Remember the old days when you measured your customer acquisition efforts by the number of calls your salespeople made and the number of ads and direct mail pieces the marketing department completed? Simpler days. Less-effective days.

Today, business development executives use customer relationship management philosophies to measure their efforts of acquiring and retaining customers. The hottest new trend in this management style is "touch scoring." Touch scoring is based on a few premises. First, it assumes that not all ways you contact prospects (touches) are equal. The second premise is a curved relationship between the number of interactions with a prospective customer and that prospect's likelihood of becoming a customer. In other words, visiting a prospect face-to-face is worth more than sending him an e-mail; and, the first few times you visit a prospect your likelihood of making a sale goes up, but if you haven't made the sale after several visits, the likelihood of doing so levels off.

Equipment leasing brokers don't get the opportunity to visit most of their prospects - even when the prospects are vendors. But, you do use multiple touches to win new clients.You "touch" prospects when they see your Google ads, receive your direct mail, answer your cold call and during follow-up activities. If a prospective customer just sees your Google ad but never receives a phone call, he is statistically unlikely to become a customer. If that same prospect sees your Google ad, receives a direct mail piece and receives a phone call, he is much more likely to become a customer.

The power of touch scoring is that it measures how and how often you should reach out to prospects and when enough is enough. If you keep track of the method and frequency of how you approach new customers, you'll be able to determine how to convert more prospects to customers and stop wasting your resources on those that are unlikely to ever become customers.

The first step in touch scoring is to assign a value to each of your methods of outreach, for instance cold calls may be worth five points, while direct mail is worth two points and e-mail blasts are worth one point. Then, keep track of how many touch points each prospect receives. If you mail, e-mail and call a prospect, using the scores above, that prospect has accumulated eight points. Is that enough to get an application from him? Soon you will know because now you are keeping track of each prospect and the touch points he has received. By tracking the touch points, you'll know what it takes to win a new customer. You'll also learn what mix of touches works best, such as starting with ads, then phone calls and finally follow-up e-mail and mail.

Tracking the average touch score required to convert a prospect into a "sale" - which for prospecing purposes is perhaps best defined as receiving an application - provides enlightenment into how and how often you should contact prospects. You may learn one or more of the following example insights that other companies who use touch scoring have learned:

• You are calling too much: stop calling after the third call, because your efforts are better spent on other prospects
• You are calling too often: you need to mix your formats to include more online and offline materials, not just calls
• You aren't calling enough: some companies have found that they see a one-hundred percent jump in sales after they make as many as twenty calls to each prospect when before they stopped calling after four calls
• You are sending too much e-mail: if they don't respond after the fourth e-mail blast, they aren't going to respond
• You should be sending more printed info by mail: after you have called twice and then sent two follow-up pieces by mail, your response rates tripled
• Internet-generated leads take three times as much follow-up to become a sale than leads from print ads, so send your internet leads a letter and a brochure that you don't send to your print ad leads

The old days aren't completely gone. Touch scoring doesn't require fancy software or bulging marketing departments. Odds are you have an Excel file somewhere with all your prospects in it. Just add columns to it for each of the different "touches," then keep track of your touch points and the outcome of each prospect.