The Process of Lead Management

Lead management is simply the process of acquiring and managing your leads so you can begin the sales process with them, or turn a lead into an opportunity. There are six key steps to doing managing leads.

1. Data management- decide on a database to store your information. This could be something as simple as an excel spreadsheet or a rolodex. Or something with more features like a CRM.

2. Lead capture- Meaning just get the basic information for each of your leads; name, phone number, and mailing address. You can use web forms, toll free numbers, local landlines, or buy leads from a lead provider, using whatever tools you have.

3. Lead delivery- Deliver the lead to your database whether it be excel, a CRM, or a lead management tool.

4. Supplement your lead- So get more information about your leads, using other database's look up any information you can about them. For example use an area code registry to see where they are from, if you sell business-to-business find out what industry they are in, their competitors, etc.

5. Score- Based on the information you have, give each lead a score based on how likely they are to buy your product. When scoring leads 3 categorizes are taken into account.

a. Quality- how well do they match our target market.
b. Behavior- how many times have they contacted us, have they requested information or free products, etc.
c. Quantity- do we have enough information to contact them or are they a real lead.

Using this criteria we can then rate each lead. Rating systems are often done A to E or 1 to 10. We'll look at the A to E a little closer here.

A. A very hot lead is someone that is very likely to buy your product.
B. Is a fairly good lead?
C. Is not really that great but worth calling?
D. Is not good at all?
E. Is bogus or too little information?

Note: D & E are usually not contacted right away but put into lead nurturing campaigns, which we'll discuss later on.

6. Route -After scoring your leads you route them to your sales reps. When routing them you must first choose what sales rep the lead will go to based on criteria of your choosing, such as location, ratings and your sales reps skills. Then you notify your sales reps with a phone call, screen pop, and/or text message, allowing them to initiate the last step.

Follow-Up Strategy- There are 4 basic strategies.

1. Immediate response- Using your different media tools phone, email, fax, chat, text message, voice broadcast. The object is to contact them as soon as possible preferably within about 5 minutes.
2. 24 Hour Response- If option one fails make 3-5 five phone calls with 24 hours and perhaps send an e-mail, text message, or any of the other options used in immediate response
3. 2 Week response- If the first two options fail try a phone call everyday or every other day.
4. Nurturing- If the first three strategies fail or they don't meet your standard for starting with those options you can put them in a nurturing campaign where once a month or whatever you chose, you send a newsletter to them, free demos or any other number of options. The purpose of nurturing is to get them to come back to you, more interested then when you first received their information.

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