May 2010

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Sales Lead Management Association^SM May 2010 Newsletter

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In this Issue:

SPECIAL ISSUE FOCUS: Focus on B2C Inquiry Management.  These area must read for B2B marketers.  Yes, I said B2B!

• (PDF) Beyond Qualification: The Impact of Speed on Lead Conversion Rates By Leads360
• (PDF) Making Money on the Other 95% - How Lead Nurturing Triples Sales By Leads360
• CRM, Where is Your Customer and Your Relationship? By Bill Rice, Founder and CEO of Kaleidico
• Lead Organizing is NOT Lead Managing By Keith Burwell,Kaleidico Lead Management Software
• Lead Nurturing, More Than Birthday Cards By Bill Rice, Founder and CEO of Kaleidico
• (PDF) Improving Conversion of Internet Leads in Education By Greg Coleman SVP, Business Development, LeadQual, LLC
• (PDF) Rapid Response to Internet Leads Drives Conversion By Greg Coleman SVP, Business Development, LeadQual, LLC

SLMA SPONSOR SPOTLIGHT:

• PointClear
• SalesForce
• Active Conversion
• Applied DM

SPECIAL ISSUE FOCUS - B to C Articles:

CRM, Where is Your Customer and Your Relationship?

By Leads360

Customer Relationship Management is the bane of most senior executives' existence. It has been preached as the silver bullet for most of their careers, but is rarely executed. Why do 90% of these implementations fail? Why does sales hate every system? Why does marketing work around it? The answer is simple--we don't start with a Customer or a Relationship!

CRM Needs a Little Lead Management

Sales people spend the majority of their productive lives generating and cultivating prospects. The good ones spend the balance of their efforts turning them into life long relationship buyers. Unfortunately, the software that is built for them is deficient. And the deficiency is cleverly hidden in the name--Customer Relationship Management.

Read the full story >>

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Lead Organizing is NOT Lead Managing

By Keith Burwell,Kaleidico Lead Management Software

Understanding the Difference

Your glove compartment, that kitchen drawer, your entire desk. You look at it and say, "I need to organize it." This task becomes a somewhat frequent occurrence. Let's say I want to organize my desk. I will place things where they need to be, get rid of the items that don't belong, create folders, and then I am "organized" for use. The problem still lies in how I operate the remainder of the day, the week, or the period of time until I have to organize it again. But if I "manage" my desk, then various papers, invoices, documents, etc. have a proper place, a standardized flow of getting there, and an ultimate method of disposition. "Managing" these areas means a specific process has been put into play. There is no "periodic" management, only ongoing.

Read the full story >>

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Lead Nurturing, More Than Birthday Cards

By Bill Rice, Founder and CEO of Kaleidico

Customers become leads in your pipeline for a variety of reasons. Not all of them are ready to buy. This does not make them any less valuable, just on a different sales cycle. Lead nurturing can help you capture and convert more of your pipeline--providing you a less volatile and higher yielding marketing and sales ROI.

Let Your Funnel Flow Up and Down

We spend our whole sales career looking at and analyzing sales funnels. We are conditioned to the typical--a lot coming in and only a little coming out. This mental picture locks us into a negative paradigm. Our assumption and behavior becomes one of accepting fallout. But, nothing (short of Do Not Call legislation) should prevent us from putting those no's and non-responsives back into the top of the funnel, nurturing them down a new sales path.

Read the full story >>

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SLMA SPONSOR SPOTLIGHT:

PointClear

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SalesForce

Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. The company's portfolio of Salesforce CRM applications, available at http://www.salesforce.com/products/, has revolutionized the ways that companies collaborate and communicate with their customers across sales, marketing and service. Learn more here >>

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Active Conversion

ActiveConversion is the emerging technology leader in total marketing measurement (TMM) and demand generation. We help companies manage marketing ROI on multiple marketing campaigns and know which leads are sales-ready. Learn more here >>

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Applied DM

Applied DM Research works with customer databases, prospect databases, b2b, b2c, and we have been in business for 15 years. Services include customer segmentation data, prospect list research, database cleansing, direct marketing strategy development, and project management. We love working with companies that have aggressive sales and marketing goals with limited budgets to achieve those goals.Learn more here >>

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