Is this your problem?

Your marketing department has launched an all-out assault to stimulate interest for its product from key market sectors, deploying the “usual suspects”----trade shows, print ads, direct mail programs, even webcasts. The campaign has spawned hundreds of inquiries, making it a hit.

Now, of course, the inquiries must be processed, and quickly, since your company’s competitors have stimulated these very same respondents. However, as fate would have it, the marketing people struggle to shoehorn the processing of these inquiries into their already chaotic schedule. Before you know it, three weeks pass since the inquiries came in—and they haven’t been touched.

Finally, dealing with the inquiries rises to the top of the priority list. By the time the most potent inquiries are extracted and handed off to the sales department, only a few of them pan out from the hundreds of inquiries initially generated. Meanwhile, the remaining inquiries now sit in limbo. But what if some of these dormant inquiries eventually could be converted to potential sales? Tragically, no one will ever know.

Inquiry processing may be every marketing department’s nemesis, but that doesn’t mean that all the inquiries generated by various stimuli still cannot be qualified completely and expediently so that the conversion rate to potential sales spikes higher.

Nevertheless, qualifying each inquiry takes time, patience and perseverance all in a short timeframe. So, a good question to ask yourself is whether this whole process is something you maintain in-house or outsource. There are arguments in favor of both options. Just which one is best for your organization depends on many factors.