Micro Goals: Craft smaller, achievable goals for each stage of the nurturing journey. These could include things like the prospect engaging with your digital content, engaging with a social media post, returning an email, attending a webinar, or taking a phone or face-to-face meeting. Meeting these micro goals makes you feel better and provides a more precise gauge of a lead’s potential over the long term. Regular Progress Reviews: Once you've set your micro goals, regularly review your progress against these micro goals. This practice can unveil areas of improvement and help determine whether a lead merits further pursuit. For instance, you may notice that certain content efforts or email campaigns tend to result in disengagement. If so, revisit that content or those campaigns to uncover the source of the undesirable results. Learn and Adapt: As you chronicle your learnings from each interaction, regardless of its outcome, use the insights to refine your strategies for upcoming prospects. Never be afraid to change your approach or try new things. Ruthlessly delete anything that isn't working for you and do not see that as a failure. Failure only occurs when you fail to achieve a goal AND fail to learn anything from that experience. The worst thing you can do is continue with an ineffective tactic because you don't want to "give up." Feedback Loop: If you're lucky enough to have a team helping with business development, initiate a feedback loop to share insights and learnings from each business development effort. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. I once used the agency's internal chat function to do this. I set up a Business Development channel, and everyone engaged in business development had access. We used hashtags to help us tag our posts, creating a searchable database of posts, content, templates, results, and reports. It was an instant and always-growing knowledge base that proved extremely valuable. As long as that knowledge base grew, I knew our business development efforts added value. Nurture Potential Social Agents: Recognize that even non-converting prospects can create value for your business development efforts if they become Social Agents.  Don't make the mistake of writing off a non-converting prospect or a prospect that you determine isn't or never could be qualified. Nurtured properly, they might just become the most valuable client that never hires you. A positive interaction with you and your firm can lead to referrals, creating a ripple effect of opportunities even when the immediate goal isn’t met. Said differently, a client can hire you once but a Social Agent can tell everyone to hire you!