Defining lead quality varies from company to company. Lead quality is one of the key factors when measuring ROI in a campaign. Some companies define leads as respondents that have complete and accurate registration data. Others define leads any respondents that have one valid form of communication (such as email or telephone number). While, many companies define leads as valid based on specific demographics.

I believe any respondent that has shown interest in your solutions and has an accurate form of communication should be considered a good lead.  These leads may be in all stages of the buying cycle.  How these leads are handled is equally important to the lead quality. When a company does not have a plan in place, there is no way to distinguish a very high quality lead vs a low quality leads.  You’ll often find the overall quality of leads increase by applying the steps below.  Regardless of what point of the buying cycle, all respondents should be followed up on.   A follow-up marketing plan needs to be in place before the campaign launches.  Below are some guidelines to improve the quality of your respondents.

1) Ask the ask right questions during the registration process to help segment respondents.
2) Tailor/customize messages to the proper segment
3) Include name of the original offer in the follow-up to generate recall
4) Provide additional offers/incentives to help bring lead through the sales cycle
5) Re-message the leads immediately
6) Avoid generic e-mail follow up
7) Send multiple follow- up emails/offers

Through the years, the one advertising medium that has evolved significantly is face to face events.  A few years back, events were very large, noisy, high traffic conferences that were used primarily for networking by the exhibitors.  They were limited to no filters for attendees and if your competitors were exhibitors, then you were an exhibitor.

Now the focus is more with events as lead generation vehicles that are designed to highlight “ROI” and “time to value” more efficiently with a smaller, more controlled audience.  These invitation only events, road shows, and seminars are now becoming major parts of marketing budgets.  Events of today offer a higher qualified audience who are typically further along in the buying process.  Is there more value in getting 3rd party analysts in a room with your potential customers than launching a seminar with your top notch product marketing team and executives?

What event strategy has worked for you?

I often wonder what kind of help IT marketers want from publishers when it comes to assisting them with their lead management activities. From my perspective, IT companies are now engaged in this activity on a number of levels. As a generalization I’d say that most small and medium companies are still pretty hands-on, slowly but surely introducing sales focused software solutions to help them manage lead flow from marketing to sales and to track conversion from lead to opportunity to actual revenue. Dashboard analysis is seldom shared with my client consulting team but occasionally a client will offer us a perspective on what’s happening behind their lead collection “curtain”.

Larger companies are building out proprietary lead portals and systems, often partnering with sophisticated CRM systems. Ironically, even after they do this, they admit the leads get lost within a myriad of post-marketing activities or fall into a black hole over which they have no control.

In the midst of all this “here’s the leads-now what do we do with them” hoop-la, media publishers are coming up with programs and technologies that can complement marketers’ efforts. From your perspective, what kind of help do you need or want? Should publishers be assisting you in sorting out the leads or just generating them for you and handing them over to you?