Life Follows Art

Just in time to coincide with rave reviews of Alan Alda, Lev Schreiber and Gordon Clapp in the revival of David Mamet’s "Glengarry Glen Ross" on Broadway comes a benchmarking study on best practices for handling online leads from KnowledgeStorm and the Artemis Group.

The breathless conclusion of this study was “Leads get cold quickly, so it is vital that vendors implement prompt, effective lead follow-up processes.”

Duh!

Is there anyone alive that doesn’t know this? Does anyone need to study or to benchmark anything to figure out that if you don’t follow up, leads die?

These geniuses also discovered that most sales guys, like the actors in the play, think the leads they get suck. And that as many as 1/3-1/2 of all viable leads aren’t going to buy anytime soon and need to be nurtured for as long as a year – a task salespeople are allergic to.

Anyone working in B2B marketing confronts this daily.

It could be a universal truth. It could be a persistent conundrum. It could be a comfortable strawman for sales and marketing managers to use as a credible excuse. Or it could be evidence of bad management.

But stating the obvious only captures our imagination on stage.