CRM, Lead Management & Sales Force Automation Blog

Are you all set in 2012 to easily test and analyze your online marketing data results? Do you understand your customer behavior? Are you optimizing your website and campaign performance?

Even if you have access to reports with good summary data, it’s a challenge to pull out the drill down statistics and data that provides true insight about your site visitors.

Lead Management is a formal process that defines how a business generates, qualifies, distributes and follows up on sales leads. Most important … it creates a pipeline of opportunities for any sales team.

Lead management systems vary widely and can consist of spreadsheets and manual follow-up or have a fully-integrated automated program with a company’s operating system. So, when companies implement a formal process around leads, everyone involved knows exactly what is expected and can actually increase lead conversion by as much as 18 percent.

Several years ago one of our clients told us they had spent a lot of money to attend the annual industry trade show; they paid extra for a prime location and had high expectations regarding their lead generation targets. They had good booth traffic and managers were please when it was all over.

They packed up their booth and sent it to storage.

The next year in preparation for that trade show, they unpacked the booth only to discover all their leads from last year had been left in the drawer of the booth … and nobody had missed them!

Establishing a Lead Score

As a company’s lead scoring requirements become more complex, a best practice is to design a system that produces a numerical value identifying a lead as qualified and ready to distribute to sales.

Lead score ranges also determine whether to send a lead to the company’s field sales organization, inside sales or to a reseller/channel partner. It also determines whether to pursue the opportunity or to not pursue it.

Managing the Pipeline is critical to the two segments covered in our previous blogs: Part I and Part II: Increasing Sales Productivity using the best SFA and choosing the most appropriate Sales Methodology for your company.

Some Sobering Statistics ...

• 70% of all Trade Show Leads are never followed up by sales reps
• 60% of Business-to-Business leads took over 60 days to follow up
• Advertising studies indicate that 20% of inquiries about your products or services end up purchasing from someone (either you or your competition) within six months and 45% end up purchasing within 12 months

Velos CRM-360 Assessment: A Web-based Diagnostic Survey that Isolates and Prioritizes Opportunities

Maximizing your organization’s revenue growth requires management to isolate business issues and identify the process improvements critical to your success, while identifying the specific technology solutions that will enable you to implement them.

The Velos Group offers an easy, affordable way for you to isolate and prioritize all of the customer relationship management weaknesses within your marketing, sales and customer service operations: The CRM-360 Assessment.

How do best-in-class Sales Lead Management techniques help your company become a Level Four company? The top Sales Priorities of leading companies utilize the following major tactics.  Read below and learn how to become a Level Four company.

Companies spend millions of dollars trying to identify qualified prospects for their products and services. We have come to understand the benefits of targeted marketing using sophisticated database techniques. But what happens once a prospect “raises their hand” and indicates some level of interest in what the company has to say? Some sobering industry information may be illuminating.