It’s something every B2B is trying to do:  make its scarce marketing dollars exert as much leverage as possible …especially on lead generation.

In his piece for DMNews, Mac McIntosh outlines eight steps for doing just that.  It’ll be worth the click over to get the rest, but here are some of his recommended steps:

• Focus on your existing customer/prospect database.  It just stands to reason:  the folks who already know and/or love your firm are more likely to buy something in the short term than someone you really haven’t introduced yourself to yet.
• Put some effort into tailoring your message to similar groupings based on industry, company size, application need or job function.  One size doesn’t really fit all.
• Make offers your prospects can’t refuse.  In tough times, it takes a really socko offer to get prospects to take action.  Time to revisit those tired old humdrum offers?
• Use multi-touch direct marketing.  Says Mac:  “You’ll generate more by touching 1,000 prospects three times … than you will by touching 3,000 prospects once.  Each contact is another chance to be in the right place at the right time.”
• Retool your SEO and PPC for more leads with a higher likelihood of short-term purchase.
• Leverage social media as another inexpensive way to stay in sight and top-of-mind with your prospects.  It’s cheap, if not free;  and it only takes time.

So much attention is devoted to online lead-generating mechanisms (SEO, PPC, etc.) that much less is given to the less glamorous activities involved in properly handling those leads, once acquired.  And in these recessionary times, leads are just much too precious to waste by mishandling them.

So along comes Mac McIntosh in his Sales Lead Report with a brief checklist of things you must take a hard look at and ensure they’re in good working order:

Fulfillment of requested information.  If it’s all-electronic, no problem;  if you provide a hard-copy/snail-mail option, your process can’t be too snail-like.
Lead database (CRM).  By now, most B2Bs have one;  less common is finding that it is fed promptly with new leads and updated by Marketing and Sales as a result of each nurturing “touch”.
Process for lead distribution to Sales, and a universally-agreed definition of a qualified lead.  Marketing/Sales coordination is where far too many B2Bs fall down, at the cost of wasted leadgen investment and morale in both functions.  Mac gives some success pointers in his piece, but much more guidance is available “out there” (e.g., this post – and many others – from Brian Carroll’s blog).
Nurturing program.  Probably you have one, but it may need a tune-up.  Do some testing to ensure that your email (messages and frequency), move-along offers and telemarketing are all working optimally.
Measurement.  Especially in tight times, it’s critical to report on how these programs are working.  You should know (at minimum) cost per lead, cost per qualified lead, and cost per sale;  which leadgen programs produce the highest ROI;  which nurturing techniques are working and which aren’t.

There’s no real rocket science here;  but it can be easy to forget that your lead pipeline is a chain, and any weak or missing link can negate all the good done in the other steps.

So much ink is spilled over driving traffic, generating leads and conversion… one might conclude that that’s all that matters.  But equally important… what’s happening to all those leads?  More specifically, how long does it take you to respond to them?  For B2Bs, lead response is kind of like baggage claim for an airline:  it’s their last chance to disappoint a customer (or prospect).

Writing on his Sales Lead Insights blog, Mac McIntosh reviews some research showing:

• for the majority of companies that respond by email, the average response time was 13 hours …which means at best the following business day
• for the remainder who use phone, the average time was 44 hours (that’s a week, folks!)

According to InsideSales.com, Omniture has done survey work showing that – incredibly – 45% never responded at all …to any inquiry.  This begs the question:  what was the point of all that investment in SEO, PPC and other lead generation, if they’re just going to ignore the leads anyway?  Aside from the few prospects that are dead-set on buying from them regardless of how they’re treated, these vendors could forego all that lead-gen expense and achieve basically the same results.  As Mac put it:

“In the B2B world, how responsive your company is to its inquiries, or how it handles the follow up of sales leads, has a lot more impact on prospective customers’ perception of your brand than brand advertising ever will.”

In tight economic times, it’s often tempting for Marketing to step up its lead-generating efforts in an attempt to help the company and demonstrate its own value …too often in the process inundating Sales with low-quality leads that are never acted upon.  Another knee-jerk reaction is to focus on driving down cost-per-lead (again demonstrating to top management how it’s helping the company tighten its belt), while most likely driving down average lead quality in the process.

Both of these temptations should be avoided, posts Brian Carroll on his B2B LeadGen Blog.  In fact, Marketing and Sales need to collaborate and actually define what makes a good sales lead in your business.  Clearly, you’re better off with 10 quality leads out of a group of 20 responses than you are with 5 in a group of 50;  and the metric you really need is not the cost to get the 20 or 50, but the cost per each of the 5 or 10 leads that will be pursued …i.e., the cost-per-opportunity, or cost-per-lead-pursued by Sales.

Brian gives some good pointers for how to arrive at a working definition of a good sales lead in this post, and promises more to come;  we’ll stay tuned.