By Bill Rice The majority of the return on your marketing dollars takes place in sales. Unfortunately, the average sales force is poorly equipped to perform in a changing lead generation environment. A recent study of marketing expenditures, by PricewaterhouseCoopers, showed a dramatic 39% shift to the Internet. This is an obvious response to consumers shifting a significant part of their buying experience to the Web. This is changing your sales force's environment. This of course begs the question, is your sales force equipped for the change? There are three fundamental changes, as you shift your budget, that need to be addressed to ensure success: (1) lead quality, (2) lead nurturing or cultivating, and (3) shift from inbound to outbound customer communication. Lead quality is a challenge of both data accuracy and leveraging the information that customers provide you in an inquiry. The data accuracy challenge calls for lead verification and validation services that can instantly, without delaying initial contact, validate that only viable leads reach the screens of your sales force. Wasted time spent attempting to contact leads with inaccurate or intentionally false information are frustrating to sales and an avoidable weight on marketing returns. Unfortunately, traditional customer relationship management (CRM) and contact management solutions are empty in solving this problem. Even more complex is the challenge of cultivating and nurturing leads. These leads are consumers captured very early in their buying decision. Most, if not all, traditional CRM solutions assume that a sale occurs within a short period or even within a single contact. However, according to recent marketing studies the reality is that 80% of sales close after the fifth contact and 40-68% of disqualified leads became qualified within 12 month. Unfortunately, 73% of survey participants do not have a sales process to re-qualify or re-visit these leads. Wow, calculate what this does to your marketing ROI. Finally, the shift to Internet advertising generates large volumes of inbound electronic data, leads. This data has to be received, filtered, distributed, and managed. This sales flow or lead management process becomes immensely more complex as you consider that the average sales person is typically managing 100-150 simultaneous consumer sales experiences. These multiple sales also involve a number of different communication methods (i.e., telephone, email, text messages, instant messaging), which need to be used and tracked to be coherent and coordinated. This is a significant different sales process from simply responding to inbound calls from more traditional direct mail, TV, and radio broadcast media. These traditional inbound call operations have been met by complex call routing technologies, but there are few equivalents to manage the data intense outbound sales process. Evolving consumer behaviors and advertising media are combining to cause challenges in your sales force. Meeting those challenges with intelligent lead management or customer acquisition technologies can provide immediate and significant results to sales performance and dramatically larger returns on your marketing investments. Contact the Author: Bill Rice
Company: http://www.kaleidico.com
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