Design A Good Lead Management Process And Improve Sales Lead Performance

Lead management is more than software--it is the secret to converting more sales leads. Fundamentally lead management are the key processes your marketing and sales teams should have in place to maximize your sales lead conversion.

Make sure your lead management system contains these 6 elements to increase conversion:

1. Orderly Lead Receipt

Regardless of where you get your leads--trade show, purchased data, online lead generation, or referral--you need a systematic way to receive leads. Your methodology should be consistent and efficiently formatted to expedite entry into your database and distribution to sales.

These are recommended minimum requirements of any lead receipt process:

• Standard data elements and formats
• Common data file formats (i.e., XML, .xls, .csv)
• Sufficient data elements to filter for product types
• Some level of data quality refinement and scrubbing

Using these lead receipt best practices, your lead management process should be able to take in all of your leads quickly, efficiently, and ready them for distribution to sales.

2. Efficient and Timely Distribution

Getting them in the database is the first step, but getting them to the sales team is the prime objective. Ensure your lead distribution is just as organized as your lead receipt.

Don't get complacent, real-time leads or static data lists should make no difference to lead distribution. Promote a sense of urgency in all of your leads. Get them into the hands of sales immediately and expect them to be called immediately.

This steady flow of leads is the lifeline of your sales production.

Leads sitting around certainly won't close. Sales people setting around won't close either. Get your leads from receipt to sales as soon as possible.

3. Managed and Consistent Sales Process

As any good sales manager knows, getting leads to sales is not enough. You have to ensure systematic and consistent follow-up and sales activity on every lead. This means demanding accountability.

Here is the level of discipline that should be embedded in your leads sales process:

• Require every lead to have an immediate initial contact
• Require every lead to have a minimum level of follow-up
• Design a consistent sales process, expect it to be followed
• Provide leads based on performance only, bad sales people will starve

I am going to emphasize the last point. It is magical. The secret to successful lead allocation and building the best sales team is to provide leads based on sales. If you don't sell, if you don't close, and you don't get leads. Bad sales people will "magically" starve themselves out of your sales organization.

4. Automated Marketing Follow-up

Sales is still largely based on the theory of large numbers. Marketing has never become so clairvoyant as to get us perfectly targeted, ready to close leads. So, we still have to do a lot of hustling to make our numbers.

Maximizing the sales activity on every lead will naturally increase conversion. This is where automated marketing can help. Your goal is to put additional sales pressure on each lead.

Cross-check these basic fundamentals of automated marketing against your lead management process:

• Every new lead in the database gets an intro email
• Email templates are available for follow-ups to calls
• Email drip campaigns are working on sales pipelines
• Lead nurturing campaigns are getting more from unconverted leads

Automated marketing systems, coordinated with your lead management system, will improve sales numbers. Increasing sales pressure, in a passive way, is the advantage of marketing automation working on your pipeline while sales is pressing with live calls.

5. Reporting and Analysis

Since marketing, sales, and markets are dynamic you need to measure, measure, measure. The big advantage to lead management is the discipline. It gives you tracking and measurements of your results, helping you find opportunities for improvement.

6. Process Improvement

Process improvement--this is really the key. Marketing and sales are far to volatile to stand "settle into" a routine. Success or failure teeters in the balance everyday as the market and customer needs change. If your lead management process is not designed to capture opportunities to improve or worse you can't see opportunity at all--you are dead on arrival.

Build and document a lead management process today--then see and seize success with your process.