more A viable lead management database is more than a respository of customers and contacts. It should also be able to do some heavy lifting, including giving visibility into key metrics, such as increases in proposals, pending orders or actual conversion to sales resulting from leads and campaigns.

But before we recommend automating anything, we recommend examining current lead management processes as well as getting input from key marketing, sales and other stakeholders to determine where the weaknesses are in the current program.

Also, to make sure the lead management process fits your business and your markets, it's necessary to Identify how products and services are currently marketed and sold including internal sales force, resellers and distribution network.

You'll want to be very clear on how the sales distribution process, including identifying who takes responsibility for following up and reporting on leads, including those collected at show site.

Also, think through how your organization decides what data to collect from the target taudience, so that the collection system obtains actional data from attendees. A big gap can also occur with booth visitors who are not ready to buy. How should followup with these prospects occur? It's estimated that 80% of the visitors who stop buy a booth will buy from someone. Will that be your company... or a competitor?

Whatever your lead management system evolves into, make sure you have some way to track and report conversion of leads to sales, so that the process is not dependent on specific staff, relationships with sales or other workarounds that defeat the purpose of an automated, closed-loop lead management system.

That being said, having a beautiful database doesn’t matter if it’s not being used by the sales force. Also, the point of any solution, technology or otherwise, should be to get more customers and ship more products or sell more services. As impressive as a state-of-the-art lead management system can be, it doesn't matter much if it can't solve your key metrics reporting issues.

Experts have written books on what to capture in a lead database. We have found the true best practice is to also take a step back and determine what process works best for your company, not necessarily what the book says is best, or the software provides.

So if you've identified a lead management solution, consider a phased in process that makes room for change, if you're not there yet.