Clicks 'n Conversions Blog

This article was first published  December 18, 2007 on the Tatum Marketing blog

Interested in a quick way to both distract your sales people AND ensure that most of your best opportunities never get properly developed? It’s easy. Simply pass all inbound inquiries and new contacts directly to your sales force for follow up

It’s startling how many technology marketing programs allow this to happen.

We know for a fact that as many as 80% or more of technology buyers first contact a vendor well in advance of wanting to talk with a sales person. It’s critical that your technology marketing process takes this into account and filters inbound leads and new contacts to separate the ready-to-buy from the just-getting-started.

Here’s one way to do it. Before you pass inquiries to the sales team, do the following:

1. Review the inquiries visually and delete or archive the obvious junk. In any lead generation campaign, you’ll get plenty of unintelligible and/or fake contact information that prospects humor themselves by submitting.
2. Identify any inquiries that are clearly not sales prospects. These may be students, competitors, suppliers, media, investors and any number of other people who have a reason to be interested in you other than possibly buying your product. You must follow up with these people, but you don’t need – or want – your sales force to do this.
3. Now, use telemarketing or inside sales support staff to follow up and determine readiness to talk with a sales person. Pass the sales-ready leads directly to sales and put the others into your lead development process.
4. You can also judge the potential sales-readiness of a prospect by paying attention to what the prospect responded to. Prospects who request a product demo or actually ask to be contacted obviously go directly to sales. Prospects who download a whitepaper are far less likely to be receptive to a sales call.

Some technology marketers filter out any contacts with free email accounts such as yahoo, hotmail or gmail. If you’re lucky, your competitors will be making this mistake. Research shows an increasing number of people using personal email accounts to receive and read business information. No need to ignore them.

Too many marketing programs consist of inquiry generation programs and nothing else. A small number of your inbound inquiries can make the leap from initial contact to serious sales discussion. But many, many more require the kind of on-going development that only a solid marketing process can provide.