Only the following areas see increase in investment:

• Sales enablement
• Lead qualification
• Demand generation

In a CMO panel discussion, the following topics are on CMOs' minds:

• How to monetize their Web traffic
• How to track the effectiveness of their marketing activities
• How to get the marketing and sales tools and information to the sales people timely nad effectively

This article will discuss the lead qualification aspect of the sales activities.

There are many lead generation sources, for example:

In person contacts:

• Tradeshows, seminars, conferences, press events

Marketing campaigns:

• Via traditional communication channels: press tours, trade magazine articles, press releases, news wire press release distributions, magazine articles, interviews,
• Via online traditional communication channels:
• Via online social media channels:
• Direct mail and email marketing:

Telemarketing:

• Use telemarketing and inside sales to prospect and to qualify list contacts

Pitfalls:

The dirty secret of these lead generation methods is that the leads are only as good as the people who collect and utilize them. Often times, tradeshow leads were not followed timely or not followed at all. Visitors to the tradeshows do not necessarily reveal their true intent. Telemarketing and inside sales often produce very poor conversion results.

Web Lead Tracking:

Web is one of the most cost effective way to generate qualified leads. Yet few companies are monetizing their web traffic.

Most of the web traffic tracking analytics tools only provide macro level visitor statistics such as the number of visitors per day, average page views, bounce rate, etc. However, it does not provide crucial information about the corporate visitors. The information that reveals visitor's company, location of the visitor, intent of the visitor, key phrases of interest, contact names, and potential buying stage of the visitor.

Web lead tracking tool can provide this information. In the current economic environment, companies are reducing headcount and slash their sales force, yet at the same time, they want to maintain or grow their sales. That means they have to improve their sales productivity.

Web lead tracking tool is the most direct and easy way to increase the sales productivity. Because it can capture corporate visitors' browsing patterns and key phrases of interest, visitors' intents are revealed. This provides sales people with timely and qualified leads that are orders of magnitude faster and better than the traditional telesales approach. Not only does it increase quality of the lead qualification process, it also speed the leads through the sales funnel a lot faster.

LeadForce1 is one such tool. I talked with Srihari Kumar, MarketForceOne's CEO, about LeadForce1.

Given the current economic environment, it is clear that companies will have to turn to Web lead tracking tools such as LeadForce1 to get more sales productivity.