Thanks for the Sales Lead! Now What?

June 17, 2011 at 1:12 pm | Posted in Lead Management, Lead Nurturing | Leave a comment
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OK, so you’ve done your job as a marketer.  You have a lead that you’ve grabbed and nurtured from vague interest to “sales ready”.  You are now ready to hand that lead off to the Sales organization. So, off it goes, and your job, other than knowing whether the lead is closed or not, is finished.  Right?  Not so fast.

Even assuming that your sales and/or dealer organizations are properly trained in lead follow-up and closing sales, you can (and should) do more.  Every lead travels a slightly different path on its way to becoming sales-ready.  Just like you try to design your nurturing campaigns in an effort to achieve “one-to-one” customized communications, the follow-up effort should be similarly customized.  For example, if the trigger to escalate a lead to “sales ready” is a series of systematic visits to your website, consider providing input to the sales resource about how to approach that lead. It’s probably not a good idea for the sales person to contact that lead and say “Thanks for visiting our website this morning, are you ready to buy?” Prospective customers don’t necessarily get a good feeling when they are reminded that their behavior is being tracked.  Instead, the sales person may want to introduce themselves as the local resource and then begin inquiring about their needs.

It’s probably not realistic to assume most sales or dealer organizations can remember how to approach different leads with the perfect follow-up message.  However, with the automation options available today, you should consider providing very specific guidance on how to follow-up certain leads based on their source, history and escalation triggers.  You can deliver leads not only with an activity profile, but also with scripting hints to optimize the follow-up messaging.  And you can build in additional triggers to assist the sales people or dealers with the timing of their follow-up activities.  Think of it as a nurturing campaign for the sales folks.

Get known not only for providing great sales leads, but also for giving great insights on lead follow-up!

JT McDonald

What’s the point of CRM?

June 29, 2010 at 9:17 am | Posted in Lead Management | 1 Comment
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Depending on where you sit, several possibilities present themselves for why companies use CRM systems: 

  • “Developing the relationship” with your customer (whatever that means)
  • Providing a 360° view of the customer
  • Assisting in the forecasting process or giving visibility into “sales funnel”
  • As a foundation for keeping in touch with customers
  • Developing metrics about your customers and prospects (and sales reps)
  • Giving sales people a real-time view of account status and activity across the entire organization

There are at least another dozen we could list that would also be descriptive of CRM.

In our world (which deals primarily with lead management for reseller networks), it’s the visibility and action-tracking benefits which resonate most with our clients.  Once a contact has accumulated activities which indicate it’s “sales ready”, it is passed on to the channel partner as a lead.  The activities posted to the lead record by sales folks during the sales process give clients and their dealer partner managers insights into how well various sales people “pay attention” to that lead.  And as sales are posted, collections of activities can be analyzed to determine which ones have the most influence in closing the sale, and how to better deploy lead qualification, lead distribution and lead nurturing systems.

If activities are the most important element for your CRM purposes, you can also get away with a “less is more” philosophy.  Choose a package that’s simpler and not weighed down with lots of features which aren’t used.  Sales person and dealer adoption will go up and your knowledge about which dealers follow up on leads will expand as well.

JT McDonald, Guest Author and president, MarketNet Services, LLC

For more information on what we call “CRM Lite”, visit http://www.marketnetservices.com/solutions/lead-distribution-software.aspx

What happened to that lead?

January 20, 2010 at 10:26 pm | Posted in Lead Management | 1 Comment
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For those of you that sell direct, the answer is probably obvious.  You can look at the lead in your CRM system and see what your sales rep did or didn’t do to follow up on your hard-earned lead.  Since leads generated by many manufacturers are distributed to independent businesses (dealers, VARs, Wholesalers, etc.) there is no CRM.  There is only a gigantic, gaping black hole. 

Some manufacturers email leads, one-by-one, out to the channel rep.  Some put leads into excel spreadsheets (one spreadsheet per dealer) and then have to resend the spreadsheet over and over again, asking the dealer for a status update.  I’ve even heard of a team dedicated to following up with distributors to ensure the distributor is following up with the lead.  A follow-up to your follow-up?  Is this really efficient?

On the other end of the spectrum, some manufacturers are enforcing the entry of a ”lead id” when a dealer places an order.  The total amount of the order can then be attributed to the lead id which hopefully can be attributed to a specific source.  Unfortunately, most dealers/distributors don’t order from a manufacturer for just one client.  They group their orders and sometimes include items for inventory.

Not only do many companies not know if a lead converted to a sale or not, they also do not know if the end user was treated well by the channel rep.  Let’s face it… they don’t even know if the rep called them and if they did, did they pitch their product or a competitive one.  It’s hard to think about your leads(the ones you sweated to get and qualify) not getting attention.  Now imagine they are being sold a competitive product!!  I can’t stand it either.

I’m suggesting a very simple solution that any company can implement quickly and inexpensively to find out WHAT HAPPENED TO THAT LEAD.  Consider this – simply ask the lead.  Approximately 30 days(or longer based on your sales cycle) after you’ve assigned the lead to a rep, follow-up with that lead with an online survey request.  Most survey tools are inexpensive if not free and you can gain invaluable info:

  • Did the sales channel rep contact them?
  • How fast and in what way?
  • Did they purchase your product?
  • Did they purchase a competitive product?
  • What was the price range of the purchase?
  • Would they refer <company name> to a friend?
  • Would they refer the local dealership/sales rep to a friend?
  • And more

Survey responses can be tied back to the lead record and after awhile you’ll have enough data to make statistically significant calculations about lead sources and your sales representatives.  If you really want to boost survey responses, send a reminder 7 days after your initial invite and/or add a $1 – $5 incentive for completion.  Amazon gift codes work well!

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