When we work with companies, we're often hear, "we already have a lead management process in place."  In fact, they do -- if you look at process as a serious of activities that need to take place to get results.

Often, companies feel they’ve done their part by defining their target prospects, or establishing standards to score leads. They may have even established protocols that define when and how Sales receives trade show or other marketing campaign leads. They may have also hammered out an agreement from Sales or Sales Operatios to how followup and results can be reported or reviewed.

The problem?  When the company fails to get documented results from it’s lead management program. The leads may be lacking qualifying information, or even accurate contact information. Frequently, Sales may not even be following up on leads that were distributed in a timely fashion. All too frequently, results may not be reported consistently or at all, despite the availability of a CRM or other reporting system.

What causes these issues in companies that have a defined lead management program in place?  It may be that the lead scoring definitions or distribution protocols were reviewed once, with no modifications or updates as markets and internal circumstances change. Or it may be that Sales was not totally convinced about the value of one of the processes they are asked to be a part of.

Root causes come in many flavors.

Regardless of the reason, somewhere is a disconnect. The disconnect is between the current process and the results your program is getting. Unless your process is reviewed and the disconnect identified, program results are unlikely to change.

Solutions can range from just a simple tweak to a thorough overhaul.  Regardless, our goal is to make your lead management program a win win for everyone, not only for Marketing, but for Sales and the C-level executives who need to review business results of marketing programs.

If internal examination and review of the program hasn’t yielded positive results, it may be time to bring in an outside objective resource. This resource can diagnose the underlying issue and partner with your team to effectively implement solutions.

You'll find a our Discovery Brief is a helpful starting point for lead management programs whose goals include measurable results. That's because a Discovery Brief reveals the issues that stand in the way of success.

The Brief recommends solutions that Marketing to Sales can work with your company to implement. Rather than a quick fix that doesn't solve the underlying problem.

A viable lead management database is more than a respository of customers and contacts. It should also be able to do some heavy lifting, including giving visibility into key metrics, such as increases in proposals, pending orders or actual conversion to sales resulting from leads and campaigns.

But before we recommend automating anything, we recommend examining current lead management processes as well as getting input from key marketing, sales and other stakeholders to determine where the weaknesses are in the current program.

Also, to make sure the lead management process fits your business and your markets, it's necessary to Identify how products and services are currently marketed and sold including internal sales force, resellers and distribution network.

You'll want to be very clear on how the sales distribution process, including identifying who takes responsibility for following up and reporting on leads, including those collected at show site.

Also, think through how your organization decides what data to collect from the target taudience, so that the collection system obtains actional data from attendees. A big gap can also occur with booth visitors who are not ready to buy. How should followup with these prospects occur? It's estimated that 80% of the visitors who stop buy a booth will buy from someone. Will that be your company... or a competitor?

Whatever your lead management system evolves into, make sure you have some way to track and report conversion of leads to sales, so that the process is not dependent on specific staff, relationships with sales or other workarounds that defeat the purpose of an automated, closed-loop lead management system.

That being said, having a beautiful database doesn’t matter if it’s not being used by the sales force. Also, the point of any solution, technology or otherwise, should be to get more customers and ship more products or sell more services. As impressive as a state-of-the-art lead management system can be, it doesn't matter much if it can't solve your key metrics reporting issues.

Experts have written books on what to capture in a lead database. We have found the true best practice is to also take a step back and determine what process works best for your company, not necessarily what the book says is best, or the software provides.

So if you've identified a lead management solution, consider a phased in process that makes room for change, if you're not there yet.