Lead Management Software, Putting Urgency Into Your Sales Process

A sense of urgency is the undisputed king of closed deals. Being hyper-responsive to customers and clients always heightens customers' propensity to buy. So, why isn't it in your sales process?

Lacking urgency is the number one weakness of most sales organizations--a weakness that will immediately return poor sales performance. The challenge is finding a way to scale urgency for your clients needs. Lead management software is the quickest way to create a consistent sense of urgency, by enforcing follow-up and drive responsiveness to customer inquiries.

Lead Distribution

The first step in creating urgency within your sales organization is to quickly get customers (leads) to sales people. This is the job of lead distribution and can become enormously challenging to do quickly, especially once you grow beyond a couple of sales people.

Lead management software is the best way to automate this distribution process. You can also achieve some of these other lead optimization tasks:

• Segment lead sources
• Distribute leads equitably
• Route leads to specialists
• Re-distribute leads as necessary

Your creativity run away from you in designing the "perfect" lead distribution process. The most important thing to remember is not to lose sight of the most important thing--getting leads to sales people fast!

Contact Management

Now that you have a lead it is critical to make contact. As simple and straightforward as this sounds it is where a lot of fall-out occurs in lead management. Call anxiety and simple lead overload are classic examples of why 60-70 percent of leads never get contacted.

Capable lead management software can fix this problem. The secret is achieving visibility and accountability on every lead in every agent's sales pipeline. There are a lot of ways to achieve this, but the most efficient and effective is using pull-based lead distribution in combination with a "get my next lead" approach to serving one lead at a time.

This approach will give your sales force intense focus and follow-up on every lead in your system.

Pipeline Management

How often have you seen sales die in your pipeline? Probably more often than you want to admit. Lead management software can increase your productivity by working on those leads even while your sales attention is elsewhere.

Lead management is good at helping you do the following common pipeline management tasks:

• Prioritizing leads
• Tagging for follow-up
• Segmenting leads
• Targeting strategic deals

The more you can automate pipeline management with your lead management system the more time you have to really sell.

Lead Nurturing

Similar to pipeline management, lead nurturing acts like a virtual assistant. Using this feature in your lead management software will help you stay top of mind and in touch with customers with little or no work. Your customers will feel like you are right on top of their emerging needs.

Typically a lead nurturing system will combine emails, alerts, and mail-merge features to automate your contact (touches) with a prospect or client. The more frequently and naturally you execute these campaigns the more production you will push through your sales pipeline.

The unique value proposition of lead management software is to increase you productivity and contact with prospects. A good lead management system will literally automate simple tasks and bring deals to you!