Spending your precious resources of time and money on generating leads and then failing to work at converting those leads to customers is almost as crazy as running really good advertising that attracts “shoppers” and then being closed for business. As in the movie Groundhog Day, in which the protagonist played by Bill Murray wakes up every morning only to find that it’s still yesterday, a marketer who lets leads fall through the cracks is doomed to a never-ending loop of unqualified lead generation.

Many companies spend boatloads of money on the technology that supports CRM. But, CRM technology is no substitute for the people-generated activities that constitute the real power of the process.

There is a new and innovative concept developed by one of our clients, DataBanque, to support business managers and salespeople. We’re calling it 3MOSS™ — third party marketing operations and sales support. DataBanque essentially takes over the administrative nuts and bolts and much of the project management portion of the CRM process, and this allows your company’s sales team to concentrate on the fun part…schmoozing, trust-building and closing deals. DataBanque’s services, which include lead management, customer & channel management, marketing campaign management and data management, can be purchased a la carte or as a system.

I don’t know about you, but the notion of outsourcing the difficult and tedious parts of business development is pretty attractive to me.