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A standard feature of most marketing automation platforms is the ability to pause our lead nurturing programs when it’s beneficial to do so. But often overlooked are the benefits of being able to pause individual leads in a program.

Why would you want to do this?

Most of us are familiar with the term “hot leads.” These are leads that have been very active in triggering scoring actions, and the owner of that lead may decide that the “hot lead” is ready to be contacted. Great!

However, sales may prefer that the lead not receive any content during their assessment of the lead’s sales qualification. In such a situation, a pause button is perfect!Pause_button

Why not just remove the lead from the lead nurturing stream?

Because sales may determine that the lead isn’t sales-ready. In such a case, they’ll probably want the lead to continue receiving the rest of the content from the content stream they were in. With a pause button, all you have to do is hit “un-pause” and the lead continues receiving content, with no need to re-enter them into the nurturing program.

Another advantage of having a pause button (whether it’s a master pause button for the individual lead or a more granular set of pause buttons to control specific content to the individual) is that it allows sales to further control the content a lead receives, without having to contact marketing or learn the marketing automation platform.

A situation you might run into is when sales has completed a sale and there is a separate platform used to deliver post-sales content (e.g., a mailing list), so the sales rep wants to pause the lead (now a customer) from being nurtured anymore. Instead of sales having to go back and forth with the marketing department, the sales rep can simply pause the lead in the nurturing and then perform whatever process they would usually use to add the customer to the separate content platform.

The technical details of creating a pause nurturing feature can vary platform to platform, but it usually boils down to setting up multiple listeners to listen for a change in the customer relationship management (CRM) software that the sales team uses. The changing of a pause status in the CRM can trigger a set of actions in your marketing automation platform. 

This is only the tip of the iceberg, and the features and logic behind a pause button can vary widely depending on your needs, but we’ve found a pause button useful, and we hope you can too!

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Topics: tips, lead nurturing, sales and marketing alignment