Leads Generated? Check! Now what? (part 1)

There is a lot of talk about the strategies to generate leads and the best ways to improve ROI just by tweaking the way your leads are generated. But what happens to your leads once you have them? It is great to have lots and lots of leads, but it's even even to have all of those leads and know what to do with them. Lead generation, or demand generation as some people call it, is only the first step that leads to a sale and an increase in customers.
This article is the first of two dedicated to discussing strategies for lead qualification and nurturing, and ultimately lead management in general.

Marketing works very hard to generate leads. This can cost considerable money for the company as a whole. This is why making the most out of every lead generated is very important. The first step in this process is qualifying your leads, even before any lead nurturing strategy is put into place. The quicker you can do this the better. Only about 20 percent of your initial leads are ready to buy immediately. For this reason, the quicker you can contact your leads, the better chance you have of making more immediate sales. If you wait too long, others will capture that twenty percent.
The initial lead qualification process has to be very quick, this is why in many, if not most cases, using telephony tools such as a dialer is ideal, because the contact is immediate and direct. It is not a passive media like email or direct mail.
Research has shown that if you contact your leads within 5 minutes, the improvement in results can be as much as 800% according to an MIT study.
This is because the likelihood of contacting individuals while they are by a phone and still interested is considerably greater within those first five minutes. Some leads are never successfully contacted, whether the response is relatively quick or not. So even if you threw initial interest aside as a potential factor in winning a sale, the simple fact that you are contacting more people would increase the overall number of lead conversions you win.
This is why qualifying leads quickly is so important. The other reason why it is so important is that the quicker you can identify potential customers, even those who are not ready to buy yet, the quicker you can begin placing lead nurturing efforts in place.