Inquiry management and search marketing strategy

BtoB Magazine's Carol Krol interviewed Kevin Lee, executive chairman of Did-it Search Marketing on "Effective Search Strategies." I first met Kevin as a fellow speaker at MarketingSherpa's first Lead Generation Summit.

I liked what Kevin had to say when Krol asked him this question, "What are the top three things a marketer should be wary of when evaluating a search marketing strategy?" I think Kevin's points serve as a good reminder for web inquiry management.

I've summarized Kevin's three points:

1. Don’t be too Web myopic. Don’t focus exclusively on Web-based leads because typically in a b-to-b environment, a prospect may choose to communicate with your company by telephone or some other channel.
2. All leads are not created equal. This is true offline and online. Don't oversimplify. Qualify the leads first.
3. The velocity of inquiry follow-up matters. Your response time say's more about you then you realize. If your competition takes 24 hours to respond and it takes you days to respond, you’re in big trouble. And don't just send a canned response either.

BtoB Magazine: Effective search strategies

Comments

[Rebecca Caroe]

Brian, you are so right about the third one - velocity... It just happened to me earlier this week.

it so impressed me I blogged it right away with your comment.
http://caroe.typepad.com/rebecca_caroe/2007/08/sales-lead-mana.html

cheers

Rebecca Caroe

[Adam Davis]

I just wanted to present a small counter point regarding the velocity of follow-up. Generally speaking, swift follow-up is a good thing, but I've actually seen this go too far. While performing software evaluations, I have at times filled out generic online inquiry forms and had people call me back within MINUTES. I know that this may sound impressive to some people, but to me it actually smacked of desperation. I assumed that my information had immediately been forwarded to some disjointed call center and I wondered how much business the company really did if their people were so avidly jumping on every possible inquiry.