Many things with lead generation seem easier than they are. Take sales lead follow-up for example, research shows that sales people do not fully pursue around 70% of leads generated by marketing.
That amounts to literally billions of wasted marketing dollars. The speed of lead follow-up is a major contributor to this problem.
KnowledgeStorm and The Artemis Group just completed a benchmarking study of best practices for pursuing online leads (registration required). They concluded, “Leads get cold quickly, so it is vital that vendors implement prompt, effective lead follow-up processes.”
I’ve closed-the-loop on thousands of leads with clients and unquestionably, the speed of follow-up and the degree of lead acceptance by the sales people has a major impact on ROI.
One of my clients; centrally qualifies all their leads (via phone) against their universal lead definition standard with in 2-hours, distributes and requires their field sales force to follow up on web inquiries with in 4 to 8-hours. They generate 12,000 inquiries per year, mostly via their website.
If a qualified sales is not followed up by the assigned sales person with in 24-hours, they can count on a call from their sales manager. If a sales lead goes more than 48-hours before being touched, that sales person risks having that lead assigned to someone else – someone with more selling time capacity.
Does that seem a bit too militant for your taste? Perhaps. For them it works. They have an amazing lead conversion rate, which is triple the amount of their industry peers. They are successfully beating three Fortune 500 competitors who are 50 times their size.
One final thought, If your sales team cannot turn leads back over for additional lead nurturing you are just throwing a lot of your budget on the scrap heap.
We have discovered that 30% – 45% of leads that were not considered viable opportunities by the sales team actually became sales ready opportunities within 12-months. They re-captured a $1million dollars per month in potential revenue by simply giving their sales team the ability to hand the baton back.
Brian Carroll is the CEO of InTouch Inc. InTouch is a 50-person company focused on delivering effective lead generation solutions for “the complex sale.”
Brian authors the very interesting B2B Lead Generation Blog which focuses on B2B lead generation, sales leads, and marketing for the complex sale.
