Lead Response Management—The Untapped Frontier to Search Marketing

QUESTION: What do you do with leads once you have generated them?

This question goes unaddressed by almost everyone. It is quite often the cause of ineffective results in what would otherwise be successful internet marketing campaigns. But the common-sense answer is easier said than done:

ANSWER: You respond to them quickly and often to qualify them into prospects.

Many companies invest thousands of dollars monthly with Yahoo, MSN, Business.com and especially Google to lure clicks to their website. These same companies invest tens of thousands in building websites to attract clicks. They even use analytical or testing tools like WebSTAT, WebSideStory or Omniture to analyze how to turn these clicks to leads.

The concern comes when they allow those leads to languish in the sales managers’ inbox for 48 to 72 hours before they get typed into a CRM database like RightNow Technologies or Salesforce.com, and finally get routed to the right sales rep to begin the sales process.

Our research shows that the average salesperson only tries 4 to 5 times to contact them the first week then they move on. That means barely half of a company’s costly internet leads will actually get contacted.

By the time they get called back (if they get called back) a competitor has often reached them first and is already close to another customer, your customer.

Why? Because they started the contact process immediately, and followed up often enough to make contact.

Just how quickly do they begin attempting contact? Within seconds and minutes, not hours and days. And they keep calling, often at different times of the day and different days of the week until they initiate contact.

Why spend thousands of dollars on driving traffic, high conversion websites, and expsensive analysis systems if you are going to let your leads sit for nearly 3 days and contact 55% of your potential prospects? The thought is almost insulting, yet that is what most organizations do.

There are exciting new systems available that take control of lead response almost immediately. They will continue to make dozens or more attempts at different times of the day and different days of the week to boost contact rates above eighty-five percent. Also, these same solutions can automatically market to leads and continue to cause prospects every 3-4 weeks for many years or more.

We at InsideSales.com call this ‘Lead Response Management’. Wringing every last ounce of value out of your expensive leads and tracking a true return from your lead sources.

This overlooked oasis of opportunity may just be the next key to online marketing. It lies unnoticed somewhere between the Lead Generation Process and the Sales Process or right where the handoff commonly occurs between the marketing and sales. It’s the pain that everyone feels but no one is doing anything about, until now.

Article Source: http://blogticles.com

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