Over the past 35 years, I have been involved in the development and deployment of scores of business-to-business lead generation programs. Here are the 21 most significant truths I’ve learned.

You can’t fake direct marketing expertise. Everything you do is quantifiable; every decision has an impact on short- and long-term profitability. If you’re seeking an expert’s opinion, get the benefit of Lee’s 35+ years of experience. He’s been on the client and agency sides and has run his own consulting practice for 10 years.

Your website is packed with information. Potential clients are showing up and spending time reading your helpful tips on home buying and selling. But you have a problem. You don’t know who they are and if
they will come back.

Not anymore.

I often hear this problem from realtors that I coach “I get people who visit my website but I don’t know how to convert them into a hot lead”

Leads are the lifeblood of Network Marketing. Whether it’s a warm market list, leads you’ve generated through your own advertising, or leads purchased from a third party source, it takes leads to make your network work.

As network marketers we do a major part of our business by calling leads. For a person just starting out this can be rather intimidating and too often a person doesn’t know how to “open” up a call, gets a lot of rejection, and then decides this isn’t for me.

Usually, U.S. retailers earn 20-80% of their entire yearly gross during the holiday season. But this year, things are different. The sluggish US economy has prompted Deloitte Research’s Carl Steidtmann to fear “the worst Christmas ever” in the retail sector.

Short of going door to door in a Santa suit, how can businesses increase profits and prevent a blue Christmas? Despite economic gloom, industry leaders have found that an e-mail follow up strategy can increase sales by a cheery 35%! To weather the ailing economy, use a follow up autoresponder during your holiday campaigns.

Today’s online marketers are much more sophisticated and enlightened than ever before. Advertising has always been a very important part of an entrepreneur’s makeup, yet today that importance grows. With the growth of the Internet, the number of different opportunities continues to increase at an amazing rate. Leads were always very important but in today’s market, each one becomes even more precious. In this article, I will discuss means of getting leads but more importantly, how to handle a lead once you have it.

SAP has been the industry leader in Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications for the past decade. However, they have been lagging in the area of Customer Resource Management (CRM), and companies such as PeopleSoft and Siebel have taken advantage of this by using their popular CRM applications to sell their ERP and SCM apps, cutting into SAP’s share of the market.

It has been said that 80 percent of business today comes from referrals. People want to do business with people they know, like, trust and respect. I believe that with all my heart.