Building Brand Awareness in 2025
Increasing brand awareness is a top goal for B2B companies in 2025. But what is a brand? And how can you evolve it to meet your changing company...
3 min read
Michele Nichols Fri, May 17, 2013
As good as our best intentions may be, most businesses experience leaks in their sales pipeline. Whether due to lack of understanding or poor processes, many companies unknowingly let leads and profits fall through the cracks. Here are the top three reasons for leaks we see with tech companies and what you can do about them:
Growing companies often believe they have a sales process but lack the sales management and tools to ensure leads are followed up intentionally and consistently. Too many times we’ve seen salespeople dig out lead sheets or cards from a trade show three months ago that have sat in their desk drawer untouched. Those leads aren’t going to magically turn into willing buyers; your sales team needs to maintain the discipline and preparation to actually follow up on them. Read our post on trade show follow-up best practices for tips on creating a plan of action.
Ideally, leads should be entered into an electronic spreadsheet or other database. Various lead management tools exist that can also help you stay organized. Molly Thompson of Demand Media suggests setting whatever system you use to send you reminders of when to follow up with leads, based on criteria you define. However, she also recommends keeping paper copies for quick reference for sales calls.
The gap between your prospects' timeframe and your salespeople's in responding and quoting can be cause for lead leakage. Let’s start with some numbers:
It’s “the sooner the better” when it comes to lead follow-up. Granted, there is a slight exception for trade show leads – waiting a few days after a show to contact attendees gives them some time to get readjusted to their daily routine. But in general, people are more likely to be open to discussing something when they’ve just been thinking about it, and speedy follow-up shows that you care that they’re thinking about your business.
Even if you make the initial contact, many leads suffer from a lack of nurturing. A ‘maybe’ could be a ‘yes’ soon enough, and a ‘no’ might not be a ‘no’ forever; but all leads will become stale if you don’t stay in front of them. Make it a habit of following up with prospects periodically, even if it’s as simple as including them in your e-newsletter distribution or pointing them to your LinkedIn page – just something to remind them of your brand. If they had shown interest in a particular product or service, point them to a relevant blog post or updated page on your website.
Keep in mind, also, that today’s sales funnel is more convoluted than it once was. Rather than being passive recipients of your marketing efforts, consumers will seek out information on your website or social media, so make sure have a varied and up-to-date cache of content for them to find. Read our 5 steps to creating quality content to learn how to keep customers in the loop, even when you’re not contacting them directly.
Keep your pipeline running seamlessly: Download our marketing roadmap planner. |
![]() |
Sometimes it takes someone on the outside to spot your pipeline leaks and to create a definitive plan for fixing them. That’s where we come in. Give us a call, and let us offer a fresh perspective.
Increasing brand awareness is a top goal for B2B companies in 2025. But what is a brand? And how can you evolve it to meet your changing company...
Why Even Innovation Powerhouses Struggle to Launch Breakthrough Products (and How to Fix It) In recent years, product launches have slowed. Even...
We work with B2B leaders every day who have extensive marketing data, but don't know what to make of it. It's hard to know you're on track to meet...