Protecting the Legacy
By Eric S. Rabinowitz
About a dozen years ago I attended a marketing symposium sponsored by Microsoft. One topic caught my attention, Nurture Marketing. Since I had been in business with the person that coined the Nurture term, I was very interested in attending this session. Although it might not always seem that way, I am very open to different interpretations of Nurture Marketing. For those people that knew James Paschal Cecil, or “Jim” as we called him, you know it was the joy of his life to hear people speak about the genre that he created known as Nurture and/or Drip Marketing.
Nurture Marketing was created by Jim Cecil almost a decade before the speaker unilaterally bestowed the creation honor on Stanford University’s Business School. Why is this an important story to tell? Jim’s dream was that companies and individuals from around the world would use his techniques nurtured while growing up on a farm, and demonstrated daily by his father and entire family. Jim like a religious evangelist spent over 20 years spreading the nurture marketing word to groups of business CEOs. Jim was originally hired by Microsoft, his next door neighbors in Belleville Washington State, to create a methodology that would influence CEOs and decision makers at small and medium sized companies. Jim utilized the religious metaphors he grew up with to explain the concepts of Nurture Marketing. For example Jim would always mentioned the Laws of the Harvest when explaining why and how Nurture worked. Jim like Sir Isaac Newton was not afraid to stand on the shoulders of giants when defining Nurture Marketing. The concepts of the Emotional Bank Account and deposits before withdrawals was developed by Stephen Covey and became a attributed theme of Nurture Marketing.
Jim’s view of the world and everybody he met revolved around Nurture. So many people were touched by his Nurturing message both in growing their businesses and improving their lives. Jim spoke to thousands of people worldwide about Nurturing Relationships. After one of his many Nurture talks, a lecture attendee approached Jim and told him how Nurture had transformed his life. Jim at first thought it was about another business transformation but after a few minutes realized that Nurture’s concepts had brought together an estranged family, a daughter that had not spoken to her father for many years. Simply by understanding and thinking about what was important to his daughter, creating carefully written and spoken communications over a year, the concepts of Nurture Marketing had brought a family back together. Countless examples exist of business lives that were touched by Nurture Marketing. Brian Ruh an Insurance Agent built his Insurance practice in a suburb of Madison Wisconsin to one of New York Life’s largest practices. My story is another great example of Nurturing Customer Relationships. I built my Help Desk technical support practice form $250K per year to close to $20M in 6- years.