Automating your lead management activities

A viable lead management database is more than a respository of customers and contacts. It should also be able to do some heavy lifting.

This includes 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 spending some time determining how best to create a closed-loop lead management system.  If there's not agreement on major issues, such as under what circumstances are leads assigned, and who assigned them, whether leads assigned need to be followed up (or not) and what feedback channels exist, in the event the lead is not accepted (and not followed up), it will do little good to automate processes that aren't working and well aligned with business and key stakeholder's needs.

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 networks.

You'll also want to be very clear on how lead followup will be reported, and monitored.  If uualified leads from a trade show are not followed up by sales (or even assigned) in your CRM system, you want to know that within a week of the trade show, not six month's after, when the value of leads have decayed significantly, and the customer experience impacted negatively. 

Also, think through how your organization decides what data to collect from the target audience, so that the collection system obtains actionable 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?  Should these prospects be returned to marketing, for additional nurturing?  These are all process decisions that need to be made, irregardless of whether your processes is automated or manual.

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 provides, make sure you have some way to track key results metrics.  This can be number of proposals generated, orders pending, stage of opportunity, as well as conversion to sales. 

Ultimately, the most efficient systems utilize processes that are not  dependent on relationships or resources that can change.  Counting on leveraging relationships with sales or specific staff who can pull together the numbers may defeat the purpose of building 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, not simply to generate reports.

As powerful as a state-of-the-art lead management system can be, it doesn't matter much if it can't solve your lead distribution or key metrics reporting issues. Take it one step at a time.  Consider a phased-in process that makes room for change, if you're not there yet.

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.  Once you know that, automation is simply the next step in implementation, not a whole new process.