Just how quickly should you follow up with your sales leads? I’ve always advocated two fundamental principles of a CRM-based lead generation program.

1. Follow-up within one hour or LESS (preferably less).

2. Follow-up via the same medium as the request. In other words, if the request was an e-mail or a web form, follow up via the web/e-mail (at a minimum).

How important is fast follow up? Put it this way, if you are not following up in the same day, you should not be doing lead gen, you have other problems to tackle first.

Here’s an article by the Harvard Business Review with some compelling data to support my main point.