A Few Advanced Lead Management Techniques

It's not quite at the level of Web 2.0, but Lead Management news seems to fill my inbox daily. I just finished listening to the AMA's "Achieve a Closed-Loop System for Sales Lead Generation and Management" webcast; Forrester's Laura Ramos recently wrote a series of notes on the topic; Sirius Decisions published "Effective Lead Management: SAL to SQL" earlier in the year; Aberdeen just published Optimizing Leads: Mid-to-Large Enterprise Affinity for Best-in-Class Practices; and blog articles abound.

In these articles and notes you'll find best practices, frameworks, tips on sales and marketing collaboration, volumes on the importance of reporting obsessively, and peer survey data.

In general, I view a lead management solution in part as a configurable set of business rules which managers can leverage to modify sales and channel behavior to increase close rates. While different rules work for different firms, lines of business within a firm, or even individual departments, some of the more advanced or unusual techniques include:

• Routing leads based on part on the performance of the individual sales rep or channel partner with better performers getting better leads. In other words, it's the "Glengarry Glen Ross" approach.
• If you're ready to route a lead to a rep who's at capacity, nurture the lead in marketing a while longer until capacity frees up.
• Automatically warns reps when one of their leads has not been acted upon quickly enough. If that doesn't work send an automatic notification to the rep's sales manager.  Still having issues? Pull the lead from the rep and reassign to another rep or another channel with capacity.
• Consider leveraging your business rules to enable your channel managers to create service leads on behalf of channel partners. While not technically a lead, this gives you a nice way to ensure partner needs are being met and to actively and accurately track service requests.
• Allow sales reps and channel partners to opt into how they are notified of new leads whether it be by email, mobile phone, or an automated voicemail.

These are just a few techniques to try. What's working in your organization?

Comments

[Emmanuel]

We advise our clients to assess leads by channels as well. You then give a quality score to each lead you receive, and at the end of each month, calculate the average score for each channel. You can then decide to invest more in the most effective channels, lowering your acquisition cost, while optimising the volume of leads you receive.

Emmanuel
http://www.getbiz.co.uk

[bjmorgan]

Emmanual -- Thanks for the post, great comment. And, it reminds me of another best practice for leads routed to channels... It's essential channel managers have a lead management dashboard/home page giving each manager high level visibility into all leads, the ability to drill into lead details, and the ability if needed to edit or reassign leads.

[Emmanuel]

Hi,

Yes makes sense. Have you ever used specific metric to assess average leads quality for a specific channel?

Emmanuel
http://www.getbiz.co.uk

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[Perry]

I believe that it's also very important that besides lead tracking, a company should also try to invest in training their staff on how to effectively use the tools that are available, including a lead management software.

[Lead Generation]

I never knew anything about the techniques that you shared. But I think I should consider this on my business. Thanks for shating your post. This will surely be applied.

[Camille]

Is the technique no. 3 not too much offending. I don't speak that much to my people, I'm just worried if I will say such things to them, this is helpful but I just don't know how to tell them.

[renamer]

Thanks for your awesome suggestions. I really learned a lot from your article.