Many moons ago, I worked for a t-shirt clothing / apparel company. As a company, we had brilliant marketing initiatives. We would send out amazing lumpy mail, we would perform crazy antics to get our prospects attention, we would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to show our audience that we were unique. We were at every major trade show and convention in our arena and had no problem EASILY gathering hundreds of prospects who actually filled and inquired about EXACTLY what they were shopping for….The fully self qualified leads were a sales person’s dream.  We would get leads for 8,000 shirts orders, leads for custom embroidery, leads for huge organizations.  We would get all pumped up, would high five and celebrate… The marketing team would gather the leads, assign them a grade (based on their potential value) and hand them off to the hungry sales team who were ready to jump right in.  Days would go by, weeks would go by, months would go by and the same stack of leads sat there collecting dust and post it notes. No calls, No emails, no snail mail, no carrier pigeons, ZERO communication efforts.

The end result: Marketing = FAIL : a colossal waste of time, money and energy on the company’s end AND an implied perception that the company just didn’t give a crap about those prospects OR their t-shirt needs.

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