How advanced is your company with your lead management process?
February 20th, 2007 | Marilou BarsamLead Management includes data collection, lead qualification, nurturing, distributing and analyzing leads.
The result? To increase the likelihood that a lead will convert to a qualified opportunity.
A recent study, “CMO Advisory Best Practices Series: Marketing Lead Management Process”, states only a few Tech Companies surveyed were able to demonstrate their impact on the sales pipeline. Failure points include: data collection, lead qualification, sales hand off, lead nurturing and performance measurement.
Here at TechTarget, we provide our customers with a unique lead management tool. The tools provides reporting metrics detailing each user’s interaction with the specific content – such are time spent with a document, pages views and pages printed. This data combined with customized questions helps better identify quality leads for sales. Do you currently utilize a lead management tool? If so, how advanced is the tool?
May 3rd, 2007 at 11:26 am
What do you do with leads once you generate them?
This question is overlooked by almost everyone. It is often the cause of failure in what would otherwise be effective web marketing campaigns. The common-sense answer is easier said than done: Have your best employees respond to them quickly and consistently to qualify them into prospects.
Many companies spend thousands of dollars every month with Google, Yahoo, and MSN to generate clicks to their website. These same companies invest tens of thousands in building a web site to attract visitors. They even use analytical tools like Omniture, WebSideStory, or WebTrends to track these visitors and turn them into leads, only to let those leads sit in some sales manager’s inbox for 48 hours before they are contacted.
One elegant solution is to embed a web-form onto a website that captures the lead and pushes it real time into a database. It then quickly routes the lead to the best suited sales rep, a telephony tool immediately gets the rep on the phone and automatically calls and connects the lead to the rep.
Our research shows that the average salesperson only makes four to five attempts to contact them the first week. This means only 55% of a company’s web leads will actually get contacted.
It goes back to Lead Response Management: Acquire a system that immediately and systematically pushes the leads to the best qualified salespeople. A system that also allows the salespeople to immediately and frequently respond to leads and turn them into prospects. Again, this simple but overlooked approach can boost net results by 20 to 200%.
Darin Dixon
Insidesales.com