Tips To Improve Lead Mgmt

Tips to Improve Your Lead Management Strategy Companies that have an effective lead management process in place can generate more revenue from their lead acquisition activities, with higher close rates on marketing generated leads. The lead management process simply increases the likelihood that a contact will convert to a qualified opportunity and then a new, satisfied customer, maximizing your investment in lead generation. Obviously, improving your lead management process can improve your results. So how does your company go about doing this? Let’s review the core components of this multistage process. The diagram below outlines the stages and flow of a general lead management strategy. Does the chart to the right resemble the process in your enterprise, or does your process emphasize only one or two of these components? Does your organization understand your entire lead lifecycle? If each of the individual components in your lead management system works efficiently, then the overall process should function effectively with measurable results. The first step in improving your lead management strategy is to: 1. Understand, clarify and refine your

enterprise’s lead management method To implement an effective lead management process, all stakeholders must be involved in the formation of each of the steps in the strategy and help determine the qualifications for moving through

Contact

Lead Generation

Lead Qualification

Lead Assignment

Customer

Closed Loop Tracking & Reporting Metrics

Lead Nurturing

Lead Management Process

each stage. Enterprises should ideally consider and embrace a comprehensive approach to lead management − one with a focus on the relevance and timing of the information that is delivered to all parties. What does your company’s lead management process look like and who has been involved in determining its strategy? Is it too complex, or is it ineffective with dropped leads and low conversions? What are its strengths and weaknesses? Consider: A. Who has ownership of each stage of the process? Get agreement with all the stakeholders as to what is expected entering and exiting each stage. Marketing needs to collaborate with the sales team throughout this process so the leads generated ultimately are the leads that your sales team needs. B. Is there a defined lead management workflow? It may be that your company needs a thorough examination and re-engineering of your enterprise’s lead management processes and activities. C. What essential performance indicators or ROI measures are associated at key points throughout the process? Without effective measurement tools it is impossible to calculate how marketing contributes to sales success or how the combined effort contributes to the bottom line.

Adopting a strategy that quickly and efficiently captures, nurtures, distributes and analyzes leads though all of the stages of Inquiry, Prospect and Opportunity Management is crucial. Once you’ve established what your optimal process should look like, then the next step is to make sure the each of the distinctive stages is a solid contributor to the overall function. 2. Improve each of the underlying components A. Lead Generation or Acquisition

Whether your lead generation strategies are predominately composed of on-line campaign marketing programs, traditional marketing techniques, or a combination of the two, the

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"Less than 25% of all inquiries are followed up and closed out by salespeople, which leaves both marketing people and the inquirer frustrated.” James W. Obermayer, executive director of the Sales Lead Management Association (Jan 29, 2008 2:11pm EST).

following elements are necessary to provide quality leads for your company.

Identify quality leads. Have you agreed with your sales team what a qualified lead looks like? Start by sitting down with sales to decide on your enterprises’ definition of a “good” lead (ready to purchase, meets demographics, etc). Clearly define and know your market niche or target. An effective lead generation process always begins and ends with knowing the audience. Once this is established, then you can segment your lists to capture, retain, entice, and get more information to and from your target audience. Use effective lead generation automation tools. This will help you decrease resource use when implementing and enhancing list management needs. Manual list management requires considerable manpower to perform basic tasks such as de-duping or handling opt outs, bounces, and previous respondents. Use of automation systems should manage all of these tasks, as well as increase your lead generation sophistication with such features as incremental profile building and data field memorization for email marketing campaigns. Optimize your landing pages and forms. Don’t underestimate the importance of your landing pages as a tool of lead management. Content, layout and graphics should all be evaluated and optimized to assure the best possible results. Be clear on the action you want your audience to take and focus the content on just that action. Make sure your surveys and registration forms lend themselves to easy capture of info and match the amount of info capture with the value of the offer. Keep in mind that crafting just a few focused questions can lead to an increase in response rates. Use accurate and reliable campaign metrics for tracking, reporting and testing. Automate your analytics as much as possible to: • • •

Tailor prospect conversations based on the areas of your site they visited Know what information the lead already downloaded to prevent duplication See where sales leads come from and what keywords they use

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B

Lead Qualification and Lead Scoring

For today’s multi-touch, B2B sales cycles, companies that have implemented lead scoring and nurturing practices gain better visibility into the lead qualification process. This is also where the synergy between marketing and sales is crucial. Establishing a lead qualification process really starts with the lead generation process. Once this process is set up then marketing can build and refine the lead qualification method to validate, score, and classify all leads. Your enterprise should have a lead ranking or scoring system in place, either using your sales CRM or SFA systems, or other automation process. A lead ranking or grading system helps to determine what leads to forward as opportunities to sales and what leads to continue nurturing in marketing. Again, with input and agreement from sales, streamline your qualification questions and ranking criteria, determine specific definitions of high, middle and low-quality leads to prioritize lead follow-up. You can customize your lead capture and scoring in a myriad of ways to provide flexibility to reflect your market, geography and business conditions. Consider ranking your leads based on data accuracy, survey responses, web interactions, profile database, company demographics, etc. – it’s all about knowing your customers’ needs. Don’t forget to consider how to manage atypical or out-of-profile leads. Implementing an automated lead qualification system allows you the bandwidth to target a larger number of prospect categories at the same time, to automate manual distribution tasks and forward the leads to sales in a timely fashion. It also removes the ambiguity in prospect classifications so that your sales team can follow shared lead consumption best practices and shorten their sales cycles. C. Lead Nurturing, Drip or Dialogue Marketing

After marketing has generated quality leads and the few “good” ones are distributed into your sales CRM or SFA system for your sales team, it needs a process for managing other prospects that are not ready to buy or are non-responsive. The nurturing and cultivating of leads, or pipeline management, is one of the most critical components of the sales

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conversion equation. The secret with any lead management system is to maximize the efficiency (with technology) but not lose the impact of a personal customer experience. Finding this equilibrium will optimize your return on marketing investments and provide the five to seven interactions or ‘touches’ we all know it takes to turn a lead into a qualified prospect. Consider: Who is responsible for nurturing – is it marketing or sales? Determine when, how and by whom the lead is contacted (followed up). If marketing is predominately responsible for lead nurturing, then make sure that sales has been given the means to hand unsuccessful leads back for further work or nurturing on their behalf. Implementing a lead ranking or grading system. Effective lead scoring techniques help improve response rates for nurture marketing programs by focusing efforts on the most responsive customers and prospects. Customers usually provide clues to when they may be willing, qualified, or able to buy. An effective lead scoring process will identify these clues and allow you to insert them into the nurturing workflow. Incorporating other non-traditional ways to drip or dialogue market to your segmented leads – optin video, viral marketing, virtual events, blogs etc. The importance of automation to track prospect response to your drip campaigns marketing, moderate frequency of reach outs (minimizing burnout) and improve efficiency. What lead nurturing “contact triggers” work best for your target market? The three main categories generally include; Constant Triggers (typically data driven – special occasion or elapsed time period reminders), Active Triggers (status tracking of prospect interactions such as for inbound non-purchase events – webinars, whitepaper download, etc.) and Existing Client Triggers (customers do provide direct cues, but these require sophisticated notation or tagging systems and support for customer community outreach like blogs, discussion groups, social networks, etc.).

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D. Lead Assignment, Distribution or Routing

Marketing’s goal is to get the “good” leads to the right sales people at the right time to maximize both marketing ROI and sales productivity. Lead distribution can be a bit tricky if you’re not sure who should get lead notification and who should handle the lead follow up. Generally, enterprises use such properties as company size, region, or other factors to determine the correct sales person to hand off the lead to via email. Work with your sales management to predefine lead distribution rules for routing to sales. This will minimize lead follow-up times while increasing your company’s lead follow-up rate − increasing total sales volume and revenue. Most enterprises rely on some type of automated system for lead distribution to improve lead routing precision, efficiency and flexibility. It’s important to make sure whatever system you use integrates with your sales CRM/SFA applications for both the assignment and notification process. And even though you employ such a system, it alone won’t ensure cooperation among marketing and sales. Both groups have to agree to work cooperatively for each other’s benefit. Jointly defined reporting from the lead management system will foster cooperation and understanding. The real-time distribution of leads, along with marketing driven sales outreach campaigns, both increase the perceived value of marketing by sales. In case your SFA tool doesn’t do lead routing, invest in a system with the ability to automate rule and score based real-time lead routing to your sales team, along with the ability to create and push outreach campaigns into SFA and call center applications. D. Tracking and Reporting

The value of lead management is critically dependent upon regular updates about each open lead. Tracking and reporting allows you to stay on top of who is responding to what and whether they are closer to a purchase. Marketers need to be confident that their lead management data is complete and accurate. A best practice is to first define key milestone points for the lead nurturing process, then to determine qualifiers that leads must achieve to

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pass each milestone. Once these milestones and qualifiers are established, defining benchmark metrics for the lead nurturing process can be accomplished. Tracking these metrics will allow you to understand your prospects’ needs to the point that you can anticipate them and provide the right message at the right time, whether in your demand generation or nurture marketing campaigns. Many marketers are now using Engagement Metrics 1 to track lead activity and interest across a much broader universe (web browsers, web applications such as widgets, RSS readers and destinations including websites, walled social networks and services like Twitter) to enhance their lead scoring process. These measurements can provide insight into every step that your prospect takes to better segment your web audience and allow for sophisticated customer profiling. These new behavioral analytics help mitigate the concerns that marketing can’t effectively measure ROI when adopting new media strategies. By maximizing your learning about each lead, you will develop your own benchmarks with defined metrics that directly identify marketing's contribution to the sales pipeline and closed deals. About Marketbright Marketbright provides an on-demand marketing automation solution which allows companies to implement campaign execution and demand generation, automate lead scoring and nurturing, and to gain visibility into closed-loop campaign-to-cash metrics via real-time dashboards. The integrated marketing platform results in a full 360-degree view of your customer’s interactions, and this information is used to route only valuable, qualified leads into your sales CRM. Marketbright is headquartered in San Bruno, CA. For more information, visit the company’s Web site at www.marketbright.com.

About absatzkraft Absatzkraft provides demand generation and lead management services to its European customers, creating and running lead generation campaigns. Absatzkraft is also the exclusive reselling, service and training partner for Marketbright in Europe, headquartered in Munich, Germany. For more information, visit the company’s Web site at www.absatzkraft.de. 1

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