Sales Leads are a lot more like Fresh Fish than Fine Wine!!
By: Mark Friedman, Partner, Cerius Consulting Group
Two recent studies indicate that the process of sending qualified lead to a company’s sales organization is fundamentally broken. In the first study, it was found that 70% of all Trade Show Leads are never followed up by sales. All the time, effort and money spent attracting people to the company’s trade show booth was practically wasted. Additionally, in a second study conducted by Performark, they found that 60% of Business-toBusiness leads took over 60 days for the company to follow up. Over the years, numerous advertising studies have consistently indicated that when companies inquire about one of your products or service, 20% of those end up purchasing them from someone – either you or your competition - within 6 months and 45% end up purchasing within 12 months. So what is the implication for your Sales Lead Management program? Speed matters: the first company to respond to a qualified lead stands a better chance of closing the deal. And this is why sales leads are a lot more like fresh fish than fine wine; sales leads do not age well! It is critical that a company optimize their processes to quickly and efficiently respond to qualified leads. There are a couple of important reasons for this: 1. Image enhancement – when you respond quickly and professionally to an inquiry, the account perceives your company as organized and responsive; “That’s the kind of company I want to do business with”, they think. 2. Influence the Specs; close the business – Responding to an inquiry quickly and qualifying it effectively will uncover potential buying opportunities. Often, if you are early enough in the prospect’s buying cycle, they will be receptive to working with your company to understand their requirements more indepth and are open to receiving recommendations regarding what to look for or what product/service features should be included in a buying decision or bid document. Once this happens, the company will use your information to not only to define their buying requirements but also will evaluate responses according to your coaching and the information you provided. As a result, you dramatically increase your chances to make the sale.
Why are qualified leads not routed in a timely manner? Lead Distribution can be complicated, especially in larger organizations. Many companies employ a Segmented Sales Strategy, assigning different sales personnel or teams to specific groups of prospects: Fortune 1000, Government, Education, etc. By Product Line Current customer Base, New business Accounts handled by Direct/Indirect sales channels Additionally, many sales departments are organized in a well-defined hierarchical and/or geographic manner. In these organizations, leads are typically sent to the cognizant sales director or sales manager, who is then asked to determine which sales person in their territory would be best suited to handle the lead. This introduces potential delay in the system as the sales manager may be traveling, on vacation or just not available to route a hot lead in a timely manner. In organizations that qualify all sales inquiries, the contact and qualification process can take a long time, especially if a large number of inquiries has been received in a short period of time. Without bringing on additional resource to help qualify these new inquiries, a significant amount of time can pass before a qualified lead is forwarded to the sales organization.
Using a systems approach, these are the elements of Speed that need to be optimized in your Sales Lead Management process: 1. Speed in responding to the inquiry – establish a goal to respond in one manner or another within 24 hours whenever possible. This can be with an auto-responding email, customized to an inquirer’s product interest or company type. Or, if possible, collect enough information from the inquirer to determine the most cost effective method of response, whether it is an email, literature pack or a phone call from a real live person. 2. Speed in qualifying an inquiry – responding to an inquiry is the first step and incorporating a mechanism to qualify the inquiry, based on established criteria received from the sales organization is the next step. Companies should strive to accomplish preliminary qualification for web leads whenever possible by constructing forms that ask basic qualifying questions.
Otherwise, a person either from your organization or from an out-sourced agency should accomplish inquiry qualification. Be sure to have enough resources to accommodate both the average number of inquiries received on a weekly or monthly basis plus the expected spike anticipated from Trade Shows and other marketing campaigns 3. Speed in delivering qualified leads to the ultimate lead owner – Once an inquiry has been qualified and it meets the definition of a qualified lead, it is absolutely crucial to deliver this lead to the ultimate lead owner as quickly as possible. This seems like a relatively easy thing to do, yet, many organizations struggle with this part of the process.
Best practice calls for a company to create business rules that identify the ultimate lead owner in their sales organization or in their indirect sales organization and use Sales Force Automation (SFA) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to automatically assign the lead to that owner. It is critical that sales be the input for these rules. If there could be multiple ultimate lead owners, define the preferred methodology to distribute the leads. Typical schemes involve a Round Robin approach or a “First come/first served approach, where the potential sales reps are the first to “accept” or respond to the lead. Additionally, it is important to define an exception process: If the Business Rules can’t identify a lead owner, identify the resource(s) within your company that will be the final decision maker for the lead assignment. Have the lead delivered to that resource and track the time it takes to assign the lead. Once a decision is made, use the SFA/CRM software to notify the lead owner AND determine whether the Business Rules can be modified to make an automated lead assignment decision for any leads that match the criteria. Once a lead has been assigned, then the company can either rely on the SFA or CRM software to notify the lead owner they have a new lead, or the company can call, Fax or email the lead owner to check their software for the new lead. The real issue is that unless a lead is immediately delivered to the correct ultimate lead owner, the inevitable delay lessens the chance of your company making the sale.