and unstructured data

3) Integrated pipeline management (Sales and marketing alignment)

Successful nurturing is often hindered by misalignment between sales and marketing. This friction leads to weak lead handoffs, inconsistent messaging, and fragmented data, ultimately resulting in lost opportunities and disengaged prospects.

Alignment can be achieved using a Revenue Operations (RevOps) framework. RevOps aims at unifying the entire revenue team (Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service) under one cohesive strategy:

• Unified Goals: with a single, shared revenue objective that supersedes siloed KPIs.

• Shared processes: a documented and mutually agreed-upon Smarketing playbook or SLA (Service Level Agreement) that defines expectations, vocabulary terms, and core processes (such as leads handoff from marketing to sales).

4) A content inventory

Nurturing is usually fueled by valuable content. 

The quality, relevance, and consistency of content will directly determine the outcome of nurturing campaigns. Many companies selling high-value solutions even require in-depth expert-level content (such as detailed white papers, ROI calculators, and technical webinars) to demonstrate their expertise to multiple technical and executive stakeholders.

As a starting point, nurturing requires just a first layer of content with a few marketing assets adapted for each stage of the buying journey:

• Awareness Stage: Thought leadership, Linkedin activity, industry guides, and high-level content establishing expertise, for instance on a blog.

• Consideration Stage: White papers, informative webinars, and product comparisons.

• Decision Stage: Case studies, ROI calculators, customer testimonials, and consultation offers.

Ideally, it should progressively evolve towards a complete system to produce marketing assets. This content inventory should be mapped precisely to optimise distribution:

• Personalisation focus: by use case, persona, industry, content obsolescence…

• Metrics tracking: with engagement (open rate, CTR…) and conversion metrics

5) The infrastructure backbone

While manual nurturing is possible for a handful of accounts, scalable success requires the right marketing stack.

• Integrated CRM: A functional Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is vital to track the full customer journey, track engagement data, record interactions, enable outreach automation, and support granular segmentation (geographic, behavioral, firmographic).

• ABM Enablement: For high-end strategies like ABM, you need modern digital technologies, such as automation tools, B2B marketing platforms, Marketing Automation Platform (MAP), or AI agents. 

This infrastructure is necessary to surface complex organisational insights, to segment prospects, to facilitate the hyper-personalisation required to engage each contact, and to automate outreach at scale.

6) Willingness to Iterate and Long-Term Perspective

Nurturing is fundamentally a long-term play, requiring a cultural commitment to patience and continuous optimisation. 

It is not a just quick-win, as the full results can only be achieved though an ongoing and iterative strategy. Success comes from meticulously measured results (such as open rates and conversion metrics) and continuous refinement of the approach based on data. 

The most successful organisations treat nurturing as a continuous process of regular optimisation based on data and feedback. The full payoff may take months to materialise with higher conversion rates, larger deal sizes, and a more predictable pipeline.

III) The 10-Points Nurturing Readiness Checklist

Everyone likes checklists right?

For a quick diagnostic, if your organisation scores high on these points, you are operationally ready to deploy advanced nurturing frameworks like Lead Recycling and ABM.

IV) Start nurturing to unlock higher growth

The time for simple, one-off email blasts is over. Modern B2B success is a non-negotiable commitment to cultivating relationships over time. 

Whether ready yet or not, by implementing the operational prerequisites laid out in the 10-point checklist, you can grow your business from mostly relying on luck to strategically building an efficient and predictable pipeline with nurturing.

Ready to accelerate your pipeline?

At Elips, we help Sales Directors operate complex strategies like Account-Based Marketing and high-ROI lead recycling supported by AI agents.

Not ready?

Elips is your partner to help you set up:

• your streamlined, data-driven pipeline

• your content system

• an AI agents toolbox to get your nurturing system running

Let’s secure your next phase of growth.

Author: Etienne Variot

Etienne is the CEO of Elips, and a serial entrepreneur. He believes modern B2B Buying Journeys are no longer linear, and creating a strong relationship with prospects is more crucial than ever. That’s why he founded Elips to manage complex nurturing to enable sales teams to focus their time on what they do best: build relationships.