Lead Management Strategies

GlobalSpec White Paper
Lead Management:
Proven Strategies for Managing and Increasing Leads
October 2007
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© 2007 GlobalSpec, Inc. www.globalspec.comwww.globalspec.com
Introduction
As a marketer, you know leads are only as good as your company's ability to respond appropriately and track them through the sales process.
If you are experiencing any challenges in managing leads or need to increase your number of highly-qualified leads, this paper will be of particular interest to you. It reviews a number of best practices for responding to different types of leads and managing leads through the sales cycle. It also introduces several marketing options that can generate highly-qualified leads and brand expo-sure, while offering features to help you improve lead response and tracking capabilities.
This information can help you increase the number of leads you receive and the number of leads you convert to sales.
Five Steps to Help Manage and Increase Leads
Companies achieving a high rate of conversion of leads into sales share a number of characteristics. Invariably, their sales and marketing organiza-tions work closely together and communicate well with each other. In short, Marketing and Sales are on the same page.
Marketing knows: Sales knows:. How to generate leads . The origin of the lead. How to respond to and qualify leads . The importance of following up on leads. How to effectively distribute leads to Sales . How to track leads through the sales cycle
GlobalSpec has identified five steps to help your sales and marketing organi-zations work more closely together, improve lead management processes and increase the number of highly-qualified leads you get:
. Assign a person, or team of people, responsibility for managing and tracking leads. Access, evaluate and respond to leads on a timely basis. Distribute leads appropriately to sales people, resellers, distributors, etc.. Track the status and whereabouts of every lead throughout the sales cycle. Understand and use your marketing options to reach more potential customers and achieve greater results from your programs
GLOBALSPEC WHITE PAPER: Lead Management: Proven strategies for managing and increasing leads © 2007 GlobalSpec. Inc. 2www.globalspec.com
Step 1: Assign Responsibility to Ensure Success
If a person or team of people are not responsible for managing leads, it's not uncommon for many leads to "fall through the cracks," leading to lost sales and wasted resources. Managing and tracking leads can be the responsibility of either the marketing or sales department, depending on your organization-al structure, or it may reside in an integrated marketing and sales position. Responsibilities under lead management may include:
. Ensuring leads are responded to in a timely manner. Leads are like fresh produce: they spoil quickly. Leads left to wither will cost you revenue. In a recent GlobalSpec User Satisfaction Survey, 45% of engineering, technical and industrial professionals who sent an e-mail to suppliers had to wait three days or more for a response. On the other hand, 74 percent stated they did buy or were likely to buy from suppliers they contacted online through a Request for Quotation (RFQ) or e-mail. Clearly, you cannot achieve sales unless you respond to leads.. Ensuring leads are responded to appropriately. There are two aspects to this: (1) knowing how a lead prefers to engage with you, and (2) evaluating the type of lead and its importance. For example, you need to recognize a hot lead ready to buy versus a lead needing more informa-tion over time and not wanting to be pressured. Otherwise, you might be too aggressive and scare off the latter, while the former, feeling ignored, buys from a competitor. You'll likely lose both as potential customers!. Know how to get leads into your contact management system or a spreadsheet such as Excel. Otherwise your ability to distribute and track leads is severely impacted. All processes become manual, leads get lost, no one knows the status of a lead and fingers get pointed. Getting leads into a spreadsheet and tracking them doesn't have to be complicated if you plan ahead and gain agreement with your sales force about report-ing leads that turn into sales. This can be done on a weekly, monthly or quart... [download for more]