U.S. Companies Severely Mismanaging New Business Opportunities, CMO Council/BPM Forum Survey Finds
Marketing and C-Level Executives Are Dissatisfied With the Way They Generate New Business Yet More Than Half Lack Formal Process to Correct the Problem

U.S. companies may be suffering huge losses in revenue due to mismanagement of new business development activities, according to an online survey fielded by two leading executive organizations. Many of the corporate officers polled believe revenues at their companies could increase by more than 20 percent through the adoption of improved prospect harvesting practices.

Entitled "Gauging the Cost of What's Lost," the study suggests that while companies may be good at generating large volumes of business leads, most prospects languish because sales is too frequently focused on only closing the most promising and qualified short-term opportunities. According to business acquisition experts, an estimated 80 percent of leads are typically lost, ignored or discarded, compromising top-line revenue growth. Some 73 percent of respondents in this survey say their company has no process for re-qualifying and revisiting business leads.

The study is based on a third-quarter, 2004 online survey of nearly 800 respondents in which CEOs, CFOs, COOs and Division or Group Executives represent 47 percent of the respondents, while nearly 20 percent represent CMOs and Senior VPs or VPs of Sales. Approximately 13 percent of the respondents represent companies with more than $250 million in annualized revenue. The study was fielded by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, whose members include more than 1,000 top decision makers at high-technology companies, and the Business Performance Management (BPM) Forum, an elite group of 500 senior managers dedicated to furthering operational visibility and financial accountability at global corporations. The survey was underwritten by Wendover Consulting, a leading provider of Opportunity Recovery Services outsourced by leading BtoB marketers.

In "Gauging the Cost of What's Lost," nine out of ten survey participants said new customer acquisition is important to business growth. Yet, approximately 44 percent of all respondents are unsatisfied with the way their companies go after new business. Nearly three-quarters of respondents believe they could increase revenue at least 10 percent with better business development practices; 37 percent say they could increase the top line by more than 20 percent.

Also among the survey findings:

-- While 53% of respondents believe the sales and marketing functions
have a close and collaborative relationship, only 7% feel the two groups
work together very effectively to harvest business prospects.
-- 56% of the respondents don't have a formal process for generating,
qualifying, certifying and validating new business opportunities.
-- 56% of respondents convert less than 10% of their business prospects
into deals; approximately 30% covert less than 5%.
-- Most respondents are not satisfied with their conversion rates; only
5% are very satisfied.
-- Nearly half of the respondents say it takes at least six months to
close a deal.

"New business acquisition and conversion is challenged in today's commercial enterprise, and the problem is significantly impacting top-line performance," said Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director of the CMO Council and founder of the BPM Forum. "Marketing today is utilizing new digital channels of interaction to gain customer access and response, but current qualification and filtering systems are unable to handle the influx of leads. Companies have to devote much more attention to how they target, capture, qualify, manage and track pipeline opportunities within their organizations."

"It's time companies take a hard look at the revenue they're leaving on the table because they lack the infrastructure, disciplines and budget necessary to effectively monetize new business inquiries and opportunities," added Larry Dillon, Chief Executive Officer of Wendover Consulting. "Marketing is focused on creating new business leads; sales is focused on closing the most promising of those leads. It's my belief that a new and separate function is now required to extract unrealized revenue growth from marginalized, overlooked and neglected business opportunities."

To undertake the research, the CMO Council and the BPM Forum joined forces with BusinessWeek Research Services and Sales and Marketing Strategies & News magazine. As the online survey was conducted, it was accompanied by one-on-one interviews with senior marketing executives at several major companies.

One of the important factors in web marketing is links. Search engines usually look for links to your real estate website. You are maybe asking what links are. Links are the other websites related to yours that will point out to your website.

You have to bear in mind that the search engines are after the quality and value and not with the quantity, so you have to gain links that have value and quality. Link partners are the best way in order to have quality links or incoming links.
In order to have a lot of advantages in terms of linking, you have to make sure to link with quality links only. This article will mention few tips you can consider in finding quality links, so read on.

The first thing you have to do is creating and writing something very interesting. You have to create article about related topics or you have do real estate website review. If other websites are willing to put link back to your website, you can allow those websites to use these reviews and articles on their websites. By doing all these, you are making these websites to be your great link partners.

You can also write articles about the expertise of your real estate website or do articles about the theme of your website. But make sure that the articles are valuable enough and have important information. Also do articles about the products and services you offer, and put valuable information on it. Then submit these articles to article directories. But make sure that all these articles have link back to your website.

Aside from submitting articles to article directories, another way that could be helpful on your part to have great link partners is by allowing other websites and ezine to repost your articles, if they are willing to put link back to your website. If these ezine and websites are willing to put link back to your website, they are already part of your link partners.

If you have discussion board in your website, you can invite other websites that are related with your website and let them join the discussion. You can ask these websites to link with your website.

If in case, your website is a member-only website, the greatest thing you can do is give other websites free membership provided if they are willing to put link back to your website. In this kind of strategy, for sure a lot of websites will grab such opportunity. All these websites then will be your great link partners.

If you truly want your real estate website to be successful and be on the top rank, real estate SEO by finding great link partners is very important. This article mentioned some tips in order for you to find the great link partners that can be helpful to your website. You can now start doing you own link campaign but following the tips mentioned above. You can start now and make use of the linking strategies now. In time, all your time and effort will soon pay off.

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