QUESTION: What do you do with leads once you have generated them?

This important question is overlooked by almost everyone. It is almost always the cause of failure in what would otherwise be powerful web marketing campaigns. But the obvious answer is easier said than done:

ANSWER: You respond to them immediately and often to qualify them into prospects.

Many organizations spend lots of money each month with MSN, Yahoo and especially Google to lure visitors to their website. These same companies invest significant amounts up front in building beautiful web sites to attract clicks. They even use analytical or testing tools like WebSTAT, WebTrends or Omniture to analyze how to turn these clicks to leads.

The issue comes when they let those leads sit in the sales managers’ inbox for 48 to 72 hours. This is still the average response time to leads.

Leads are most often manually routed and typed by hand into a customer database like InsideSales.com, RightNow Technologies or Salesforce.com before the correct sales representative gets back with them.

Our research shows that the average salesperson only tries 4 to 5 times to contact them within the first week or two. That means only one-half (55%) of a company’s expensive web leads will actually get contacted.

By the time they get contacted (if they get called back) a competitor has often reached them first and is well on their way to another customer, your customer.

Why? Because they called them back immediately, and followed up often enough to make contact.

Just how quickly do they follow up? Within minutes and seconds, not days and hours. And they keep making attempts, often at different times of day and different days of the week until they can begin the sales process.

Why spend thousands of dollars on generating clicks, well designed websites, and powerful analytics if you are going to let your leads sit for nearly 3 days and contact roughly half of your potential prospects? The thought is almost insulting, yet that is what happens most of the time.

There are solutions just coming out that trigger callback attempts within seconds of entering lead data in a web form. The technology prompts a sales rep to continue to make dozens or more attempts at different times of the day and different days of the week to boost contact rates above 85%. Also, these solutions can automatically market to leads and continue to generate prospects every 3-4 weeks for many years or more.

We at InsideSales.com call this ‘Lead Response Management’, responding immediately and touching a lead many more times. This assists in wringing every last bit of value out of your costly leads and tracking a true return from your lead sources.

This overlooked oasis of opportunity may just be the next key to search marketing. It lies hidden somewhere between Lead Generation and the Sales Process or right where the handoff commonly occurs between the Marketing Department and Sales. It’s the pain that everyone feels but no one is doing anything about, until now.

Kenneth D. Krogue is the Co-Founder of InsideSales.com, the first internet-based lead response management CRM database solution with built in dialer and voice messaging technologies. InsideSales.com is in the process of integration as a partner with WebSTAT in helping companies convert and qualify leads better.

Ken has nearly 20 years experience in building and management of teams and technologies for remote selling capabilities. He built the fastest growing department at Franklin Qwest (Now Franklin Covey) and was a co-founder of UCN, Inc. a leading hosted contact center solutions provider. Ken can be reached at 801-853-4090 and the solutions he discusses are now in production to try for yourself by going to www.insidesales.com.