Whether you are using the latest marketing automation technology or an Excel spreadsheet it is crucial to master these lead management fundamentals.  Making lead management improvements will: provide a better buying experience for your customers; increase lead conversion rates and drive business growth; enable sales and marketing to use their time and resources most effectively; give you insight into marketing program ROI; and help align Sales and Marketing.

Start with the end in mind as you consider the following.

• Align Sales and Marketing with shared goals, objectives and metrics.  Alignment needs to come from the top.  Sales and Marketing leaders must illustrate a shared commitment and start to break down perceptions such as “marketing only generates poor quality leads”, and “sales never follows up on leads”.

• Agree, define and document your lead process from end to end. It is vital that everyone involved in the buying process knows it from top to bottom, and that each stage is transparent to all involved.  As you define the process consider language, ownership, internal SLAs, escalation and metrics.

• Spend time considering your qualification criteria. Marketing and Sales must reach agreement on lead qualification criteria that is required for each stage of the sales funnel. Furthermore it should be recognised that the sales funnel shouldn’t be totally linear. It is important to map out a process whereby leads can skip stages and move backwards, i.e., sales should be able to pass leads back to marketing for further nurturing when required.
• Be prescriptive with your data acquisition. What information is vital to move prospects through the buyer cycle?  What information is needed to determine their propensity to purchase?  Consider the likely level of engagement of visitors to your site prior to first form submission.  Will they be engaged enough to give you information for a life time commitment or just the next step? Once you’ve decided on your data acquisition requirements you can consider how you can ensure high levels of accuracy, such as PAF enabled address verification.
• Nurture your leads. There are numerous statistics regarding both the % of leads that Sales typically work; and the number of contacts required to make a sale (see below). The numbers may or may not surprise you, but they indicate the vital role of nurturing communications to help move leads through the sales funnel.

• Score and rank. Not all leads are created equal. As you define your lead process, consider your criteria for ranking leads. Whether you are using marketing automation to consider leads based on their implicit (behavioural) and explicit attributes (including BANT: Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline criteria), or whether you are manually triaging leads that come into your business, ensure that those with a higher propensity to purchase are pushed to the top of the follow up queue.

• Track, analyse, and improve. Continually benchmark, track and analyse your process and results. Recognise that getting lead management right takes time and continual tweaking.

• Marketing automation. Lead management automation is a key component of marketing automation. Results are realised through improving conversion rates at multiple stages of the sales funnel. The marketing automation market has been, and still is, growing fast.  Check out the “The Best Top 10 Marketing Automation Companies in the UK” by uk.topseos.com for June 2010.

1. Net-Results
2. Loopfuse
3. Pardot LLC.
4. Manticore Technology
5. Aprimo Inc.
6. Marketo, Inc.
7. Eloqua
8. Neolane
9. SilverPOP
10. Genius.com

Tags: demand generation, lead management, lead nurturing, lead qualification, lead scoring, marketing automation, sales and marketing alignment
Posted in lead management