B2B business development in this age of SEO

This is my first forey into the blog-sphere, so please excuse this old dog trying to run with the young greyhounds.
Recently all one hears in the marketing and business world (besides the impending doom of a recession) is the importance of SEO & e-commerce, which, I agree, cannot be underrated.
However once a prospect/lead has raised his/her hand by responding to your irresistable offer and or website, then what? 90% of the time (unless your offer is of such minimal cost or so extraordinary that you'll soon be out of business) the respondant will want to review, compare others, mull it over or just think about it. We are all familiar with the glacier speed even the most decisive C level exec's can move at, lets not even talk about the purchasing agents or the poor first year employee who has been tasked with researching a particular solution.
At that time the single most important part of the business team, your sales force will need to be able to nourish and cultivate that prospect.
-HOWEVER- salesteams are by nature busily working the immediate deal, the ones about to close, or the current client screaming in their ears about the latest glitch that support can't seem or doesn't want to fix. After all, the salesteam needs to put food on the table and meet their quota, and lets face it, the best sales person is usually the most disorganized. I'm just stating the obvious here and if any salesperson wants to disagree I challenge him or her to respond.. go ahead, write yourself a reminder to blast me back... when you have the time, with all your closings, putting out the fires, jumping through the hoops, filling out the reports, dealing with the installers, updating your quotas, explaining your losses, justifying expenses, fighting management over discounts, ad naseum ;)
The new prospects, the ones not ready to commit, can and often will fall by the way side. Even the best intentioned and most organized sales person cannot maintain the broad end of the funnel , and your lead/prospect will be relegated to a life of occasional mass produced email and even (gasp) and occasional glossy mailer ('member those?). Yes, putting the clients name on the message is nice, even trying to customize the message as best you can, but who are you fooling? Certainly not the prospect whose inbox by now is so overflowing they shudder to open it in the morning! A good sales person can effectively and personally handle around 20 long to medium term prospects in addition to his clients and the hot/about to close prospects.
What is needed is a team of specialists that have the time AND the motivation to continue a personalized and targeted communication stream with that client:
Business Developers (BusDev).
In my opinion, using a state of the art CRM or SFA (just google CRM or Sales Force Automation you'll be astounded at the variety), a single BusDev member can handle hundreds of leads/prospects, with personalized touches, answering questions, and forwarding pertanent information on a regular and (hopefully) non-annoying basis over a 6 month to one year period. I don't want to get into the details of how that's done, but suffice to say it has.
If the BusDev team has a fiduciary stake in nuturing this lead, so much the better and a relationship will be established that should eventually produce fruit. If the lead is simply put into an automated drip program, chances are that lead will die on the vine.
In addition, the BusDev can become an complimentary addition to your marketing program, my former Marketing Director, Dudley Larus (dlarus@gmail.com) had an outstanding ability to fuse BusDev, sales and marketing into a comprehensive and fully integrated unit, not leaving any member out, and as a result the company he and I worked for was so succesfull it was bought by a much larger competitor (so much for doing a good job!).
I have not seen a substantiated ROI on a Business Development project, and would love for anyone out there to give me their take/experience on this.
This is what I call taking the Japanese approach, investing without expecting an immediate return on your investment, but realizing it EVENTUALLY.
It does stand to reason that, although not all leads will bear fruit (were it only so), an organized and personalized approach to following up and continuing to provide value to a client via the personal touch will produce results; one of the only companies so far that I have dealt with that probably does the best job of providing relevant and usefull mass emails is http://www.hubspot.com/, but they even have a sales/bus dev team. I had the pleasure of working with Heidi in particular, and although my previous employer could not see the wisdom of replacing their part-time gardner, part-time SEO in favour of Hub-Spot (at thousands per months vs $250 per month) or at the least letting her take advantage of it, they have continued to provide me with information and data as needed.
My next blog will be on the proper use and implementation of a CRM/SFA, I think I'll call it: "Implementing a CRM or how to get your 5 year old to eat their spinach".
Bryan
(anxiuosly awaiting the fallout from the sales people out there)