Review of The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing - A Marketo Workbook

Marketo's - Definitive Guide-to-lead-nurturing from Sanford Diday

Marketo is a very interesting company focusing on lead to revenue software and tools to efficiently handle potentials customers and interaction between your sales and marketing people. Here's a quick summary and some highlights:

At Marketo, all incoming leads are scored using a combination based on:

• lead source 
• demographics
• activities

Scores with:

• less than 65 points require further nurturing -> prospects 
• more than 65 points pass on to sales for further qualification -> leads

Marketo is using:

• Use single opt-in for leads that have filled out a web form
• Use double opt-in for others, follow up, if no response, suspend in database

After the opt-in welcome, present an option to accelerate the communications.

An example of a possible buying cycle:

If the buying cycle for your product is threemonths, your lead nurturing path might look like this:

• Day 1 - Follow-up with introductory email
• Day 10 - Email offering new content related to first download and subsequent Web site activity
• Day 15 - Personal email from sales rep
• Day 30 - Email best practices whitepaper
• Day 45 - Call from sales rep to ‘check in’
• Day 60 - Email promoting webinar series
• Day 75 - Personal email from sales rep offering a product demo
• Day 85 - Call from sales rep to schedule in-person meeting
• Day 90 - Send sales proposal via email


Marketo’s nurturing program has four main roles:

• marketing manager 
• marketing executive
• sales rep
• agency

And three main buying stages:

• early stage awareness
• middlestage consideration
• latestage evaluation.

There are over 50 pieces of nurturing content spread across those roles and stages, so the typical prospect will receive between 10 and 30 total touches across the nurturing programs.

Make the Most Out of Trigger-based Marketing

• Web pages: visiting the page on your Web site that explains how to buy
• Content: downloading content you’ve marked as being relevant to later stage buyers
• Email: opening every email you send
• Scoring: If a prospect is “stuck” at the same score with no recent activity, it may be time to try a different approach or offer


Use of Accelerator campaigns in two ways.

1) When Prospects reach a specific threshold lead score that indicates interest but then stall out before making it all the way to becoming “sales ready”, we trigger a series of high value offers intended to spark re-engagement.

2) We watch for specific behaviors that indicate when we should move a prospect from Early Stage nurturing to Mid-Stage, or Mid-Stage nurturing to Late Stage.

There are three important categories of Lead Lifecycle campaigns:
• Lead Handoff
• Lead Recycling
• New Customers

Calculating the ROI of Lead Nurturing

Before Nurturing
A: Won Opportunities from Leads Under 30 days old - Number A

B: Won Opportunities from Leads Over 30 days old - Number B

C: Won Opportunities Total Marketing-Generated - Number C


If B > A, you are nurturing well (or possibly not generating enough new leads).

If not, subtract A – B to get the number of extra marketing-generated won opportunities you might expect from better lead nurturing.

Calculate (A – B) / C to measure the % increase in total marketing-generated revenue from better lead nurturing at your company.



The common result is that with nurturing you increase number B generating an overall higher C.




Do you want more sales? Then contact Thomas Lidforss International for a discussion.