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Lead Management, Increasing Sales from Your CRM System

Lead Management: Marketing Automation and Sales CRM

Ever wonder the secrets of top sales producers? Is it a gregarious personality? Maybe the witty stories punctuated with a twist of gritty humor? How about the gumption to call anyone? No, No, and No. They may help, but the secret lies in the "system"--how they manage their client database, their repository of prospects and customers, their leads. It isn't magic, but once you understand the process, and discipline yourself to it, you have a stable stream of increasing sales numbers.

Lead Management Overview

The basic tenets of lead management include a closed loop of process and feedback. Ideally your lead management software, or even manual system, will have mechanisms to track and measure lead activities and results from lead generation to final disposition.

It sounds intuitive. Accounting for every potential customer, especially if they show interest in your products/services, and actively following-up. Working every prospect until you are turned down or they buy something. Unfortunately, common practice does not follow action. As a result, 50% of leads never reach sales and 65% of customers never receive follow-ups to their online inquiries.

The goal of this article is to close the gap between understanding and practice. Our simple methodology with give you the lead management system you need to hit every sales goal.

Advertising to Close--Closed Loop Lead Management

Optimizing your lead management process is about defining and capturing data on key process points (key performance indicators). For a lead management system these process points include:

Lead Generation
Lead Capture
Lead Filtering and Verification
Lead Distribution
Lead Workflow
Lead Nurturing
Lead Reporting

We will cover each in depth, but the important point to remember is--"What Get's Measured, Get's Improved." So, make sure you have mechanisms for lead tracking along each of these critical paths.

Lead Generation

Lead generation is the alpha and the omega, as they say, of the circle. It is the beginning of the lead management process, but if done right a closed deal begets a referral and the circle is complete. The ultimate goal of the lead management process is to generate a lead that closes and then refers more people. Build your process with that in mind.

You are likely to acquire leads from a myriad of sources. This diversity is good to smooth out natural cycles in different marketing techniques. However, it will create disconnects and fall out if you can simply centralize and manage your various marketing channels.

Some of the most popular methods of generating sales leads include:

Email campaigns--generating new opt-in mailing lists or providing valuable information to existing clients
Internet lead generation--generating targeted consumer traffic through techniques like search engine optimization, pay per click, or email campaigns that motivate customers to submit inquiries via Web forms
Trade shows--generating foot traffic, presenting, and discussing solutions with attendees to collect "scans" and business cards
Various offline direct mail and publication advertising

These all generate some level of inbound customer inquiries. The important impact here is to a seamless (as possible) transition from lead generation to lead capture.

Lead Capture

This is the cause of most lead loss and negative impact to lead ROI. The simplest way to achieve an integrated lead receipt or lead capture process is to set-up a few standard interfaces to your lead management process. Here are three simple ways to automate the input of 90% of all the leads you will buy or generate:

Secure XML POST--this allows you to receive real-time, secure Web inquiries from your own landing pages or from pay per lead lead providers
CSV Import--this interface is a critical back up import technique that will allow you to get lead data from most any source or database
Address Book and Email Import--you lead management system should allow for imports from Outlook, Yahoo!, Hotmail, GMail, and other popular email software

The most important take away for this point in the process is--get them in the system. If business cards are lying about your desk and not in your contact management system I can guarantee you a 0% conversion rate.

Lead Validation

This is a relatively new component of lead management. Lead validation, lead qualification, lead filtering, lead prioritization are all similar terms that describe a core problem in any CRM system: What should I focus on first? Although lead sorting and prioritizing is still a bit of an art form there are emerging "sciences" around the process.

The most fundamental of lead validation targets verifying the customer data that was captured during the lead generation process. These techniques concentrate data scrubbing techniques on:

telephone numbers
address validation
correlations of telephone numbers to addresses (increasingly riddled with opportunity for false positives with portable numbers)

This is of some minimal value and seeks to eliminate typos and Web form spam.

Potentially more interesting are emerging technologies and data sets that give insight into a customers propensity to buy something. In addition, some of these techniques enhance your ability to segment, distribute, and route leads to the right sales agent or team.

Lead Distribution

Getting your leads into your contact queue or allocated to people that can help a customer can be a big challenge. Typically customers need or want for a product or service is fleeting. Consumers generally react to immediate impulse or pain and want immediate satisfaction.

That satisfaction is based on your responsiveness and the offer’s appropriateness.

Unfortunately, the typical lead distribution process--handing off a crumpled business card from a trade show, forwarding an email, or printing out lead sheets--probably isn't going to render customer satisfaction. In addition, you are probably burning a lot of resources to accomplish this clumsy process. This is where lead matching and lead routing can help.

Your lead distribution program should have the following basic features:

Awareness of whether the agent you are giving the lead to is available
Ability to determine if any agent has too many or too few leads
Tracking of whether an agent is qualified or trained to handle the customer's request
Determine if the agent is performing (making sales)

Lead Nurturing (Lead Workflow)

Another emerging concept in lead management that is having a lot of impact on overall lead performance and marketing ROI is lead workflows, or lead nurturing. There are a lot of techniques that can be melded into this broad idea. However, it boils down to adding value to customers while they are making their decision, or when they are not buying.

This value-add can be part of your marketing strategy and part of your sales process.

Within your marketing campaigns lead nurturing should include a value-based discussion and information flow about important consideration to their decision to buy. This should not be a sales pitch. A marketing lead nurturing campaign should educate a customer on the market, techniques to be successful, what solutions in this space should have, and potentially things they can do to afford or qualify for your product or service.

As your leads transition into the sales process your workflows should begin to weight towards educating customers on benefits, how easy it is to purchase, how quick the results are, and the fastest way to get the product or qualify.

Lead Reporting

Most would tell you that lead analytics is the most important process in lead management. I am suspect of this claim. My experience is that they are rarely used properly, yet are often requested. The bottom line in lead reporting is: reports don't close deals, but they can definitely point to opportunity. That is how you should use lead analytics.

When evaluating your tracking and reporting mechanisms start with the simple question, "What opportunities does this show me?"

Here are critical elements to design into your lead management process to ensure proper lead reporting:

Use standard actions and statuses to disposition each lead
Look areas where your sales cycle slows or extends
Determine where your customer fall-out happens and why
Create benchmarks for each status and metrics so you can quickly forecast

Simple metrics are always the best. The simpler reports are the more focused you are on the important. Simple analytics also make your optimization cycles quicker.