Making Quality Leads is a Top Priority in 2009

Garnering high quality leads is of the utmost importance in 2009. A current LinkedIn poll proved this to me, and was actually somewhat of a surprise. In the past you have heard me talk a lot about marketing consolidation and optimization. This is important, but it's not as important as delivering the highest quality leads to sales. The LinkedIn poll compared some compelling B2B lead generation priorities for 2009; including the importance of generating more leads, measuring results, working with less budget and reaching decisions makers. I can assure you all of these are important, but I can also assure you lead quality should be your number ONE priority.

You may be thinking how am I going to make higher quality leads? Should I spend more on lists? Should I bid on more expensive keywords? Should I hire more outside sales reps?

All of these things will help, but won't be the answer. You still need to nurture your leads from quality lists and you still need to qualify PPC leads. Hiring more outside reps is great, but only if you can keep their pipeline fresh with quality leads.

The answer is Lead Scoring.

As a matter of fact, I am not the only one who thinks this. CSO Insights' 2008 Lead Life Cycle Optimization study found that technology is playing a larger role: 51 percent of marketing organizations are using lead management systems and 60 percent are using some form of lead scoring before passing leads to sales.

With lead scoring you will transform the relationship between sales and marketing to work seamlessly together by opening up the passive touch marketing activities that are driving forces into qualifying leads for sales to follow-up on in a more active matter. The key features that will excite B2B marketers includes:

* Highly customizable rules to generate more accurate lead scores.

* Intelligent monitoring of customer activity, including web pages visited, time spent on the site, and visits from multiple people from the same company.

* Validation of data entered onto lead forms helps weed out inauthentic leads by scoring them lower.

If you are interested in learning more about lead scoring and marketing automation, please download this informative brochure giving you a checklist of things to consider when evaluating vendors.

Marketing Automation Checklist