Whether a small company or a large one with a sales force, leads that are always best are ones that are easy to close. But what about prospects that were reached but never closed? They are in an abyss - The Unclosed Sales Lead Abyss, technically speaking.

What are you doing to follow up? Are you following up? Do you have a fixed idea in mind about some time frame that those leads then become dead?

What does it cost you to get that lead? Let’s look at a hypothetical analysis:

•Postcard marketing experts will tell you to send out 5000 postcards. •It costs you $2000.00 to send out those postcards.

•Say you do that and you get 50 calls;

•That is $40.00 per lead.

The Return On Investment (ROI) of this example is as follows…

•You make $2000.00 off of every close.

•You close 20% out of those 50 calls (10 sales).

•You made $10, 000 less 2G’s for postcards = $8000.00.

That is decent Return On Investment (ROI), but what about 40 leads that never closed? That is $1600.00 sitting out there on table, spent with no return.

Now ask yourself, how many of your leads don’t close per month? Take that theoretical situation and multiply $1600 by other 11 months. That is a chunk of change that you are basically blowing.

Don’t get discouraged. Getting educated in marketing and determining your ROI is a major step in right direction. Great ROI is what you should be going for, but don’t stop there. There is more to sniff out.

So, what are you doing to get all of those that initially reached for your product or service?

How many phone calls do you make before you decide that a lead is “unclosable” – zero, two, three? Did you leave a message on their voice mail and they didn’t call back so you dropped them?

Most likely a one-man-band or a two to three-person operation is working harder than a sales force in following up on their leads. How many in a sales force are simply cherry picking their leads, so to speak, and not closing or following up with rest? How many of these dropped leads do you have built up? Can you see waste?

You need to follow up. Even if you didn’t get ROI you anticipated or needed, you still need to follow up. But how? More specifically, what kind of campaign should you do to get even more ROI? Good question. Here’s answer.

First of all, realize that these prospects reached for you, your product or service and you CAN rehabilitate that initial interest. They are much easier to close and more valuable than someone who has never shown interest in your product or service before. Build on that. You don’t now have to send out a mass mailing of postcards again to revitalize their interest – we’re only talking about 20 to 100 leads that need to be followed up with a catchy message each month.

Yes, they responded to a postcard (if that is what was sent) and will respond again if it is right communication. The same postcard may work, but what you are trying to do is send repeat communication to those initial “reachers” and word it in such a way that they will want to reach again. Send a direct mail postcard or an email or both – follow up with repeat mailings to that small cluster of people that is a different, more personal communication than what got them to reach first time.

What would that message be? When you get calls off of your initial mailing, get as much information as possible – cull data.

Have you ever heard of “Database Marketing” or “CRM” (Customer Relationship Management)? This means getting data about each one of those customers/leads and putting them in a database.

What is it that you need to find out? All kinds of things, such as, but not limited to:

1.How they found out about you in first place?

2.What kind of product they are looking for?

A customer relationship system (CRM) system uses technologically-driven strategies to assess customer needs and buying behavior. This allows businesses to market their products and services more effectively. The ever-increasing level of technology available to a CRM system can, however, provide an overwhelming amount of information to a company, not all of it useful. Large corporations compile enough data in their 'data warehouses' each day to occupy a team of marketing analysts for a lifetime. In fact, 'data mining,' a relatively recent term coined by marketers and data analysts, was coined from attempts to sift sales trends and associations out of mountainous volume of data constantly pouring into a company.

This information overload has created a need to give useful meaning to data. This is where a CRM system can be essential. A CRM system takes data mining to next level by focusing on data that will paint clearest customer portrait possible. If a CRM system works properly, a number of important benefits should result, including:

· Customer retention improvement · Increase in call center sales conversion rates · Sales agents are able to more effectively cross-sell products · Deals close more quickly · New customer inflow · Increase in revenue

To get results listed above, a CRM system must take name, address, and other important demographic information into account. Moreover, system must be able to gather information from a wide variety of customer 'touch points', or instances of customer contact. These can include faxes, emails, direct mails, personal sales, etc.

The most important function of any CRM system is to provide you with an accurate profile of your customer. If you can identify your customer, you know how to market, where to focus R&D funds, and what kind of potential growth road blocks you can expect.