What does it mean to manage a lead effectively? Listed below are the 9 steps to follow when managing your leads.
1. Lead Generation: any of a number of marketing or sales methods used to generate inquiries.
2. Lead Inquiry: a person provides contact information inviting a response.
3. Lead Capture: the method whereby contact information from an inquirer is gathered.
4. Lead Scoring: the practice of grading and prioritizing an inquiry prior to a response to a lead from your sales department.
5. Lead Routing: the geographical, skills-based, random, or other decision process whereby an inquiry is assigned to a rep for response.
6. Lead Distribution: the method used to send inquirer information to a rep for response.
7. Lead Response: the practice of responding immediately, consistently and at optimal times to optimize contact and qualification ratios.
8. Lead Nurturing: the practice of persistently marketing over time to increase awareness, education, and need using ‘permission-marketing’ strategies and tactics.
9. Lead Tracking: the process of gathering key performance indicators and metrics on sources of leads their progress towards sales closure.
We will be reviewing each lead management step in depth. If you have any questions or comments about any of these steps, please, leave them in the comments—we’ll be writing […]
As always I want to make things clear, and today I’ve set my sights on some acronyms that are used a lot in remote sales: B2B and B2C. What do they stand for? ‘Business to Business’ and ‘Business to Customer’ respectively.
Some may argue (and do if you read some of the blogs out there) that there are virtually no differences in the sales processes targeting these to groups. B2B and B2C become arbitrary classifications to these people. Instead of tallying up the many ways they are the same, I want to highlight some of the key differences between the two categories and explain why that warrants a different sales tactic.
Quantity: There are two major differences in quantity between B2B and B2C markets: a difference in number of clients, and a difference in size of their budget. There are millions of individual customers while some B2B operations struggle to have customer bases creep into the thousands category. But what businesses lack in shear number they more than make up for in how much each individual customer is able to spend. Because of these differences each sale to a B2B customer has more […]
Remote Sales needs leads. Good Leads. Leads that will become customers. This kind of lead is not easy to find, though there are some companies that would tell you otherwise.
These companies make their profits by selling what they want you to believe are leads. In reality they are often little more than a long list of contact information. Anybody with a phone book could gather a lead just as useful (or useless!).
What separates lists from leads is qualification. Leads are qualified by four factors, and to be good leads they need at least 2 or three of these factors. The four factors are:
Need
Urgency
Decision Making Capability
Money
While there are some companies that sell leads that are more pre-qualified than those next to useless lists – there may be no better source for leads that meet the four qualifying factors than your own corporate website.
Visitors to your site are already showing a sign of interest – and many of them came to your site looking for a solution to a need. Visitors who use the internet expect immediate results – reflecting urgency. Already two of the four qualifiers […]
Last week I wrote about what you can do to get the most out of your Auto Dialer. Look forward to me highlighting in the future different kinds of dialers, and what you can expect from them. This week .
What’s the best kind of Dialer for you? Part 1
Several varieties of dialers exist. Click-to-call, auto dialers, ratio, and predictive dialers have each been available and used by remote sales businesses for decades. These dialers were developed by companies who wanted to be able to churn through thousands of leads a day while identifying the easiest sales. Over time advancements in dialer technology has led to a more refined and customer focused alternative. This alternative is the power dialer.
Power dialers still meet the fundamental goal of all dialers – they help sales representatives call more leads each day. An average rep can call two or three times the amount of leads in a day using a power dialer than he could call dialing manually. While this number is lower than with some other kinds of dialers, its impressive enough to justify the investment in such software.
Power dialers go beyond increasing […]
Auto Dialers are staples in the industry. What other software solutions allow you to get the most out of your Auto Dialer?
