Chief Marketer recently released results from its first survey on prospecting and lead generation, conducted at the end of 2009, which asked 1,000 U.S. marketers about their strategies and tactics for turning up sales prospects this year.

As is often the case (though not always wisely), almost half of the respondents (48.6%) said their main customer aim in 2010 will be to generate new leads, although one quarter of the response said they will concentrate on retaining the ones they’ve got.

Two-thirds of respondents suggested that they concentrate more on customers’ lifetime value rather than attempting to make a profit out of them from the first transaction; this good intention was unfortunately philosophical rather than actual — more than half those interviewed don’t track customers’ lifetime value by channel, making it somewhat difficult to hold the focus on their avowed longterm goals.

WHAT OFFERS?
Discounts were the big lure in economy-ravaged 2009, with 92.2% of marketers favouring this as the most used prospecting offer. Amongst the drawcards planned for business-getting in 2010:

• 94.9% Information Content (eg White Papers, Webinars)
• 93.7% Extra Services
• 93.0% Free Shipping
• 92.9% Entertainment Content (eg ringtones)
• 91.5% Contests or sweepstakes
• 89.0% Discounts
• 88.1% Gift With Purchase

Whether marketers can actually hold themselves back from price-cutting in 2010 remains to be seen.

Asked specifically if higher-value incentives will be required in 2010 to bring in fresh prospects, almost half the survey said no — but neary a third hedged their bets and said the answer is still uncertain. Taken with the “yes” vote, that’s a large proportion of marketers who believe that finding new customers may get even more costly this year.

Online & Social Expected to Boom
When it comes to what they’ll do more of in 2010 to uncover leads, survey respondents are undoubtedly thinking social and online. More than half expressed interest in deploying Web strategies to draw prospects, and almost three out of five said they intend to pursue social marketing.

Overall, respondents are pretty equally interested in using social connectivity to define their brand image (51.7%) and in creating customer relations that may lead to sales conversions at a later date (50.3%).

Only about a third said they use social media as a tactic to drive traffic to their Web site, and only 13.5% said they market products directly in social media, whether through e-commerce or clickthrough ads or apps.

Those relative proportions hold for all revenue segments. But it’s interesting to note that a higher proportion of small companies (54%) are using social media in the hope of turning friends or followers into future shoppers.

Tags: discounting, lead generation, new business, prospecting