Dick Lee made an excellent post on lead management earlier. I wholeheartedly agree with Dick’s assessment of the state of lead management; D+, needs to focus on the task in hand more!
Lead management is tough. It isn’t as sexy as marketing. It often requires dogged persistence over time before it pays off. And it doesn’t get as well rewarded as commission-driven sales. But it is an absolutely critical link in the early customer lifecycle. If the only real purpose of marketing is to create a prospect, it follows that the only real purpose of lead management is to create a sales-ready hot-lead. You can probably guess what the real purpose of sales is. (Hint. It is more than just closing the sale.)
Take a look at Brian Carroll’s B2B Lead Generation Blog and Jill Konrath’s Selling to Big Companies blogs for two excellent resources on all things to do with lead management.
Graham Hill
