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Lead Management the process of generating the list of potential customer prospects, prioritizing and classifying them, organizing sales effort around them and finally converting OR tracking them to closure.
Scope of this Chapter
This chapter covers the business intelligence and performance management aspects of sales leads. It does not include the leads related to hiring (called hiring leads) OR service providers (vendor leads).
The focus of this chapter is on how to maximize the effectiveness of the leads generation, distribution, follow-up and closure for the leads generated by a central leads generation function, like marketing, promotion, lead management unit etc... It does not spend much content on leads generated by a sales person on 'business as usual basis' to fulfill the sales target.
Business Objective of Managing Sales Leads:
Maximize the generation and conversion of leads to achieve cost and profitability objectives.
Key Sales Leads Management Questions
- How much of the leads am I able to generate to feed sales pipeline?
- How my leads are getting converted into which stage of the sales process?
- How my different channels/sources for leads generation, are performing?
- How my different channels/sources for converting leads, are performing?
- What is the cost and profitability of my leads generation process?
- What is the process efficiency for leads generation process?
- Am I converting high-value OR high-priority leads?
Challenges in Sales Leads Management
- In case of lead generation team being different from the Sales channel, the sales channel does not taking the leads seriously, especially if the past experience is not good.
- Warm leads cools down due to delay in response by the sales channel.
- Sales people are not given incentive to follow the leads.
- Source data for the leads is not reliable.
- Rate of conversion of leads does not justify the cost of acquiring them.
- Duplicate Leads.
- Information Management
Success/Business Drivers in the Sales lead management:
Sales Lead Generation:
- Effectiveness of lead generation channels- Telemarketing
- Effectiveness of a lead generation channels- Point of Sale
- Effectiveness of a lead generation channel- Advertising
- Effectiveness of a lead generation channel- Conferences, Seminars, Events
- Effectiveness of a lead generation channel- Web
- Effectiveness of a lead generation channel- others
- Quality and cleanliness of leads data-base
Sales lead Prioritization, classification and distribution
- Distribution efficiency of the leads
- Prioritization and classification of the leads
Follow-up tracking and Sales Leads Closure
- Leads follow-up and tracking
Overall:
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