This is Part 1 of a two-part newsletter series that offers tips for preparing your 2010 marketing and lead management programs to increase sales and reduce customer acquisition costs.

Budget season is right around the corner. It’s time to outline ideas for your 2010 marketing plans to boost sales and reduce customer acquisition costs. You don’t have to set anything in stone just yet, but here are some tips to start the process.

Make a list, check it twice. Find out which marketing programs were naughty or nice.

With the recession, you may not have the resources to accomplish all of your goals, but make your wish list. If Santa dropped a big bag of money down your office chimney, how would you spend it? When the list is done, study 2009 marketing data to determine what worked and what didn’t.

How many leads did you generate overall and for each media type and event?

• Which media produced the highest ranked leads and the highest percentage of converted leads?
• How many leads were actually touched and worked by your sales team or dealers and how many were left untouched?
• How many leads converted into sales?
• How long were leads in the pipeline before they were sold?
• How much did it cost to generate each lead by media type?
• How much did it cost to generate each lead that was sold?

Answers to these questions will help you refine your 2010 plan and determine which goals on your wish list are:

• The most beneficial
• Attainable
• Realistic

 Fish where the fish are biting

Although one of your goals will likely be to generate more leads, remember success demands generating quality, not quantity. You want leads that are more likely to produce revenue.

Where do you find higher quality leads in 2010? Study your 2009 leads. When you were fishing for leads in 2009, where did you find the high quality leads? Plan to fish in those same ponds in 2010.

Improve sales performance – rank and distribute smarter leads

Do you send every lead to your sales team or dealers? That means the sales team is weeding through a stack of leads that could cause them to complain, “All of the leads that Marketing sends us are junk.” 

Consider changing your lead distribution rules. Send sales and dealers only the leads that have been pre-qualified, ranked and declared “sales-ready.” Sales people will make more productive use of their time and sales conversions will increase.

Reduce customer acquisition costs

A powerful way to reduce customer acquisition costs is to squeeze more revenue out of the leads you’ve already generated. Calculate the cost to generate a lead. For example, a February 2009 B-to-B’s online magazine article said that the average cost to generate a lead is $84 (when more than 50% of a b-to-b company’s lead generation budget is dedicated to inbound marketing).

If a company already spent $84 to generate a lead, and the lead isn’t yet ready to buy, they can spend a few more dollars to nurture a lead over the next 30 to 60 days with additional marketing messages. Our case studies show that nurturing can increase conversions more than 30%. Nurturing costs a few dollars per lead, far less than the cost to generate a new lead. This reduces the overall customer acquisition costs and improves ROI.