Is there such a thing as a “perfect lead?” While “perfect” is probably too strong of a word to describe any business parameter, there IS such a thing as a good lead, or a qualified lead, and an unqualified lead.

Most sales people agree that a good lead has the following characteristics and behaviors:

1. A lead that entered his full information into the form and has opted in to receive communications from you.
2. A lead that is active on your site, shows real interest, and responds to your messages by opening and reading them, clicking on links in the email body, and even replying with questions and clarifications.
3. A lead that actively connects with you in social media.
4. In the B2B space, a lead that escalates the communication higher and higher in the decision-making channel of command.
5. A lead that has the budget to purchase your product or service over the next 12 months.
6. There’s a good fit between your product and the lead – the lead would benefit from using your product.

In the ideal marketers’ world, all leads would be “perfect” leads, showing great interest, good fit and a readiness to buy immediately.

Since we’re not living in an ideal world, most of us need to either let go of very cold leads, or nurture relationships with cool or slightly warm leads over long periods of time. While some of our leads will be immediately “hot” and sales-ready, most will never buy, and many will be ready to buy – months from now.

In the meantime, to make sure you don’t lose track of not-yet-qualified leads, use a good marketing automation system to not just keep track of leads, but also to regularly communicate with them, score them and identify if and when they move from “unqualified” to “qualified” status – at which point you would want to promptly transfer them to Sales.

I agree with Jonathan Block. Organizations do not suffer from lack of content- they just don’t realize that they can use, and reuse, the same content in different ways and across many marketing channels.

Jonathan gives a great example – those whitepapers that we marketers must write and at times it seems that no one really wants to read, are chock full of useful information. In fact, a whitepaper can be used in bits and pieces for months, as material for tweets, emails and blog posts. The average whitepaper is so rich in content that each paragraph can spawn lots of shorter-style content.

It’s not that whitepapers, or longer, detailed, richer-type content, are unnecessary. These do have their place, certainly in later phases of the buying cycle when prospects are ready to dig deeper into your product or service.

But in the initial phases of the buying cycle, most prospects will be very interested in receiving short, concise messages about your product and will not be terribly into reading ten pages of technical information. Remember – they are just skimming at this stage, looking for an overview. Giving them what they want is easy, if you remember that you already have it – you just need to re-wrap the content and present it a little differently, tailoring it to the specific channel you’re using (email, blog, Twitter, LinkedIn) and to the specific prospect.

Sure, if you have more than a handful of customers or prospects, this is easier said than done – it won’t be easy to manage the distribution of content across many channels to many prospect if you want to stay personal with each of them. This is where marketing automation and sales enablement tools become useful, enabling you to automate your lead nurturing efforts to the point where you can take each prospect from initial engagement to a decision, giving them personal attention and helpful information along the way.

I recently experienced firsthand what a big turnoff it is when a vendor pounces on you even though you’re still at the very first stages of research and are in no way ready to commit.

I saw a promotional video that I loved, and immediately thought about a friend who has been looking to add a video to their Web site. So I found out who made the video and contacted them, figuring I would then give their contact info to my friend.

What I envisioned as a short phone call turned into several phone calls and emails. They have set up an account for me so that I could watch more videos, several people at the company became involved in the chain of emails, and then a sales rep was copied on one of the emails and of course immediately wanted to set up a meeting.

During this flurry of activity, which wasted almost an hour of my busy day (what can I say, I need to learn to say “no”) I basically felt as if they were getting it completely wrong. I was obviously not ready to make any purchase – I was merely inquiring on behalf of someone who doesn’t even know they exist yet. It was nice of them to set me up with an account (getting my details, of course and thus entering me into their database) – but the pouncing that followed, and especially the call with the sales rep, was a waste of time for both she and I.

Frankly, I felt so uncomfortable, I don’t think I would recommend them to my friend.

It got me thinking about the delicate balance between neglecting a lead and basically handing them off to the competition, and pouncing on them so hard when they are not ready that – again – you end up losing them.

Both are NOT good scenarios, and both can be avoided with a proper lead management system. That video company would have done much better identifying me as a cold lead, placing me into their database (as they did) and nurturing me for a while, making the sales call only when realizing from my reactions that I am ready to buy.

It’s all about relationships, they keep telling us, and I have to agree: more and more, marketing is becoming a very different activity than it used to be just a decade ago. In fact, it’s not an activity anymore – marketing has now become a process, a slow process of building connections and trust over time.

Social media is certainly a big part of this shift. Social media has taught buyers and prospects that they can expect more from companies – generic sales pitches or a limited info on the company’s Web site will no longer cut it. Your prospects now expect to have a two-way relationship with you, to interact, to get as much information as they can about you and about your competitors before they make their decision.

The recession, which is turning into a long-winded economic slump, has further contributed to this shift in how marketing works by making buyers choosier, more reluctant than ever to spend. It is now more legitimate than it ever was for buyers to take their time before making a decision, and as marketers, we have to accommodate that.

Here at eTrigue, in the Marketing Automation business, we are strangely benefiting from this shift in how marketing is done. When marketing is a conversation rather than a blast, when you need to engage your prospects and produce content and information over many months to keep them interested, how do you monitor these relationships? How do you decide what content to send to each client, and which client is ready to buy?

Marketing Automation tools are extremely helpful when it comes to managing leads in this relationship-based market. Automating your marketing efforts enables you to develop long-term relationships and to keep the conversation interesting and relevant. Automated marketing also promotes marketing and sales alignment and especially agreement on what is a sales-ready lead and on corporate messaging.

In a relationship-based market, lead management is a long-term process. Automating it makes sure nothing falls between the cracks. After all, the last thing you want to do is to serve potential customers to your competitors on a silver platter just because you are unable to efficiently manage your leads.

Marketing automation and sales intelligence tools can help accelerate the flow of qualified leads into the pipeline, but the fundamental shift for many companies is improving the long-term visibility of pending deals.

“It’s imperative that sales and marketing teams take a longer term view in conjunction with a ‘what can we close today?’ view,” says Louis Foong of The Alea Group. “Most companies realize that it is taking longer to close deals, yet they haven’t implemented programs that start early to assure a stable flow of mature leads.”

One of the first steps to achieving longer-term visibility is measuring the average conversion rates for prospects through different stages of the sales funnel. That means measuring from initial inquiries to qualified leads and then from opportunities to closed deals.

However, only 64% of companies have defined those pipeline stages to ensure marketing and sales agree on common definitions, according to the Executive Benchmark Assessment (EBA) from Frost & Sullivan and Bulldog Solutions.

While measuring the flow from inquiry to close is an important step, the hard work of improving the conversion rates at each stage is heavily dependent on a company’s lead nurturing programs.

According to the CSO Insights’ report, only 26% of firms had a formal lead nurturing program in place. Lead nurturing programs allow the sales team to close out the quarter by focusing on the truly hot leads that are likely to buy, while marketing continues to warm up those longer-term opportunities that need education.

“In today’s busy world, a prospect may be a perfect fit for your solution,” notes CSO Insights’ report, “but they may not have the time available to take a look at your offerings right now.”

Ultimately, lead nurturing programs help increase the volume of sales-ready leads in the pipeline, but this process requires patience, persistence and precision. The development of a prospect from initial engagement to a closed deal can vary widely depending on price point and the complexity of the solution.

Once a lead nurturing history is established, companies can build metrics for the average lifecycle of leads from initial inquiry to close. This intelligence will provide insights to support the longer-term visibility companies need into their pipeline.

A better understanding of buyer needs and an automated stream of relevant messaging to targeted buyers should accelerate the sales process. And this in turn would reduce the amount of deals stuck in the pipeline and improve the effectiveness of your sales organization.

Case studies have consistently shown that unclogging deals and reducing funnel leaks makes companies less reliant on sales teams having to “save the quarter” with expensive, inefficient eleventh-hour deals.

According to CSO Insights’ new report, “2010 Sales Performance Optimization–Going Forward Analysis,” the following are the top four initiatives needed to increase sales effectiveness:

1. Revising/enhancing lead generation programs.

2. More closely aligning sales and marketing.

3. Enhancing sales team communications.

4. Analyzing customers’ buying processes.

The report noted that lead management plays a critical role in developing likely buyers. “We have documented numerous examples where using Lead Generation Management systems have increased the quality and quantity of leads; yet only 16% of the firms we surveyed have these systems in place. This is something nearly all companies would benefit from and is not just for use by marketing.”

Since sales reps are still responsible for generating “nearly half of the leads they pursue,” the CSO Insights’ report suggested that giving sales reps access to lead management automation systems “can help them more effectively generate their own prospecting campaigns.”

Many B2B companies are supplementing marketing automation systems with sales acceleration tools. These tools enable reps to focus on deals in the pipeline with personalized attention via trackable emails and real-time actions. They not only allow sales reps to track ongoing activity and history, but they also provide real-time alerts and triggers to allow sales reps to focus on the prospects that are active and ready to buy.

Last week, we discussed ways to avoid the “end of quarter scramble,” and pointed out that one of the best ways to insure a healthy pipeline is to segment and narrow your target audience and focus on the audience most relevant to your product.

More advanced companies are now taking segmentation to the next level by developing buyer personas for their key target groups.

David Meerman Scott, author of “The New Rules of Marketing & PR,” described the process of developing personas as breaking buyers into distinct groups, and then collecting intelligence on those groups to make it easier to create content specifically targeted to each group.

“You need to segment buyer personas so you can then develop marketing programs to reach each one,” Scott says. “For each buyer persona profile, we want to know as much as we can about this group of people.” In addition to conducting interviews with recent buyers and target customers, companies are using the intelligence gathered from Web activity tracking tools to build personas and to create content to reach them.

This targeted approach to communicating with buyers is becoming a competitive differentiator, according to Ardath Ablee, author of “eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale.” “Companies who truly understand the needs of buyers and develop content to help them learn what they need to know to build the confidence that they’re making the best choice will win. Companies focused on themselves and their products will not. Buyers care about the outcomes the products enable before they ever care about the features, feeds and speeds,” Albee said.

This goes back to one of the most basic lessons in marketing – always focus on your product’s benefits rather than highlighting its features. Buyers simply do not care about your shiny features – they want to know how the product will affect them.

Industry analysts report that personas and buyer profiles are helping to make both large and small companies more efficient. However, less than half (46%) of B2B companies have developed buyer personas to guide communications and sales readiness for their prospects. This means there is still significant room to adopt advanced segmentation to help make sure the deals being pursued at the end of the quarter are based on real business needs and have a greater chance of actually closing.

We’ve all seen it happen: at the end of the quarter, realizing that the quarterly goal has not been met, companies scramble to quickly close a few more deals. This is often done by spending on short-term lead generation, including cold-calling campaigns and trying to quickly close immature leads before the quarter’s end.

Needless to say, this is the most expensive and inefficient method of lead generation and usually drains budgets from subsequent quarters and campaigns. More importantly, these short-term initiatives typically fail because accelerating the buying process can’t be done at the very last minute and without any prior planning.

In order to help B2B organizations end the stress and expense of the “end of quarter scramble,” we have developed the following four steps to help your organization build a more predictable and sustainable pipeline from quarter to quarter.

1. Narrow your target audience

To stabilize your pipeline, you should actually narrow rather than expand your target audience. Through the use of segmentation tools, successful B2B companies are defining and targeting their marketing databases to focus on the sectors that are converting into legitimate sales activity. By narrowing their focus, these companies are able to personalize their messaging and develop content and campaigns more relevant to their target audiences, resulting in shorter sales cycles.

2. Help Sales Step on the Accelerator

A better understanding of buyer needs and an automated stream of relevant messaging to targeted buyers should accelerate the sales process. And this in turn would reduce the amount of deals stuck in the pipeline.

Case studies have consistently shown that unclogging deals and reducing funnel leaks makes companies less reliant on sales teams having to save the quarter with eleventh-hour deals.

Many B2B companies are supplementing marketing automation systems with sales acceleration tools. These tools enable reps to focus on deals in the pipeline with personalized attention via trackable emails and real-time actions. They not only allow sales reps to track ongoing activity and history, they also provide real-time alerts and triggers to allow reps to focus on the prospects that are active and ready to buy.

3. Converting Cold Calling to Warm Calling

Instead of pouring money into “dialing for dollars,” more B2B companies are shifting their teleprospecting investments to qualifying and nurturing prospects that have already shown some interest in their solution.

By focusing on prospects that have had some prior contact, inside sales or call centers typically have much higher success rates in creating opportunities for the sales team because they are spending time on “warm calling” rather than cold calling.

Sales intelligence tools not only allow sales reps to do “pinpoint prospecting,” they also help to identify “trigger events,” which can drive short-term sales opportunities. Real-time lead alerts can increase connect rates by up to 10X. Reps armed with website visit history, campaign and detailed prospect information have more confidence and more information to effectively engage with interested prospects. The result is a much higher success rate then traditional, often futile, cold calling.

4. Start Planning Two Quarters Out

Automation and sales intelligence tools can help accelerate the flow of qualified leads into the pipeline, but the fundamental shift for many companies is improving the long-term visibility of pending deals.

One of the first steps to achieving longer-term visibility is measuring the average conversion rates for prospects through different stages of the sales funnel. That means measuring from initial inquiries to qualified leads and then from opportunities to closed deals.

While measuring the flow from inquiry to close is an important step, the hard work of improving the conversion rates at each stage is heavily dependent on a company’s lead nurturing programs. Lead nurturing programs help increase the volume of sales-ready leads in the pipeline. They allow the sales team to close out the quarter by focusing on the truly hot leads that are likely to buy, while marketing continues to warm up those longer-term opportunities that need education.

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Obviously, it’s impossible to ensure that all sales reps will start reaching quota, but implementing these tools and processes will have a significant impact on shortening sales cycles and improving win rates. With these in place, the quarterly close can be a smoother and more predictable process rather than a late-night panic.

Saying that “content is king” has become such a cliché – so much so that I went back and forth on whether I should even say it here. I decided to go ahead, because no one who does marketing can afford NOT to discuss the importance of creating useful, rich, varied content.

Content is king in B2B marketing because long buying cycles mean that rather than pouncing, marketers need to patiently build relationships with prospects. A single inquiry does not turn someone into a sales-ready lead, and sending those leads to Sales would be a mistake. The need to patiently build relationships with prospects until they are sales-ready, a process that can easily take months, brings us to the perhaps overused, but in no way overhyped, concept of “content is king.”

Content is king for marketers because building those relationships with prospects is best achieved by being useful to them and providing them with timely, relevant information. Whether you provide that information that sustains the relationship through social media, white papers on your website or email – ideally a combination of those – the information needs to be of high quality.

“High quality” means, of course, well-written, but it goes beyond that. High quality content is content that is relevant to the audience you serve, and content that is timely for that audience. Ideally, you want to send an email to a prospect that addresses a major pain point for that prospect, and you want to send it at the right time.

While your marketing organization would need to create, or outsource the creation of, great content, making sure it is delivered in a relevant and timely manner can be achieved by automating your lead management process. Marketing automation and sales acceleration tools provide your marketing and sales organizations with the information about prospects that enables them to deliver that great content to the right person, at the right time.

In a market where B2B buyers report that they were the ones who have found the vendor, make sure they find YOU by creating and distributing consistent, constant, high-quality content that keeps your company top of mind when it’s time to make a buying decision.

We all know that the rules of demand generation marketing have changed. They’ve been different for a long time now, but it’s not easy to accept – let alone embrace – those changes.

With the vast majority of decision makers now saying that they have found the vendor rather than the other way around, and with an ever expanding gap between marketing planning and buyer preference in the B2B space, marketers must adapt and indeed, embrace the fact that the buying process is now buyer-focused rather than led by the vendor.

Buyer focus isn’t necessarily a bad thing – in a way it evens the playing field. In the past, the company who could allocate more resources to marketing activities had a huge advantage and a far better chance of closing a deal. Now, it’s not so much about your marketing budget as it is about your ability to build and maintain a meaningful, long-term relationship with buyers.

Lead nurturing can only work if we are willing to set aside old assumptions about how marketing is “supposed” to work and embrace the new rules: a long buying cycle, where buyers take the lead, and where our job as marketers is to nurture a long-term relationship with them where we provide them with useful information, tailoring that information and its frequency of delivery to the needs of the specific buyer.

Managing long-term relationship with B2B buyers is of course a challenge in itself and something that no marketing organization can be expected to do manually. Marketing automation software thus changes its role from a supporting role into necessity that the modern marketing organization can’t manage without, at least not effectively.

The patience, persistence and precision needed to effectively and successfully nurture a lead from the initial marketing inquiry until they are sales-ready becomes attainable by automating the nurturing process. Timely, precise messages tailored to each prospect’s specific pains and level of readiness align marketing campaigns with prospect needs and readiness and increase sales effectiveness, and the company’s bottom line.