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You are at a stage whereby the leads generated by marketing OR sales function through various channels are available. The next step is to prioritize and classify these leads.
Here are various tracks for classification of the leads:
- Value of the leads (high value, medium value, low value…)
- Product Segment category of leads (product line 1, product line 2….for example- home theatre system, home computing system, …)
- Campaign category (lead generation campaign, which generated the lead)
- Customer relationship category (existing customer OR existing in-progress customer.. for example- you get credit cover insurance lead from a customer who is in the process of taking home loan from you OR no existing relationship).
- Degree of confidence (high, medium, low confidence on conversion of the lead). Level of confidence comes on the basis of hard as well as the soft data. For example, if a customer is in the process of acquiring a house, she has a higher chance to acquire your home furnishing product. At the same time, if a customer has acquired a house 6 months back, he may be a low confidence customer as he would have bought home furnishings.
Depending upon the above (and some more) tracks of classification, one is able to decide upon the priority of the leads for follow-up and conversion. Here are some possible logics, which are used for prioritization. The purpose of this list is to give an idea on the thought process:
Here are some considerationsfor Sales leads prioritization:
- If lead is generated as part of the sales campaign, which has a deadline for customers to apply- The priority will be high.
- If the lead is a high value and high confidence- Lead is high priority.
- If a product line revenue is falling short of target- The sales focus moves towards the leads related to that product line.
- If a customer is an existing high value customer and has a high-value enquiry- It will be a high priority lead.
It is important to note that prioritization and classification is an iterative process. After first round and forwarding to sales staff, a feedback from the field should fine tune the classification and prioritization. For example- a lead may not turn out to be a high value, which may result in reduction in the priority.
The starting assumption is that leads are prioritized and classified at a central level and then forwarded to the field staff for follow-up and action. However, the prioritization and classification may happen after a chunk of the leads are sent to sales office (say purely on the basis of proximity of the sales office to the addresses of the leads). It is also possible that even if the P&C activity is done at central level, it is taken through the second round of P&C by the sales office OR unit, which is expected to action on the same. This is fine, as long as the second round P&C is shared and agreed with the central leads management function.
Success drivers for effective sales leads prioritizing and leads classification;
- Availability of defined business rules and heuristics for prioritization and classification.
- Quality of the leads database.
- Querying system to effectively run queries on different parameters to filter out the queries.
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