How to Strengthen Your Lead Management Process. - Issue: 2000 Qtr 2
E-business imperative: Strengthen Your Lead Management Process.
In today's world of 1-to-1 marketing and "Internet time," your customers and prospects expect rapid and personalized follow-up to their inquiries. If you are not prepared to respond rapidly and effectively to their inquiries, how do you think this affects their trust in your capabilities? Is this the brand impression you want to make?
Lead management is important not only from a customer perspective, but also because it represents a vital link between your marketing and sales organizations. Lead management is not simply the "passing off" of leads from marketing to sales. Rather, it is the process of moving a prospect along the sales cycle continuum from a state of "awareness" to a state of "loyal customer." For some companies, this process is short. For others, it takes many months and requires significant cooperation between marketing and sales through multiple contacts with a prospect.
Fortunately, software technology now exists to automate many pieces of the lead management process. For instance, workflow "engines" can fulfill literature requests by sending electronic files to an email address or generating a mail merge letter. Automation can speed up the process, personalize the lead follow-up, eliminate redundant data entry, and reduce the potential for human error. Furthermore, in large companies with multiple sales channels and product lines, complex lead routing rules can be established and implemented consistently and rapidly. Here are some questions to consider as you assess the lead management process in your company:
1. Do you know how many leads your marketing organization generated last year?
2. Do you know the sales conversion rate of those leads?
3. How quickly are leads sent to the sales channels following an inquiry by a prospect or existing customer?
4. How much administrative time is spent processing and responding to leads?
5. Could some of this time and effort be saved through automation of the process?
6. Do you have a prospect/customer database that is accessible by marketing and sales employees?
7. Do you assign and prioritize leads based on information contained in the database?
8. Do you provide an easy way for sales representatives to update the database during the sales cycle?
The key to successfully implementing lead management is to find the broken elements of the process and to seek to continually improve the process. In the end, both sales and marketing will benefit. Sales will be able to show marketing where the "good" leads are coming from and marketing will be able to analyze its efforts and adjust investments in campaigns and promotional activities to generate higher quality leads for the sales channels. And perhaps the most important benefit - your customers walk away with a terrific impression of your brand!
This article was contributed by Allan Wimmer, Manager, Corporate Strategy, Aprimo, Inc. If you would like more information about improving and automating your lead management processes or other aspects of marketing management, please contact Allan Wimmer at Aprimo, Inc. 317.803.4309 or allan.wimmer@aprimo.com.
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