Lead Management

Leads are always precious but in today’s tough business climate it is more important than ever, having expended money and effort to generate a lead, that it is nurtured and developed appropriately through to a closed sale (and beyond) to deliver maximum lifetime value.

In many firms the success of the lead generation effort (the marketing department) is measured on the number of leads; but far more useful is to monitor the true value of the leads that have been generated and to automate the processes to ensure that leads are handled properly.

A few years ago my company ran a series of seminars that attracted huge attention and generated scores of leads. 2 years later they had not generated a single sale. At the time we thought it was the best seminar series ever as we were so oversubscribed we had to run additional sessions. The hard facts though are that it was a complete waste of time, effort and money.

How do you measure currently?

Fig. 1 = Example Lead Pipeline

Once a lead has been generated all firms have theoretical rules as to next steps. The problem is that tracking even the basic next step is often a major time consuming challenge and after several attempts gets abandoned. Marketing ask Sales what has happened – Sales stall as “unable to get through to the lead”, sometimes genuine, sometimes because they are “too busy”. Marketing frequently gets fed up tracking like this so the lead tracking is either inefficient or does not happen. Users will try to use tools like Excel or Outlook to manage the process from their own perspective but the data remains personal and not shared. Such a problem is removed when implementing a CRM system. Figure 1 shows a typical graphical view of a lead pipeline where leads are tracked through the qualification process prior to entering the sales process

What would you like to happen?

Fig. 2 = Example Sales Pipeline

Once a new lead has been generated and any immediate response has happened (such as an information pack being sent) any follow up activity should fall into the relevant (sales?) person’s daily work list. The next step is often further qualification – it is important that this process allows for leads to be rejected and reasons tracked so that useful metrics are in place to refine future campaigns. Auto notification that the next step is overdue will allow sales managers and/or marketing teams to intervene in a timely fashion. I have seen a company successfully enforce a rule whereby if a salesperson did not follow up within 3 working days the lead was reassigned to a different sales person.

Once the lead has been accepted it should feed into a sales forecasting pipeline to further track the lead through the sales process. An example of a graphical view of a pipeline showing typical stages in the sales process can be seen in Figure 2.

The lead qualification and sales process can be further enhanced by adding in workflow process automation. By making the processes intuitive and to a large extent automated, the staff are motivated to use the process because it saves them time – both as they work through the sale but also because sales forecasts become almost a by product rather than a major regular chore. An example of how a workflow process looks ‘behind the scenes’ can be seen in Figure 3.

Visibility of the sales stages reached by leads from specific campaigns also helps in refining future lead generation plans. Figure 4 shows a typical reporting analysis dashboard.

Fig. 3 = Example Lead Workflow                   Fig. 4 = Dashboard analytics view 

Conclusion

Leads are too important to get lost anywhere in the firm. Make sure that you can track and measure the value of leads over the short, medium and long term.

It is also important to ensure that you can reliably report on how far each lead gets in the selling cycle (if all leads of a certain type come second to a competitor then you need to know so that you can address the underlying issue).

Make sure that you can attribute a value to each lead.

Make sure that you have a reject mechanism so that the early stage lead count is reliable and consistent with ‘good leads’.

E1 Business supply CRM solutions personalised to your firms’ way of working so that your processes become well managed.

A valuable by-product is that personal productivity for Sales, Marketing and Sales Management staff will also be improved in a number of other areas

To further discuss the contents of this article, contact e1 Business on (01962) 718270 or email us on info@e1business.com

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