Why Lead Management is so Important

By Larry Caretsky
Commence Corporation

Sales executives have been talking about effective lead management for decades, yet most companies do not do a very good job of managing their leads or determining the quality of the leads they generate.  Leads traditionally come from multiple sources such as marketing campaigns, trade shows, cold calls or customer referrals. What happens to those leads is the problem. Sometimes they are distributed to the appropriate sales representative who calls on the lead and reports back on his or her progress. More often than not however, they are distributed to outside representatives, third party resellers or simply fall through the cracks.  What most companies don’t realize is that the improper distribution and management of leads can be quite costly to their business.

Recently Commence was engaged to help a mid-size manufacturing company address their lead management challenges.  The company had been spending tens of thousands of dollars to attend a national trade show to display and demonstrate their products. The trade show provided an exceptional opportunity to increase their brand recognition and generate new business opportunities.  During the three day show the company acquired hundreds of leads that were entered into an excel spreadsheet then distributed to their sales organization based on geographic location.  Because this was a manual process the distribution of the leads took almost two weeks.  Making matters worse was the fact that the company had no formal process for lead reporting.  As a result, they were not able to determine the quality of the leads they got or more importantly what happened to them.  We then asked management how are they able to determine if the trade show provided a return on their investment.  They indicated they were unable to.  We call this a “failure to close the loop”.

How Commence CRM Addressed This Problem

The Commence CRM software offers a robust lead management, sales process automation and reporting engine for qualifying leads and managing the lead distribution process.  Commence combines this with a set of “CRM Best Practices” for effectively managing the complete sales cycle from lead generation and qualification to closure of the sale. The Commence system also provides a series of reporting metrics, such as how many leads were generated by attending the show, how many of the leads were converted into sales opportunities, how many of the sales opportunities turned into sales, and what was the dollar value of the closed sales

How The Client Succeeded

The process was fairly straight forward thanks to the robust lead management and lead qualification features built into the Commence CRM software.  With the assistance of the Commence implementation team the process took less than a week to refine and implement.

Step 1:  Lead Distribution

The time delay in distribution of the leads was addressed using an automated import utility which automatically imported all of the leads and distributed them based on geographic territory.  The leads appeared immediately on each sales representative’s home page or personal dashboard alerting them that they had new prospects to follow-up on. With a single mouse click the sales representative was presented with the prospect name, address, contact, telephone number and the product or service they were interested in.

Step 2:  Lead Qualification

Using Commence’s automated business processes for lead qualification and scoring, the company’s management created a series of pre-defined questions that assisted sales representatives in properly qualifying the new leads.  Each lead was then color coded based on the answers to each of the questions.  This unique feature ensured that the sales team was following up on the most qualified prospects and not spending their time chasing tire kickers.  The color coding also enabled management to quickly determine the most promising opportunities and assist with the sales process if required.

Step 3:  Lead Management

Commence CRM provided the sales team with a quick and efficient vehicle for lead management.  Right from the initial lead detail screen, sales representatives were able to add follow-up activities, notes, history items, log e-mails, even distribute documents from a single screen and with a single click.  Sales management also has the same accessibility to this information so that they could monitor the progress of each new lead.

Step 4:  Reporting

The proper management of the lead and sales process resulted in a series of reports that enabled management to identify how many of the trade show leads were converted into sales opportunities, how many of those opportunities closed, which representatives had the highest close ratios and what the total dollars value was for those sales.

The result of this process determined that the trade show did indeed represent a good investment of time and resources.  The real value here however is that the company now has an automated and proven methodology for properly managing leads and the sales process.  The sales team is now more focused then ever before on qualified opportunities and can efficiently manage the sales cycle from introduction to closure.  Management can quickly view a snapshot of all sales activity and can proactively assist in the sales process.  Reporting is finally accurate and forecasts can be relied upon.

For more information on how Commence CRM can help you to become a more efficient sales and service organization visit our web site at www.commence.com or call  1-877- 266-6362  and talk with one of our sales consultants.