An Interview with one of the "50 Most Influential Sales Lead Management Professionals":
Joe Lethert, Performark, Inc.

Company URL

Who are your mentors and why?

What is the most helpful advice you've received to improve your business?

What is the most helpful advice you can give to help others improve their businesses?

How do you give back to the professional community?

What is your favorite business book?

What's your recommendation of the 4 steps?

Which 4 basic skills or process steps do you recommend?

Lead Generation Process

1. Start with a great database - it will reduce your costs by as much as 50%. If you don't have one, build it.
2. Shoot for depth in your profiles. People buy from us, not for what they know about us, but for what we know about them.
3. Build a comprehensive nurturing program based on delivering only relevant data, at the right time in the buying process, in the prospects preferred media, and all based on the prospects profile data.
4. Measure everything. Testing and refining should grow your ROI by 10%+ per year even if your already an industry leader.

In your opinion, the best book on marketing is:

Your reasons for choosing this book are:

What would you say to someone who asks what to do first in managing sales leads?

Start with your desired outcomes and build a process to support that.
Be sure you have input from all stakeholders.

If someone wants to nurture sales inquiries what process would you recommend?

I don't believe there is just one right process, but the following must be included.

1. Become a trusted source of reliable data. Most buyers will not want to engage with sales until they have done thier due dilligence.
2. All content must be relative to the propects needs, which should be specifically defined in your database.
3. All interaction should be appropriate to the stage in the buying cycle for that individual prospect.
4. Measure the effectiveness of timing, message, offer, and media for each type of prospect.
5. Do not buy into the perfect process. Keep continually improving it.

What steps would you suggest to measure the ROI for sales inquiries?

Everything should be measured but through the lens of revenue.