Phil Lauterjung

A few years back I was head of sales for a $70 mil./yr. manufacturing company.  The Executive VP for the company and I had an ongoing debate over metrics to use in evaluating our leads.  His primary measurement was cost-per-lead.  While I felt it was good to know that number I also argued that it was rather meaningless unless we knew how much sales revenue, and over what period of time, we were getting from those leads.

My primary example against the cost-per-lead being meaningful was trade shows.  One could simply collect as many business cards or badge scans as possible and end up driving down your cost-per-lead measurement – but how good are those leads?  A large number of the follow-up contacts went no where and our staff got discouraged and eventually stopped pursuing those “leads”.  Is any of this sounding even slightly familiar?  Or were we the only ones following that rabbit trail to la-la land?

The lead generation landscape has changed even more over the last few years.  While trade shows still rank fairly high as a source of leads, they have been surpassed by the company web site as the primary source of leads.  A number of research reports all show company web sites to be the main source of leads for companies regardless of industry.  One research report showed web sites generating 70% of all leads with trade shows generating less than 48%, and I’m willing to bet there are still a lot of useless leads being brought back from those shows factored into that percentage.

Older, more traditional sources of leads have been reported to be less than 20% of leads.  That would include trade magazines, direct mail, and telemarketing.  When’s the last time you responded to a “bingo” card (do you even remember those?) or knowingly answered a telemarketing call?  Or, called back after receiving a lame voice mail message?

So, here’s the question for you.  If your company web site is the number one source of leads today; why isn’t it the best it can be?  I’m not talking about a pretty, well-designed from a graphic standpoint web site.  There are way too many of those that look really good, but don’t generate anywhere near as many leads as they could.  There are also some really ugly and dated web sites as well.  I’m not advocating that everyone go out and dump your existing web site.  However, make sure that you have done some of the simple and basic Search Engine Optimization tasks that can help.  More on that in the next post in this series.

After all, what needs to happen in order for someone to become a lead through your web site?  Right, they need to be able to find your web site!  All of the research companies that track the use of the web  state that over 90% of purchase decisions (both consumer and business) start the process by searching the web for information.  The days of purchasing people needing to call a few potential vendors to get information is over.  All they need is a good internet connection and a mouse.

With this in mind your web site should be the hub of an integrated lead generation process.  If you expect to grow your business your site should be more than just another pretty brochure parked on the internet that can’t be found.

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Photo Credit:  StanandLou

Announcing a Special 9/11 Tribute

Also, tomorrow is September 11th which is two anniversaries for me.  It’s my wedding anniversary and the anniversary of the World Trade Center attack eight years ago.  Yes, that was the most unusual wedding anniversary my wife and I have shared.  But, the reason I mention this is that I have signed on with a number of other bloggers to do a tribute for one of the victims of that terrorist attack.  I have done some research on the person that was assigned to me, and I promise that you will find his story to be very interesting and very touching.  I was literally in tears as I read many of the tributes and stories that I found about him.  Please tell your friends about this very special posting to commemorate 9/11.

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