Admit it. It's a question nagging you at the back of your mind. Whether that sales person is you, the team that works for you, or the team you support as a marketing pro, you always wonder...are we doing enough in follow-up?

In fact, recent studies show that most leads or hot prospects go cold in the first 24 hours (and 3 days on the outside). Yet, many sales teams are not meeting this demand. How do we know? We recently measured the follow-up of a couple of our client's sales teams. We had asked the sales people if they had followed-up. Many said yes. Others said, they had found the leads unqualified. We wondered, "Were we not sending sales qualified leads?" So we called them. Each and every lead that we had passed to the sales pipeline was called and asked about the follow-up process. And we learned...that at best only 25% of the leads had never been followed up on, and many more than that had received only one call.

Why does this happen? We have found there are a couple of reasons for this problem. The first is that sales, marketing, and management teams are not on the same page as to what DEFINES a lead. Marketing feels a lead is a contact in the target market they've captured. Sales feels a lead is someone "shopping" or ready to buy what they have to sell. This difference in semantics can wreak havoc on follow-up.

Further, sales and marketing teams are not always in agreement as to what the follow-up process on leads should to be. And even when these logistics are in place, follow-up procedures can fail due to the lack of sales process discipline and lack of controls.

And, what can we do about it? The first place to start is with the lead definition process. Get everyone on the same page as to what defines a QUALIFIED lead. Next, define your follow-up requirements as to who will follow-up, when (we recommend within 24-hours), and how. Finally, put controls in place and let everyone know about them. For example, conduct the pipeline follow-up process we mentioned earlier. Within 7-days have someone (or hire someone like us!) call each lead passed on to sales and query the lead on their follow-up experience. This keeps the sales team on their toes and gives the marketing team valuable feedback on how to improve their own processes in the future.

Happy selling!

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