Describe lead generation and nurturing

  • 5 minutes

Lead generation and nurturing are essential to driving revenue. Here's what each term means:

  • Lead generation is about capturing interest and identifying people who might buy.
  • Lead nurturing is about building trust, proving relevance, and guiding next steps until the prospect is sales-ready.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys helps you plan, automate, and monitor the full customer journey. Prospects travel from discovery through nurturing and onward to become marketing-qualified or sales-ready leads. Not all leads respond the same way to your organization's marketing initiatives. Some leads naturally identify with your organization and are more likely to respond to the messages they receive. Others aren't as invested and don't respond or engage as often. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys lets you prioritize leads with customizable lead scoring rules. These rules help identify the most engaged leads based on their interactions with your marketing campaigns.

Lead scoring features

Various features support lead scoring, including:

  • Features to identify the best prospects and hand them off to the sales team:
    • Lead scoring
    • Lead qualification
  • Features to capture demand:
    • Lead and opportunity creation in journeys
  • Features to assign work to your sales team:
    • Task creation in journeys
    • Phone call creation in journeys
    • Sales activities creation in journeys

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys helps you nurture and prioritize those leads. You can run targeted, multi-channel campaigns and personalize each customer's journey to generate more sales-ready leads. By personalizing the customer experience, you predict customer intent, get a complete view of your customers, and design a journey that addresses their needs.

Diagram that illustrates the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights journey from discovery to nurturing to sales-ready stages, showing lead scoring from low to high engagement.

For example, as Contoso Coffee runs its lead nurturing campaigns, customers engage and interact with the marketing materials. Contoso assigns point values for each interaction. An email open might be five points and registering for a webinar might be 15 points. After the customer reaches 100 points, the system considers them a sales-ready lead and sends them to the sales staff.

By generating customized sales activities, you integrate your marketing and sales efforts and provide a more cohesive experience for your leads and customers. Creating sales activities directly from real-time journeys helps you track effectiveness and make data-driven decisions to optimize your campaigns.