Yet another article this week in the Wall Street Journal about looming global economic recession number two. To quote the IMF’s World Economic Outlook report, “Risks for a serious global slowdown are alarmingly high.”

What does this mean for those in the business of selling big dollar discretionary products and services – namely second homes, jet cards and the like? It means that the leads that your marketing team generates are going to continue to increase in value, i.e. each lead will be more precious because there will be fewer of them. Successful real estate lead management then becomes even more crucial.

We saw this in 2008 through 2010 and lead generation still hasn’t reached the numbers we saw pre-great recession. So if (and that’s a big if – I’m not sold on the doom and gloom reprise just yet) we slide into another economic sinkhole sales and marketing teams will need to spend more resources focusing on two things:

1) Finding more cost effective methods of reaching their target markets – social network interaction and direct marketing efforts is the name of the game here. These are relatively inexpensive electronic advertising channels that can help tell a better story than more common forms of advertising – media and the like.

2) Investing in better Customer Relationship Management practices – CRM software, (I’m a big fan of Salesforce.com), and better lead response practices to ensure that relationships are built faster with a greater percentage of those precious leads.