This is a question I am asking myself with increased frustration recently. All we hear on the news is recession, doom, financial meltdown etc. You would’ve thought that new sales leads would be vital in these tough economic times. Lead generation is key to all businesses, so why aren’t people taking it seriously?
I took a few days last week to sort out a few areas of my business; these included looking at new CRM systems as well as a new telephony provider. I took a day out to investigate and then contact potential suppliers.
In total I contacted 3 companies via contact forms on their website as well as calling 4 other and emailing a couple. These companies had all done very well to generate leads in the first place either through good websites that were easy to find, good email campaigns or good callers who contacted me at the right time, however the results were astounding.
Of those I called I only managed to speak to the sales departments in 2 companies, of those 1 wasn’t suitable and the other never sent me the information I requested, even after I called back the following day to request it again!!
From those that I contacted via their website and email not one got back to me.
So I was ready to buy and not one company could be bothered to follow up a single enquiry in a professional and courteous manner. I thought about contacting the MD’s to inform them how inept their sales departments were, but then I thought why should I go to the effort.
B2B lead generation takes a lot of planning, effort and costs so please make sure that your sales departments are prepared to follow up leads and that your marketing department can track all inbound leads and their success.
If your company can’t be bothered to follow up sales leads then please don’t bother marketing yourselves because all it does is make buyers frustrated.