Be a Lead Management Superstar! By Lisa M Anderson
Your company has paid a lot of money for the leads your call center is responsible for contacting. It can be easy in the hustle and flow of the work week to lose sight of the individual value of these leads, but it is important to your company's bottom line as well as your company's reputation. This is why it is imperative that you use some additional tools to take full advantage of the information provided to you, as well as to correlate that information for analysis. One of the best ways to acquire new leads, in this internet-dependent world, is to offer a web form for interested parties to fill out. This process is Lead Capture, and is a very smooth and effective way to obtain contact details for people who were interested enough to seek out information about your product or service. The best way to utilize this tool is to have the contact details automatically imported into your customer database. From there, the lead is routed for assignment. Lead Routing is used to determine which salesperson might be best suited to respond to it. For example, some businesses capture leads from all over the world and therefore offer several languages for communication purposes. If a lead requests a French phone representative to call him or her, then that is the most important part of that contact's details and it must get routed properly or there will be no sale because there will be no communication. Other important factors are the size of the interested party's company or potential sale-many sales teams are divided by account size with some sales people responsible for several large accounts while others are in charge of numerous smaller accounts. After a lead has been routed, it must be distributed. For Lead Distribution, there are both passive and active methods to deliver the fresh lead to its intended salesperson. Passive methods include simply adding it to a database, while a more active distribution method would be email or a phone call. A dialer that allows the captured contact information to be automatically routed to the sales rep's phone is the optimal delivery method because it allows for immediate contact. Once the lead has been captured, routed, and distributed the management has been only just begun! There are many different options for responding to leads once they are ready for you. According to a 2007 study at MIT, conducted by Dr. James Oldroyd, the most productive way to respond is: immediately! It may seem odd at first, but this research supports the theory that calling a contact as soon as he or she has entered information on a web form is the best way to reach that person and they are the most likely to become a customer. They have a problem that needs to be solved, and catching them in that window of time they have set aside to solve that problem is crucial.
The mantra here is "The Right Message to the Right Rep with the Right Media at the Right Time." It is a juggling act for sure, so fortunately there are tools to further streamline this process.