As soon as a lead is received it's mechanically tossed over to the sales department for follow up. Many companies have done it this way for so long that the practice simply isn't questioned.

It should be!

Most prospects aren't ready to buy after the first or second contact. In fact, it typically takes seven or eight contacts for the prospect to build sufficient knowledge and trust so that they can buy. For more complicated business to business transactions, it may take ten to twenty contacts.

Think about a purchase that you made recently. How many times did you visit the company's website, talk with a sales person, read the product literature, call the 800 number? When did you make your decision? Did that "Eureka" moment occur while you were reading the company's literature or standing on the showroom floor with the sales person?

If you're like most people, you took your time, you conducted your research, you formulated your own view of what the company stood for and whether the product would do what you needed it to do. A full 80% of your fellow consumers wait until after the fifth contact with the company to make a decision.

Do you expect your prospects to act any differently?

Oh, and by the way 90% of sales people typically give up after the fourth contact...just as the prospect is warming up to the idea of a purchase. Should your sales people be conducting these initial outreaches or should the marketing organization invest in prospect development and turn over the qualified prospect when he or she truly is ready to entertain a buying discussion?

What's a savvy marketer to do?

Handling prospects is different than clearing 2 feet of snow off your driveway. It takes patience, close monitoring of metrics and a strong working relationship between marketing and sales.

It's like working together to find a single snowflake on a driveway covered in snow. Without a system, you'll never find it. Should you use a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers or a 400 horsepower four wheel drive snowplow?

Once you've set up a closed loop lead management process, you can start tweaking the intervals between touches and testing different types of touches to identify the optimal mix.

In our experience, two critical success factors help to ensure effective demand generation:

• Patience on the part of the management team to "do it right" rather than to do it quickly.
• Effective monitoring of the key data points in the closed loop lead management process.