Lead Nurturing is the process of interacting with new leads and churning existing ones over a period of time to help stimulate inbound sales inquiries and automate lead qualification to connect your sales force with prospects that are ready to engage with sales. This is usually accomplished by using a marketing automation vendor to dynamically generate a "personalized email" from their assigned salesperson, but it is also done using other delivery methods like SMS, Print Mail, Fax, Chat, Social Media and Call-on-Demand. Personalization helps increase response rates, leading to a faster conversion to a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) for a salesperson in the CRM.

Nurturing leads with automation reduces the time spent on cold-calling and manually qualifying inadequate leads by discovering new sales opportunities within existing leads as their budget and need changes over time.