I’ve closed-the-loop on thousands of leads with clients and unquestionably, the speed of follow-up and the degree of lead acceptance by the sales team has a major impact on ROI.

One of my clients; centrally qualifies all their leads (via phone) against their universal lead definition with in 2-hours, distributes and requires their field sales force to follow up on those that are sales ready within 8-hours. They generate 12,000 inquiries per year, mostly via their website.

If a qualified sales lead is not followed up by the assigned sales person with in 24-hours, they can count on a call from their sales manager. If a sales lead goes more than 48-hours before being touched, that sales person risks having that lead assigned to someone else – someone with more selling time capacity.

Does that seem a bit too militant for your taste? Perhaps. For them it works. They have an amazing lead conversion rate, which is triple the amount of their industry peers. They are successfully beating three Fortune 500 competitors who are 50 times their size.

One final thought, If your sales team cannot turn leads back over for additional lead nurturing you are just throwing a lot of your budget on the scrap heap.

We have discovered that 30% - 45% of leads that were not considered viable opportunities by the sales team actually became sales ready opportunities within 12-months. This client re-captured a $1.2 million dollars per quarter in revenue by simply giving their sales team the ability to hand the baton back and recycle their leads.