Lead Management
Lead Management Strategy
Having a strategy is a critical success factor
Much of the buzz around managing a successful business revolves around ways to generate more leads and strategies for closing sales.
Meanwhile lead management is often relegated to a position of secondary importance. Yet according to estimates from Yankee Group, a typical company loses between 40 and 80 percent of sales leads somewhere in the sales cycle.
As for the leads that do make it into the pipeline, oftentimes there is no way of tying them back to a particular marketing campaign and thus no means to measure return on investment or provide feedback to refine the marketing and sales process.
If you can relate to that research then you need a lead management strategy. LeadMaster is here to help solve your Lead Management problems. LeadMaster makes it easy to track leads and manage leads.
Defining your strategy
The first step is understanding your current process.
Document your current process by writing it down and reviewing it with stakeholders to be certain it is correct.
Here are the key questions...
- How do leads flow through your company now?
- Who is responsible, for which types of lead generation campaigns, that you are running?
- Where do the leads come from?
- List all the sources. For example, Landing Pages, Webinars, Telemarketing, Direct Mail etc.
- How are the leads transmitted from marketing to sales? CRM, Excel, email, etc.
- Who owns the current process?
- One person overal,l or bits and pieces?
- How do you measure lead follow-up?
- How do you track from sales lead to closed sales?
Lead Definitions - you must standardize...
It sounds simple but many companies don't do it. By scoring and classifying your leads consistently you'll be able to focus on the high potential leads and nurture the rest. Yes, LeadMaster includes Lead Nurturing.
- How do you classify leads?
- A, B, C, D.
- Hot, Warm Cold, Dead
- Be specific and consistent
Lead Status
Once you've created your definitions you'll also want to track their progress so you can see how many leads have been followed up and what the sales stage is for each of those.
- attempted / no contact
- made contact / follow-up required
- meeting scheduled
- pipeline
- forecast
- dead
Once you have your process defined you'll be able to pinpoint areas for improvement. The first thing you'll want to understand is your target market. The best way to do that is by analyzing your existing customers. The next best way is by analyzing prospects who respond to your marketing campaigns.
Next you'll want to know what happens with the leads after they are distributed to field sales reps and partners. This will help sales managers know know which reps are working the leads and which aren't. LeadMaster has built-in Lead Aging Analysis.
The last thing you'll want to understand is what was sold as a result of each lead and each campaign. You should be able to view that information in a variety of ways: By industry, territory, product, rep, partner etc. Again, LeadMaster has built-in Lead Analytics reports to help you understand not only did you win or lose but why you won or lost.
There's a great deal of detail behind each of these you'll want to identify. For example, do you mark a lead dead if you haven't been able to reach the prospect after 3 attempts. Your lead management strategy should be a living process, continuously updated.
LeadMaster makes Lead Management easy
Using the LeadMaster lead management solution as your centralized web-based database, you can capture leads from a variety of sources, including imports from other enterprise applications and third-party sources, telemarketing campaigns, web forms, direct mail, event registrations, manual data entry and more. Leads flow directly into the system in real time and are fully indexed for comprehensive search and data mining. As leads are entered, they can be automatically assigned to sales reps and channel partners, with email notifications to alert them to the new opportunity.
As leads are followed up, a journal of sales activity is maintained for each opportunity, with areas for reps to perform typical sales force automation tasks such as updating the status of the lead and scheduling callbacks, but also to provide valuable feedback on lead quality and indicate progress in the sales process. Managers can track the progress of every lead through dashboards and other tools for CRM analytics, allowing marketing to measure return on investment and sales to create reliable forecasts. They can also evaluate user activity, introducing increased accountability and transparency into the sales process.
Click here to send us an email and we'll send you a user ID & password to our system so you can see for yourself just how easy it is to manage your leads with LeadMaster. Free 30-day trial - no strings attached.
Give us a call at 800-699-4164 and we'll connect you with one of our Lead Managment experts. We've helped hundreds of companies just like yours. Don't waste another day, give us a call - you'll be glad you did.