Market Analyst
Dun & Bradstreet
Canada
Sales Tips: Lead Management Process to Get More Leads
People new to the arena of lead management often struggle with defining exactly what it is, and one of the biggest mistakes they make is trying to pigeonhole lead management into just another aspect of marketing or sales.
The reality is that it stands alone in its own "space," almost directly between marketing and sales.
In simple terms, the process of lead management begins the second you have actionable information about a client that has expressed interest, but has not yet bought. Lead Capture is the first of a series of steps that make up the complete process, as follows.
The 8 Steps of Lead Generation
- Lead Capture—getting usable contact information from the inquiry.
- Lead Scoring—evaluating the potential for the lead in terms of quality, potential revenue.
- Lead Routing—passing the lead info to the appropriate agent.
- Lead Response Management—the agent's actions to contact and qualify the lead; usually very time-sensitive, especially for Web-generated leads.
- Lead Qualification Skills—agent's ability to convert the lead into a viable prospect.
- Lead Tracking—analyzing the steps taken to produce a qualified prospect. Used for training and management.
- Lead Reporting—analyzing the end results based on previous steps taken.
- Lead Source Analysis—identifying for marketing, based on reporting and tracking, which sources of leads are producing the highest quality and most profitable leads, to enable future marketing outlays.
If you're having difficulty establishing the process for your organization, make sure that you have some form of action item within each of these eight areas. Obviously you may find that more steps need to be added, but organizations that skip any of these eight find down the road they have a critical gap in either their data intelligence, or in their process that hinders the results they want.
Also note that of the eight steps, only #5—Lead Qualification Skills cannot be improved, made faster, more efficient, or more productive with an automation tool. If you're serious about improving sales and maximizing your business, an automation tool completely transforms and supercharges the lead management process, driving the number of prospects and closed sales ever higher. The right software boosts sales performance so dramatically that there's almost no excuse to be managing the lead generation process by hand.
See how the InsideSales.com Lead Response Management system can triple your agents' productivity in lead qualification, and dramatically increase contacts and qualifying rates by giving you the power to contact new leads in seconds, not hours or days.
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