B2B Sales Lead

Billions of dollars from business-to-business marketing budgets are spent each year on sales lead generation. Billions more dollars are spent to fulfill and follow up on marketing responses, and to determine which sales leads are qualified and ready for sales attention. Unfortunately, much of this investment in B2B sales lead generation is wasted. Why? Because many sales lead generation programs and lead qualification efforts are not in harmony with the needs of sales.

With this in mind, have you optimized your company's sales lead generation programs to be in harmony with the needs of your salespeople, reps, resellers or distributors? Here are some questions to ask yourself:

Have you built consensus with sales management on the definition of a qualified sales lead? Has this definition been clearly communicated to all parties?

Typical definitions include criteria such as:
- Does the prospect have a need or an application for your product or service?
- What is the prospect's role in the decision-making process?
- What is the prospect's timing for purchase or implementation?
- What is the status of the prospect's budget?
- What is the size of the opportunity?

Have you calculated how many qualified sales leads are needed in the sales pipeline in order to meet or exceed the company's sales revenue goals? Have you broken that number down into how many qualified sales leads are needed each month and each quarter? Have you built your company's sales lead generation programs with those target numbers in mind?

Have you put in place programs specifically designed to weed out the non-prospects and nurture the longer-term, not-yet-qualified opportunities-only forwarding the truly qualified sales leads to salespeople, reps, resellers or distributors for follow-up? Have you budgeted appropriately for this important sales lead development function?

key element to any sales operation is to obtain as many sales leads as possible. However, once you have the sales leads they must be constantly monitored and worked to close the sales. This can be difficult with even a small sales force if there is not a set procedure to monitor and track sales leads. Many companies are turning to sophisticated software programs to assist them in tracking sales leads. There are many types of software on the market that can assist in keeping up with sales leads, but some of it can be very expensive and provide a lot of tools that most companies never use.

necessary to monitor sales leads without the expense and installation problems. Since this sales leads tracking system is designed to be used with existing Outlook programs it is easy to set up and very simple to use. No special training is required for a sales team to use the Prophet system to monitor sales leads.

Instant information is available with the Prophet contact management program.

With the contact management tools provided in the Prophet system a busy dales manager can instantly access information about the sales leads being developed by members of the sales force. This information includes not just the names of the indivi9duals or companies, but back-up information such as copies of correspondences and contracts related to the sales leads. All appointments involving these dales leads can be tracked so none will be missed and new ones can be easily made. The system also allows automated e-mails to be sent to sales leads so that constant contact is maintained. Every member of the sales team is kept up to date with all of the necessary information about sales leads