We often hear, "we already have a lead management process in place."  In fact, you may well have a process in place, but is this process getting you the results you need? 

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 Operations 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 or needs information, or even basic, 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?  Root causes come in many flavors.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.

Regardless of the reason, if you can't track revenue to tradeshow participation, there is a disconnect somewhere.  If internal examination and review of the program hasn’t yielded positive results, it may be time to bring in an outside objective resource to identify the underlying reasons for lack of abiltiy to create a closed-loop system.  Equally as important, this resource can partner with your team to effectively implement solutions.

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.

You'll find a our Discovery Brief is a helpful starting point for lead management programs whose goals include measurable results.

Take a moment to identify the issues that stand in the way of success.  A quick fix may or may not solve the underlying problem.  Our focus is on working with your company to develop an implentation plan that has buy-in and approval from all key stakeholders, for maximum success. 

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.