If you sell high-value services, then the most important part of your marketing by far is the way you nurture relationships with current, ex- and potential clients.

It's not as glamorous as generating new leads – but it's where the real money is.

But…

Most of us are really inconsistent at nurturing relationships.

And inconsistency is the #1 reason nurture marketing fails.

It's not that we don't know what to do. Nurturing relationships isn't rocket science. And there are plenty of sources of great ideas for nurturing like my in-depth guide to follow-up here.

The problem is keeping it up regularly.

Sometimes we get overwhelmed with client work.

And while that's understandable every now and then, if client work is consistently getting in the way of your marketing then you've got a problem.

Maybe you're not valuing your work highly enough so you have to bill 5 full days to hit your revenue goals – leaving no room for marketing.

Maybe you're over-promising or over over-delivering or committing to get things done faster than your client actually needs.

Or maybe you're using client-work as an excuse to push aside the marketing you're not so keen on doing. If you find yourself doing a lot of admin work too, that might well be the case.

Sometimes it's a matter of how we organise ourselves. We don't plan our nurture activities. And we don’t set regular times for them to turn them into a habit.

It's worth checking on yourself every now and then and thinking “how much time did I spend on proactively nurturing my best relationships this week?”

If it's less than an hour you might need to look at why that is.

Maybe you need to rejig your services and pricing so you have more time.

Maybe you need to plan your time better to fit nurture activities in.

And maybe you need to think about why you're avoiding nurture marketing and looking for ways of doing it you don't find so difficult.

Whatever it is, nurture should be a priority.