Connecting with prospects is a challenge for many businesses. We spend all kinds of marketing, advertising and promotional dollars trying to get prospects to raise their hands, then we inevitably do one of two things:

1.      We have sales hound them

2.      We ignore them

We did a little digging and found out that most businesses choose #2.

We did a study on the propensity to buy related to lead follow up a few years back and found that time to respond was a key (but often ignored) variable in whether or not someone eventually purchased. The company in question was selling a $75,000 a year software-as-a-service, so it’s not a trivial purchase we’re talking about. It turns out that the propensity to buy actually decreased nearly 90% if a prospect was not contacted within 72 hours of an inquiry to the seller. We graphed it, analyzed it and scratched our collective heads. To a business person 72 hours is really three 8-10 hour days. Could propensity to buy really decay some 3% per business hour?

Yes.

So much money invested in acquisition -- so little attention made to connecting the dots between marketing and sales, ensuring a successful handoff to sales.

And the even bigger challenge came when sales did make the follow up calls. Most of their effort was completely wasted with redundant and irrelevant questions and abrasive qualifying questions that completely turned off the potential buyers.

So these areas have become a focus of Connection Model and its principal strategists: HOW to ensure prospects get handed off in timely fashion, WHO they get handed off to, and WHAT content they are followed up with. If you need some great ideas in this area, or need a hand getting started fixing the issues, drop us a line at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Search, Blogging and Social Media have accelerated the opportunities for generating qualified prospects online.

It’s now possible to create a measurable, cost-efficient online lead generation program online that was inconceivable just five years ago. A client out of Florida generates 100% of their training business customers from these areas – without one dollar of investment in traditional outbound media.

In a study of businesses already engaged in search, blogging and social media, conducted by HubSpot late in 2008, The State of Inbound Marketing, it was revealed that businesses with an “inbound focus” – those that had shifted a majority of their marketing budgets to search marketing, blogging and social media and away from traditional outbound marketing approaches like direct mail, tradeshows and print advertising – had a cost per lead only 40% as much as those businesses still stuck relying on traditional outbound tactics.

Overall average cost per lead for inbound-focused businesses was around $80, while those with an outbound-focus reported average cost per lead of over $210.

The differences were even more pronounced for large businesses: $120 per lead for inbound-focused businesses vs. over $500 for outbound-focused organizations.

The technology vertical reported a difference equally striking: $100 per lead for inbound-focused businesses vs. over $375 for outbound-focused organizations.

Is it time to create and implement a profitable, effective and measurable online prospect generating programs in your business? If you need some great ideas on the subject or some help getting started, drop us a line at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it