Effective Lead Management

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Lead management can be designed to deal with an influx of meaningless leads that you have to sift through to find a gem, or it can be designed to provide the kind of response that an interested party expects.

The former is a time consuming and (probably) unprofitable venture because it takes effort to find anything worth pursuing. This is typically the result of a product based initiative (i.e. mass mailing, emailing to purchased lists), or a trade show, or an advertisement that rang too many bells. Wouldn't it be great if a high percentage of our leads were potential customers that needed the product or service we provided?

If you know your best customers, then you know what a new customer should look like. And your marketing should reflect that knowledge.

So, at this point I'm going to assume that you are marketing correctly and to the appropriate audience because I don't deal in effective lead management for ineffective marketing initiatives.

Since you are marketing to a very targeted audience, you want to present the best picture of your business to them. You have already done this in your marketing materials. Now you must respond to their inquiries quickly and effectively because that's what lead management is all about.

With a well defined CRM Strategy you, but more importantly your entire team/organization, should know exactly what you are doing to attract prospects and what you want to say to them when they make their first inquiry and any subsequent communications. This could be rather simple or it could get complicated. I'm a believer in simple, if possible

Since you know what you want to say, it needs to be prompt. And this is where some quality CRM software can help you. A response could be in the form of a personal phone call. So an appointment would need to be set with the appropriate internal resource to make this call. And when they make it, they need to know exactly the message that should be communicated in this context.

Another possibility is that an inquiry will get an automated response via e-mail. This is becoming more prominent these days, but it is still important the the right message be sent, and that it look as personal as possible. In other words, make sure a real person is connected to it with a return e-mail address and a signature line with contact information.  Remember, your customer knowledge will determine what method of contact is best and most profitable.

Any communication with leads and prospects must be incorporated into your customer database so future analysis can take place. This might be with business intelligence tools that look at patterns in the aggregate. Or, it could be as simple as collecting which link a recipient clicked in your automated (and personal looking) inquiry response email. This sort of data can be used to generate (automatically) even more quality and focused content to your lead or prospect on whatever schedule you deem appropriate (based on your customer knowledge!)

In closing, if you have a complete strategy in place, developing these automated lead management solutions is a snap. But make sure you're CRM Software has the capability to both generate this sort of communication as well as track the results; including hyperlink clicks! It should also be capable of automatically scheduling resources based on criteria provided by the inquiry.

As resources works with these appointments, it should be clear what message they should be presenting and where this lead is in the lead development lifecycle.

Don't develop 10,000 fly traps. You know your best customers, so you know where you new customers are coming from!

I'll be talking more about leads and managing them in future articles.

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