Lead management

Lead Management is a term used to describe the methodologies and systems to manage customer prospects and inquiries, generally generated by a variety of marketing techniques. Lead management can be considered the connectivity between advertising and customer relationship management. This critical connectivity facilitates the acquisition of customers, and has also been referred to accurately as customer acquisition management.

Lead management creates an orderly architecture for managing large volumes of customer inquiries, or leads. The architecture must be able to organize numerous leads, at various stages of a sales process, across a distributed sales force. In order to understand this process it is helpful to examine a simplified linear lead flow process, such as the following:

1. Advertising
2. Customer inquiry or response
3. Inquiry captured
4. Inquiry filtered
5. Lead graded and prioritized
6. Lead distribution
7. Sales contact
8. Lead nurturing or retention
9. Sales result

The lead flow process can become enormously complex as customers and sales professionals begin to interact. These various interactions and subsequent actions can create a variety of scenarios, both productive and counter-productive. This exponential number of scenarios can provide for numerous opportunities to mishandle leads in such a way as to reduce their value. Managing these scenarios is the function of lead management.

Lead Management Architecture

Lead Generation

Generating a lead, or lead generation can relate to a myriad of marketing technologies and methodologies. However, from an architectural perspective it is simply the ability to attract the interest of a consumer and capture sufficient data to understand the consumer's inquiry and contact that consumer regarding the inquiry.

Here are a couple of simple examples:

1. Mortgage Lead Generation

LendingTree runs TV advertising that touts that "when banks compete, you win" and directs you to visit lendingtree.com. Having watched this advertisement and depressed that you rent an apartment that has your living room, dining room, kitchen, and bedroom all in the same room you flip on your computer and go to their website.

Upon reaching the website, you surf around a bit and read some information about buying a house and going through the mortgage process with LendingTree. This convinces you to give it a shot. You click on the submit an inquiry form and proceed to fill out a web form that includes information about you, such as: name, address, telephone number, and the amount of the home you dream of buying. Having completed the web form--presto, you are a lead.

2. White Paper Lead Generation

You are surfing the Internet and you decide there has to be a good way to make a lot of money on the Internet. So, you go to Google and search for "make money on the Internet." This search reveals an interesting link that says, "10 steps to becoming a millionaire using the Web." Sounds good to you, so you click the link and arrive at a page with a brief sales pitch for making money on the Web and a brief web form asking for you name and email in order to download the sacred PDF white paper with the 10 steps. Once you have filled out the form, submitted, and received your PDF--again, presto, you are a lead.

Lead Acquisition and Distribution

This is arguably one of the most critical functions in the lead management architecture. Its importance is linked to the relevance and responsiveness of the customer experience. A consumer generally uses the Internet and makes Internet inquiries for products and services out of a desire for convenience and efficiency of their time. Consequently, they expect a response and timeliness of the response. If the acquisition and distribution is not effective the consumer will experience neither.

The lead acquisition architecture generally consist of a web form to collect consumer data, a database to either temporarily or persistently store that collected information for subsequent distribution.

The distribution architecture can vary in complex depending upon the objective of the lead generation. Generation for the purpose of selling the inquiry would typically include a methodology for selecting one or more buyers and then transmitting the lead via a variety of potential means, like: XML, named-value pairs, fax, email, telephone. In the case of leads generated for an organization's own use it may simply consist of a web page to render the contents of the leads database or a simple email action from the Web form itself.

Marketing & Sales Operations

Ultimately the customer of any lead management system or methodology is the marketing and sales operations. It is the connectivity and accountability between those two operational units. It is also the connectivity that enhances the effectiveness of both operations.

The architectural relationship is much akin to the order carousel in a short order diner. This carousel is the communication and accountability between the waiter and the cook. Without this simple coordination orders would be lost, prepared incorrectly, or prepared in random order missing the expectations of the customer.

This analogy is very relevant to the architectural foundation creating efficiency and accountability between marketing and sales activities. If implemented correctly, the lead management system will complete a loop from lead generation, to prioritization, to distribution, to final disposition, and back to re-calibrate lead generation.

For marketing, this portion of the architecture primarily manages the analytics of the lead generation, distribution, and disposition. For sales, the architecture provides the means to receive leads and account for the actions taken on them throughout the sales process.

Communications

Communications is the center piece of the lead management architecture. The communications functions should include the intelligent sourcing of call information for sales professionals to make telephone contact. This is obviously fundamental; however, more subtle, but equally important is the ability to maintain ongoing nurturing communications that cultivate a lead into a future sales. This cultivating architecture typically comes in the form of some type of email campaign architecture.

Analytics

The analytics architecture is probably the most critical piece of an effective lead management system. This portion of the architecture allows for the dynamic review and analysis of lead actions, marketing channels, and sales performance. Information that can assist in the business decisions that improve production and ROI.

Optimizing Lead Management

Lead Distribution

As larger vendors work with partner organizations such as distributors, resellers, brokers and other channel partners, those vendors often distribute leads to their respective partners to provide a local contact to those prospects and also 'feed' partners with new business opportunities. Today there are two major methods for distributing sales leads to partners: Push or Pull.

PUSH The push method sends leads to specific partners assuming that those partners will follow up and work on those leads. The challenge with 'push' is the fact that often times the local sales people may not be able to react immediately for various reasons: not available, busy, on vacation... Many large vendors report disappointment when asked about their lead follow-up rate through partners after the leads where pushed out to those partners.

Pull The pull method was invented and patented by a German Engineer, Axel Schultze, who was frustrated with the lead follow up results of the push method and decided to let the available and motivated sales people 'pull' leads from an online available system. Patent was granted by the US Patent Office in May 2006. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&S1=09514997&OS=09514997&RS=09514997 The pull method became widely accepted in the high tech industry where thousands of resellers from companies including Avaya, Nortel, Juniper and others distributed leads that way. The PULL Method became superior over the PUSH method, and lead closure rates grew on average by 300% as white papers from BlueRoads indicate.

Technical Functionality

Lead Acquisition

The lead acquisition functionality should allow for the simple and efficient acquisition of lead data into the lead management system. The acquisition functions must be able to support a variety of marketing channels and methods of capturing data. Some examples include:

• Electronic Data Transfer

This acquisition function may include the transfer of discrete lead data via technologies like name-value pairs, XML, RSS. These technologies can be used in conjunction with an organization's own website or third party lead provider.

• Batch Imports

This acquisition function may include imports of multiple leads' data via technologies like Microsoft Excel, CSV, or other formatted batch data values. These technologies can be used to acquire leads that have been stored in other systems, assembled from lists, or other volume sources.

• Quick Apply Web Forms

This acquisition function may include Web landing pages or sales interfaces. This technology can be used to acquire discrete lead data via manual input into an application-type form.

Lead Filtering and Assessment

Most lead management systems will have some intelligent methodology for filtering and assessing lead data into useful categorizations. There are a myriad of ways to accomplish this process and some of them may be specific to industries. The following is a suggested list of possible functions:

• Data verification (i.e., telephone numbers, zip codes, address scrubbing)
• Fraud screening
• Data appending (e.g., appending third-party data such as credit, preferences, purchase history)
• Grading
• Prioritization

References

• Lead Generation for the Complex Sale (ISBN 0-07-145897-2)
• Managing Sales Leads: How To Turn Every Prospect Into A Customer (ISBN 84423-3599-7)
• Managing Sales Leads: Turning Cold Prospects Into Hot Customers (ISBN 0-324-20546-5) (ISBN 978-0-324-20546-6)
• Sales & Marketing 365 (ISBN 0-9704515-5-5)