Better Lead Management: 10 Best Practices

Posted on July 13th, 2009 Adam Honig Comments 0

Working the crowd: Who's really a potential customer?

The practice of lead management seems simple enough:

1. Capture information about a prospective customer
2. Score the lead (typically: how likely are they to buy?)
3. Pass the best leads to the sales team
4. Nurture lesser leads until they become high-quality leads
5. Revise scoring and handoff practices to increase effectiveness

But here’s the problem on too many projects that I’ve seen: the lead management project is led by the company’s marketing department.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

True, marketing generates the leads. But salespeople have to work with them. And when marketing tries to complete lead management with minimal input from sales, you end up with decent leads that go nowhere.

It’s all about the handoff. You can have the best leads or the worst leads, but if marketing and sales don’t agree on what the handoff is, you might as well not bother.

Furthermore, new technology won’t fix existing process problems. For example, one of our clients, a high-technology company, came to us because although its lead management team was putting leads into the SFA system, salespeople never looked at them. However, this didn’t stem from a technology fault, but rather from the failure of the marketing department to sell the leads to the salespeople.

On a related note, you don’t necessarily need cutting-edge market research management (MRM) solutions — now available from such vendors as Apprimo, Eloqua, Epiphany, Market2lead and Unica — to have highly effective lead management programs. For example, another one of our high-technology clients uses two good but not necessarily enterprise-class tools. For this company’s needs, however, they are more than adequate. Lead management need not be rocket science.

10 Ways to Improve Lead Management

Even so, most organizations could stand to improve their lead management practices. Here are my recommendations:

1.  Define “lead.” Marketing and sales must agree on what a lead is, and then generate those leads. Here are the two most common approaches:

• If the corporate strategy is to push a certain type of product, then marketing finds people who fit that product buyer mold
• If salespeople are good at selling to person X, then marketing finds person X

But it has to be one or the other. Sales can’t expect to sell to person X, and marketing give them something else.

2.  Reconcile definitions with technology. Next, identify how your current technology treats leads. (Both Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM On Demand, for example, consider a lead to be someone you don’t know, whereas many companies treat anyone who might buy, even repeat customers, as leads.) If there’s a discrepancy, decide whether you’ll change the technology or the business process, all based on costs versus benefits.

3.  Keep things simple. Avoid unnecessary complications. Where necessary, streamline lead management process. And to define leads, use simple story models and easy routing for moving leads forward.

4.  Sell the leads. There’s a common misconception within marketing departments that the only customer they serve is the end user or prospective customer. But salespeople are also their customers, and if you want something to happen with your leads, you’ve got to sell them to sales.

5.  Agree on lead scoring. Accordingly, marketing and sales must agree: what’s an A lead, what’s a B lead? In the abstract, marketing scores don’t sit well with salespeople. They have to really want the A leads. Again, marketing must sell them.

6.  No “set and forget it.” Work on continually improving how you define and score leads. Check the metrics: are B leads outperforming A leads? If so, revise. And ensure any lead model changes are approved by both marketing and sales.

7.  Share only high-quality leads. Keep lower quality information and cultivate or nurture it until it is good enough to pass to sales.

8.  Consider integrating the team. Some companies have been very successful at refining lead management by embedding marketing people with salespeople, so that they are looking at leads in the same way. Then again, some companies have been extremely successful after separating marketing and sales.

9.  If you offer incentives, ensure that they have the intended effect. For example, if you incent your lead qualification team to produce quality leads, they may see their role as ending at the handoff to sales, as opposed to when sales close. Likewise, if you incent them on how those leads perform, they may browbeat salespeople to take their leads, which doesn’t create a good working environment.

10.  Acknowledge marketing’s role. Keep in mind that this doesn’t consist only of the lead handoff, but with advancing all prospects (using advertising, collateral, webinars and so on) through sales stages to a closed deal. In other words, just measuring marketing effectiveness based on “lead to opportunity” often sells marketing short, and overlooks non-lead-generation activities that remain crucial for closing sales. And isn’t that really what lead management is all about?

Learn More

Read how Innoveer worked with  Kronos to more effectively track and manage leads.

Want to understand the next steps for improving your marketing effectiveness? Rather than asking that question, Innoveer tells you what you should do, to maximize program results.