There is a lot of talk about the strategies to generate leads and the best ways to improve ROI just by tweaking the way your leads are generated. But what happens to your leads once you have them? It is great to have lots and lots of leads, but it’s even even to have all of those leads and know what to do with them. Lead generation, or demand generation as some people call it, is only the first step that leads to a sale and an increase in customers.
This article is the first of two dedicated to discussing strategies for lead qualification and nurturing, and ultimately lead management in general.
Marketing works very hard to generate leads. This can cost considerable money for the company as a whole. This is why making the most out of every lead generated is very important. The first step in this process is qualifying your leads, even before any lead nurturing strategy is put into place. The quicker you can do this the better. Only about 20 percent of your initial leads are ready to buy immediately. For this reason, the quicker you can contact your leads, the better chance you have of making more immediate sales. If you wait too long, others will capture that twenty percent.
The initial lead qualification process has to be very quick, this is why in many, if not most cases, using telephony tools such as a dialer is ideal, because the contact is immediate and direct. It is not a passive media like email or direct mail.
Research has shown that if you contact your leads within 5 minutes, the improvement in results can be as much as 800% according to an MIT study.
This is because the likelihood of contacting individuals while they are by a phone and still interested is considerably greater within those first five minutes. Some leads are never successfully contacted, whether the response is relatively quick or not. So even if you threw initial interest aside as a potential factor in winning a sale, the simple fact that you are contacting more people would increase the overall number of lead conversions you win.
This is why qualifying leads quickly is so important. The other reason why it is so important is that the quicker you can identify potential customers, even those who are not ready to buy yet, the quicker you can begin placing lead nurturing efforts in place.
Tags: Lead, Management, Marketing, Marketing Software, Insidesales, Salesforce, Lead response Management, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Dialer, Sales, demand generation, lead generation
September 25, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Well said… Great information, keep up the great work!
September 25, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Definitely correct in your statements but I also think that it comes down to identifying the points of what you want to sell and then targeting the people that actually need them. Its easy to get leads, leads could really be anything but finding the leads that are actually looking for what you have to offer is the tricky part. Different industries also account for some differences in difficulty levels of marketing to those potential leads. For instance Axe marketed their product to 15-30yr. olds with the mindset that the cologne and personal hygiene items would automatically make every woman be attracted to you. Whereas my company, a cast parts producer doesn’t have a chance marketing this way. If we were to produce a commercial of some guy getting all these girls simply because he had this metal part it wouldn’t work well. Plus we are also targeting a much older age group usually between 30-55yrs. old. How do I know this because the companies we are targeting are smaller companies where the owners and VP are the ones that make most decisions.
I think you are right on though, you definitely need to qualify the leads. It cuts down on the Sales costs of taking pain staking time to contact these people only to find they are in some other industry or not interested for whatever reason. That is why marketing accuracy and information is so crucial to marketing.
September 25, 2008 at 5:54 pm
thanks birdman, and I completely agree. Marketing varies per industry a great deal.
September 25, 2008 at 5:55 pm
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