Marketing Profs ran a great article yesterday by Russell Kern entitled “How to Solve Direct Marketing’s Five Biggest Problems” that struck a nerve with me as a B2B direct marketer. He writes “Salespeople love to receive a nice steady flow of leads that keeps them busy, but not too busy. When that’s not what you’re giving them, they tend to become, well, verbal. So what does Sales do? It cherry-picks the best leads, letting the surplus responses fall to the floor to rot. Within 45 days, they’re yelling for “fresh” leads.”

Wow, does that ever sum up the universal B2B Direct Marketer’s challenge! It’s either too many or too few. We can never win. ReachForce’s superbly targeted B2B Marketing Oh Crap day addressed this challenge brilliantly. I know we can all relate to the effect that the holidays has on our lead flow.

If you are struggling with too many leads or too few fresh/high quality leads, then Kern advises:

• One of the fastest and least expensive methods to improve your results is to eliminate poor targets and increase the number of look-alike suspects.
• Here is a simple exercise to perform when putting together a lead generation mailing: Have your data-processing vendor run a count, by title, of your mailing list. At the same time, run a count of your customer titles.
• Now, compare the results. How many of the titles in your suspect mailing list are not in your customer file? How many titles like “administrator,” “consultant,” and, yes, even “inmate” have somehow slipped into your mailing list—people who will respond for the sake of it, but never, ever buy your product?

Once you’ve taken the important step to better target your campaigns, you should also consider a great automated scoring and lead scoring and nurturing program as we wrote about in The B2B Lead and our ebook on the topic Funnelnomics. If you have some time to sit down and study up on database marketing fundamentals this holiday season, I encourage you to take a moment to download the book and put a few of the lessons into action in 2008.