No question, leads have been much harder to come by in the present economy.  This has led B2Bs to focus much more strongly on their existing lead pipeline, on the theory that it will be easier to close one of those than to generate a new lead.

This focus extends even to “stalled” leads… those that have started through your nurturing process, but whose forward progress appears to have stopped.  In better times, you might demote these one stage;  wait them out to see if they restart;  or just write them off as evidently not as good as they first seemed.  But these are not those times, so it behooves any B2B to figure out what’s up with those stalled leads.

Writing in The DemandGen Report, Dave Green discusses four practices that will improve results at each stage of the cycle, including helping free up those stuck leads:

Research.  Marketing and Sales should conduct research to determine precisely why sales are stalling, and what incentives or other tactics might get them moving again.  Ideally, such surveys will be transparently integrated into the overall nurturing program.

Lead definition.  While many B2Bs have universal definitions of what constitutes a qualified lead in place, those definitions should be revisited frequently.  In theory at least, in a down economy salespeople should be less swamped, and therefore able to talk to prospects at an earlier point in the cycle.

Scalable nurturing/re-engagement.  Use what was learned from the research to refine what stalled leads see next.  How much more likely is a prospect to respond, if the next email they get speaks directly to the reasons they had for putting their buying cycle on hold?

Phone followup/re-engagement.  No matter how sophisticated your automated nurturing process is, there’s simply no substitute for human interaction.  Well-trained telemarketing representatives can leverage a response event to engage more senior decision makers and make important judgment calls about mission-critical lead qualification criteria.

While no one can change the economy, most B2Bs can improve the yield on their lead generation investment by following these four simple guidelines;  but it all starts with a deep understanding of your customer and their buying behavior.