"The difference between a successful lead management system and a huge waste of money is a leader who motivates the rest."
Source: Destination CRM, CRM Magazine
A company can have a great marketing department, terrific sales people and the most creative ad agency money can buy but if senior management is not serious about measuring the success of every ad they place or event they manage, precious marketing dollars are wasted. The best way to get management interested is to identify the true cost of sales lead generation and management.
You must identify all costs related to:
- Creating and placing advertising campaigns.
- Exhibiting at and staffing trade shows.
- Production and distribution of collateral.
- Telemarketing to handle leads.
- Website development and maintenance.
"18% of prospects never receive the materials they had requested."
Who's in charge? Sadly when it comes to sales leads either no one is, or everyone is. Put someone in charge of sales lead management and enable them to challenge what is going on. Are the leads being entered, assigned and distributed? Are requested materials (brochures, samples, documents) being sent to prospects? Give the in charge person tools to monitor what is happening and to report to the organization the relative performance of each component of sales lead management. This performance must then be included in the rewards system.
"90% of marketing-generated leads are not acted upon by sales"
Sales people are driven by how to earn the most by doing the least. They love "low hanging fruit" and will first grab the ripe sales leads that are ready to fall. If this gets them over quota and makes the house payment they may be content. But how many leads that need just a little bit of nurturing and follow up were wasted? Find a way to get feed back from the field rep and then cultivate all of the other sales leads. Use a lead management system to maintain contact with the prospect providing them with all of the necessary information to make them a warmer lead.
"Use the Goldilocks approach. Some tools are too big; others too small. Find what is right for your business."
Source: Destination CRM, CRM Magazine
Just collecting business cards, reader service cards, website inquiries or telemarketing sales leads is not enough. You must have a process to capture, assign, distribute, and fulfill every lead. How will you assign the sales lead and get the lead detail to the rep responsible for making the call? How will you get the information requested to the prospect?
Depending on the complexity of the organization or product the solution can be as simple as an Excel spread sheet or as complex as an enterprise wide customer relationship management system that ties your lead program to accounting, payroll, production, logistics and service. In most cases the optimum solution is somewhere in between.
You need more than a spreadsheet to have control of what is going on but you probably don't need to invest a fortune and take years to get what you need. LEADTRACK for example, has a standard program created from over 30 years of sales lead management experience, which can be implemented for less than the cost of a single trade show and configured to exactly meet your needs. In addition we have a hosted or SaaS (Software as a Service) solution that utilizes cloud computing technology that is configured to meet the needs of each of your users and is provided for a low monthly subscription fee.
"Don't buy what you don't need...People don't like change as it is; keeping things simple only makes implementation easier."
Source: Destination CRM, CRM Magazine
Keep it simple. If you make the lead management and follow up process too hard you will not maximize the opportunities. Sales people or distributors should not become administrators having to deal with complex software or forms. If it is too difficult to work with they simply won't do it or will find a way to short cut the complexities. You must develop a straight forward process to assign, distribute and update sales leads in a timely manner.
"43% of prospective buyers received requested materials after they had already made a decision."
Source: U of Mass Center for Marketing Communication.
This is where a good process can pay for itself and the cost of a sales lead management system. Automated campaign execution and sales lead management software will allow you to deliver timely, relevant, consistent communications to prospects or customers via email, direct mail, telemarketing or other communication channels. Replacing PDF formatted brochures as an email attachment for mailed brochure will save your company thousands.
Sales leads age - make sure you know if your leads are blooming, ripe or dead.
Inspect what you expect. Beyond just making a person responsible for distributing and assigning sales leads you need to make those who receive the leads accountable. Lead aging reports, viable and non viable lead reports, campaign effectiveness reports are all critical to determining what is happening with sales leads, what programs work and what programs need to be improved.
"When service is perceived to be immediate, 95% of customers will do business with you again. "
Source: US Gov Buyer Survey
In sales lead management Speed is of the Essence. Sales leads that are not followed up will never turn into sales. The greater the time lapse in contacting a prospect, the less effective that follow up tends to be.
"Do what you do best, and let others do the rest."
Source: John Arend, president of Maverick Marketing
As good as your IT department may be at providing support for your computers, phones and networks it is unlikely they have an intimate knowledge of sales lead management software. The math is easy - estimate how many man hours it will take to develop an in house program, apply a loaded hourly rate - then triple it! You will be money ahead with much more sophisticated tools if you select a program developed and refined by sales lead management experts.
""If it's not worth measuring, it's not worth doing."
Whether it is development and placement of ad campaigns or the true cost of trade shows, it is imperative that you look at the Return on Investment for every activity. A good source for this information is your accounting department. They are probably already looking at the costs and wonder why no one else is.
Don't forget to look at opportunity costs:
- What is the real cost in lost revenue of not following up on a sales lead?
- What is the cost of your company image when a lead is not worked?
- How much are you spending today to manually manage, distribute, follow up and
fulfill leads?
- What is the cost to print brochures?
- What is the cost to mail brochures?
All companies invest heavily in programs to generate leads unfortunately 90% of these leads never get worked. All leads are not created equal. Some definitely have more potential than others but it is impossible to determine which leads are red hot if someone doesn't work the leads. Your company can make dramatic improvement in your lead management program if you take the time to consider the above tips. They will help you to turn sales leads into customers.
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