In the beginning, someone raises a hand and says "Yes – tell me more." From that moment on, a company becomes engaged in one of the most critical functions that impacts sales success: lead management.

Lead Management is the process of rapidly and effectively creating, nurturing, distributing and analyzing leads. The ultimate goal? To increase the likelihood that a lead will convert to a qualified opportunity and then a new, satisfied customer.

Change is sweeping through marketing organizations everywhere. Expectations are rising – “give us more, better quality leads, more quickly” – while budgets and headcounts shrink. The mandate of doing more with less has never been more apparent, and pressure is increasing for marketing teams to draw a direct line drawn between their activities and the bottom line.

The good news for marketing professionals is that lead management technology, one of the key tools that demonstrates marketing value in the charts and stats that executives demand, is now widely available. It’s no longer merely the ‘Fortunate 500‘ who can afford to buy and implement this powerful capability, and have marketing teams that are intensely, quantitatively accountable.

As lead management strategies - and the processes and technologies that bring them to life - come within the reach of mid-sized and smaller businesses, the value proposition and timeliness of these tools is becoming irresistible to those marketers who need to prove their worth to their organization.

Marketing Today

Traditionally, marketers have been ‘idea’ people, experimenting with creative ways to generate leads and create awareness. For some time, it was accepted that the benefit of marketing would be soft and qualitative in nature –  “We know half of our marketing activities are useful – we just don’t know which half.”  “We know marketing is necessary, we just don’t know how good we are at it.”

ROI-based reporting had long been an inexact science. But as our collective understanding and visibility improves, what we see is alarming. Gartner recently released studies suggesting that the vast majority of all sales leads – “more than 70% are never acted on because they do not reach the right person or organization at the right time”.1

This is a sobering reality for marketers everywhere.

1 Source: Gartner: “Re-engineering Lead Management”: Claudio Marcus: October 3, 2002