Phil Lauterjung

This is one of those topics that could easily have twice as many posts, but I think that eight is enough.  Hey, that might make a good name for a TV show – oooohhh now I’m dating myself.

One topic in this series that has only received passing mention is email marketing.  That should clearly be a component of any good lead generation program and I have written about in the past – Tips for Effective Email Marketing Campaigns, Email Marketing: Getting & Keeping Subscribers, and Increase Sales with Marketing in Transactional Emails.  Feel free to take a look at those articles.

While on the subject of email marketing, there was an interesting analysis by MarketingSherpa regarding the change in challenges from last year to this year.  Here’s a summary chart for you to compare with your own situation:

Marketers Rate Past Challenges and Predict how Importance Will Increase

It’s interesting to note that the area with the biggest increase in attention is competing with Social Media.  Email marketing really shouldn’t be competing with social media, it should be integrated to work with social media channels.  Which gives me an idea for another post.  You can watch for that if you’re interested in that topic.

Getting back to our main topic of lead generation, I wanted to give you a better idea as to how you define the different stages of leads.  That will help with lead scoring and evaluating the proper timing on a hand-off to sales.  Our good friends at SiriusDecisions have spent a lot of time and research on this topic and have come up with this chart that defines 5 stages of lead development.

This should give you some concrete ways to monitor your leads through the nurturing process and help prevent them from drifting away to your competitors.

Always remember that successful Integrated Lead Generation is not a one-time event that you then set on auto-pilot.  It needs to be constantly evaluated, looking for ways to improve the process, keeping in mind that the majority of your leads can ultimately become customers.

There will also be future posts on this topic as software vendors get better at developing tools to make the process easier, and more companies find the ROI to make sense.  My commitment to all of you is to keep you posted on improvements and changes as they happen.

Please let me know if there is any way I can provide additional help.  As always, I welcome you comments and suggestions in the box below.

Photo: © Leah-Anne Thompson – Fotolia.com

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