Lead Response Management—The Untapped Frontier to Internet Marketing

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Lead Response Management—The Untapped Frontier to Internet Marketing

By: Ken Krogue

QUESTION: What do you do with leads once you generate them?

This question goes unaddressed by just about every web marketer. It is quite often the cause of failure in what would otherwise be successful web marketing campaigns. But the obvious answer is easier said than done:

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

Many organizations invest thousands of dollars each month with MSN, Yahoo, Business.com and especially Google to lure visitors to their website. These same companies invest tens of thousands in building beautiful web sites to attract visitors. They even use analytical or testing tools like WebTrends, WebSideStory, WebSTAT or Omniture to analyze how to turn these visitors to leads.

The issue comes when they let those leads to sit in some 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 representative to call them back.

Our research shows that most salespeople only dials 4 to 5 times to get in touch with them the first week then they move on. That means only 55% of a company’s expensive web leads will actually get contacted.

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

Why? Because they called them back immediately, and followed up often enough to make contact.

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

Why spend thousands of dollars on driving traffic, well designed websites, and powerful analytics if you are going to let your leads sit for 2 days and contact just over half of your potential prospects? The question is almost insulting, yet that is exactly what happens.

There are exciting new systems being released that trigger callback attempts almost immediately. They will continue to make dozens or more attempts at predefined times of the day and different days of the week to dramatically raise contact rates above 85%. Also, these solutions can be set up to automatically market to leads and continue to convert prospects every 3-4 weeks for 2 years or more.

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

This forgotten oasis of opportunity may just be the next frontier of internet marketing. It lies hidden somewhere between Lead Generation and the Sales Process or right where the handoff commonly occurs between the marketing and sales. It’s the pain that everyone realizes but no one is doing anything about, until now.

Article Source: http://www.find-affiliate-advice.com

Kenneth Krogue is the Co-Founder of InsideSales.com, the first web-based lead response management database solution with built in voice messaging and dialer technologies. Kenneth has two decades experience in building and management of teams and technologies for remote selling capabilities. He built the original inside sales department at Franklin Qwest (Now Franklin Covey) and was a co-founder of UCN, Inc. a leading on-demand contact center solutions provider. Kenneth is available at 801-853-4090 and the solutions he discusses can be demonstrated by going to www.insidesales.com.

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