Lead management

Lead Management is a term used in general business practice to describe methodologies, systems, and practices designed to generate new potential business clientele, generally operated through a variety of marketing techniques. Lead management facilitates a business's connection between its outgoing consumer advertising and the responses to that advertising. These processes are designed for business-to-business and direct-to-consumer strategies. Lead management is in many cases a precursor to sales management and customer relationship management. This critical connectivity facilitates business profitability through the acquisition of new customers, selling to existing customers, and creating a market brand. This process has also accurately been referred to as customer acquisition management.

The general principles of lead management create an ordered structure for managing volumes of business inquiries, frequently termed leads. The process creates an architecture for organization of data, distributed across the various stages of a sales process, and across a distributed sales force. With the advent of the Internet and other information systems technologies, this process has rapidly become technology-centric, as businesses practicing lead management techniques have shifted much of the prior manual workload to automation systems, though personal interaction with lead inquiries is still vital to success.

Along with its other related business practices--marketing, brand development, advertising, and sales--the goal of an effective lead management initiative is to generate new business revenue, increase visibility, and improve the general attitudes of potential clients and the public at large for future business development.

A typical outline of a lead management process might follow the following steps:

#Business engages in a range of advertising media (Lead generation).
#Recipients of advertising respond, creating a Customer inquiry, or lead.
#Respondent's information is captured (Inquiry Capture).
#Captured information is then filtered to determine validity (Inquiry filtering)
#The filtered leads are then graded and prioritized for potential (Lead grading)
#Leads are then distributed to marketing and/or sales personnel (Lead distribution).
#Leads are contacted for prospecting (Sales contact).
#Contacted and uncontacted leads are entered into personal and automated follow-up processes (Lead nurturing).
#End result is a new business sale (Sales result).

While simple in scope, lead (or inquiry) flow process can become complex as clients, prospective clients, and sales professionals interact. Interactions and subsequent actions create a variety of potential outcomes, both productive and counter-productive to business development. This ever-increasing number of scenarios creates functional disconnects, in other words, critical opportunities to mishandle an inquiry that reduces or destroys its potential value. Appropriate management of these scenarios is the function of lead management.

Lead Management Architecture

Lead Generation

Generating a lead, or lead generation can relate to a myriad of marketing technologies and methodologies. Regardless of how it is achieved, however, from an architectural perspective lead generation is simply the ability to attract the interest of a consumer and capture enough data to validate and prioritize their interest, then contact them.

A few examples:

1. Mortgage Lead Generation

LendingTree runs TV advertising that touts that "when banks compete, you win" and directs you to visit [http://www.lendingtree.com lendingtree.com] . After watching this advertisement, and being depressed that you rent a 300 square-foot studio apartment, you flip on your computer and go to their website.

Upon reaching the website, you surf around a bit and read some information about buying a house, and how the mortgage process works with LendingTree. This convinces you to give it a shot. You click a link to request information, and fill out a form on their Web site to provide information about you: name, address, telephone number, estimated home price, and so on. Once finished, you submit the information to LendingTree, and your information is immediately compiled into an electronic lead.

2. White Paper Lead Generation

You are surfing the Internet and you decide there has to be a good way to make a lot of money on the Internet. So, you go to Google and search for "make money on the Internet." This search reveals an interesting link that says, "10 steps to becoming a millionaire using the Web." Sounds good to you, so you click the link and arrive at a page with a brief sales pitch for making money on the Web and a brief web form asking for you name and email in order to download the sacred PDF white paper with the 10 steps. Once you have filled out the form, submitted, and received your PDF--again, you are a lead.

3. Infomercial

You're at home, awake late at night due to insomnia, and while watching TV you see a paid advertisement for the "Sleep Number Bed" by Select Comfort. Thinking that your old mattress is falling apart, and one of the likely causes for your insomnia, your call the toll-free phone number listed in the infomercial to receive more information about the product being offered. An agent captures your information in a computer system, and agrees to mail you a brochure discussing the features and benefits of the Sleep Number Bed. You are now a lead in the system.

Lead Acquisition and Distribution

Lead acquisition is the first, and possibly the most critical potential disconnect in the lead management process. With [http://www.tns-mi.com/news/01082007.htm billions being spent] on advertising, in many cases the value of those expenditures is reduced because relevant information from responses is not collected or distributed. The value of this process is tightly linked to a variety of consumer response theories that highlight the relevance and responsiveness of the customer experience as being key ingredients in turning potential customers into actual customers. Once acquired, the speed, accuracy, and relevance of response can greatly influence a potential consumer's decision to buy, or not buy a product or service.

One extremely relevant example of this process is the use of the Internet, online marketing, and Web analytics for high-level lead generation. A consumer generally uses the Internet and makes Internet inquiries for products and services out of a desire for convenience and efficiency of their time. Consequently, they expect a timely, relevant response to inquiries made. An alternative to the time consuming research involved in cultivating a good lead, unique resources such as [http://www.sales-fax.com/ Sales-Fax News] have taken this burden upon themselves to find and report on leads for advertising sales. If the acquisition and distribution of data collected during during their inquiry is not effective, the consumer experience will be negative. No response, poor response, too-early or too late response = negative impact on consumer attitudes and behavior.

For this particular medium, the lead acquisition architecture generally consist of a Web form to collect consumer data, a database to temporarily or persistently store that information for subsequent distribution, and a software application to distribute the data at appropriate levels.

The distribution architecture will vary widely depending upon the objective of the lead generation. Generation for the purpose of selling the inquiry itself to another organization would typically include a methodology for selecting one or more buyers and then transmitting the lead via a variety of potential means, like: XML, named-value pairs, fax, email, telephone. In the case of leads generated for an organization's own use it may simply consist of a web page to render the contents of the lead database or a simple email action from the Web form itself..

Marketing & Sales Process Operations

Once the lead information is collected and distributed, it is then transferred to a marketing and/or sales management department, who will continue to implement lead management practices in pursuit of completion of a sale. Established lead management practices should provide the needed connectivity and accountability between those two operational units, and when managed properly, enhances the effectiveness of both operations.

The architectural relationship is much akin to the order carousel in a short order diner. This carousel is the communication and accountability between the waiter and the cook. Without this simple coordination orders would be lost, prepared incorrectly, or prepared in random order missing the expectations of the customer.

For management teams with a solid foundation in lead management principles, the process should create increased efficiency and accountability between marketing and sales activities. As stated previously, the increasing technological foundation of lead and sales management practices provides a number of "closed loop" data circuits, tracking the overall effectiveness of everything from lead generation, to prioritization, to distribution, to final disposition, and then back again to re-calibrate the process.

For marketing, this portion of the architecture primarily manages the analytics of the lead generation, distribution, and disposition. For sales, the architecture provides a fast, accurate method of distribution, in addition to improved management and accountability processes for sales activity.

Communications

The central hub of the lead management process once the prior architectures are in place is communication. Effective lead management principles requires intensive and accurate high-level communication, both internally within organizations, and externally to the lead inquiries.

Communications functions should include intelligent sourcing of inquiry information, and provide appropriate vehicles for overt contacting methods such as phone, email, or other communication forms. In addition to overt communication methods, technologies now also now provide marketing systems the ability to do extensive lead nurturing activities through automation systems, which often include opt-in email listings, automated telephone dialing systems, or hard copy mailing lists to increase visibility, touch on customer need, and increase brand visibility. In many cases, especially where inquiries may not be ready to work with businesses immediately, it is crucial to maintain ongoing nurturing communications that cultivate a lead into a future sales, and effective lead management practices include these methods.

Analytics

The analytics architecture is the last, and once the other architectures are in place, the most critical piece of an effective lead management system. This portion of the architecture allows for the dynamic review and analysis of lead actions, marketing channels, and sales performance.

For many organizations this information can be vital in assisting management teams make decisions that improve production, return on investment, and the overall performance and cost benefits of their marketing and sales strategies.

Optimizing Lead Management

As larger vendors work with partner organizations such as distributors (see distribution (business)), resellers, brokers and other channel partners, those vendors often distribute leads to their respective partners to provide a local contact to those prospects and also 'feed' partners with new business opportunities.Today there are two major methods for distributing sales leads to partners: Push or Pull.

PUSHThe push method sends leads to specific partners assuming that those partners will follow up and work on those leads. The challenge with 'push' is the fact that often the local sales people may not be able to react immediately for various reasons: not available, busy, on vacation... Many large vendors report disappointment when asked about their lead follow-up rate through partners after the leads where pushed out to those partners.

PullThe pull method was invented and patented by a German Engineer, Axel Schultze, who was frustrated with the lead follow up results of the push method and decided to let the available and motivated sales people 'pull' leads from an online available system. [http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&S1=09514997&OS=09514997&RS=09514997 Patent] was granted by the US Patent Office in May 2006. The pull method became widely accepted in the high tech industry where thousands of resellers from companies including Avaya, Nortel, Juniper and others distributed leads that way. The PULL Method became superior over the PUSH method, and lead closure rates grew on average by 300% as white papers from BlueRoads indicate.

Technical Functionality

Lead Acquisition

The lead acquisition functionality should allow for the simple and efficient acquisition of lead data into the lead management system. The acquisition functions must be able to support a variety of marketing channels and methods of capturing data. Some examples include:

* Electronic Data Transfer

This acquisition function may include the transfer of discrete lead data via technologies like name-value pairs, XML, RSS, HTTP POST, and FTP. These technologies can be used in conjunction with an organization's own website or third party lead provider. Often lead providers will deliver leads via a standard email. These leads can be electronically captured by parsing the email and then submitting the lead using one of the methods described above.

* Batch Imports

This acquisition function may include imports of multiple leads' data via technologies like Microsoft Excel, CSV, or other formatted batch data values. These technologies can be used to acquire leads that have been stored in other systems, assembled from lists, or other volume sources.

* Quick Apply Web Forms

This acquisition function may include Web landing pages or sales interfaces. This technology can be used to acquire discrete lead data via manual input into an application-type form.

Lead Filtering and Assessment

Most lead management systems will have some intelligent methodology for filtering and assessing lead data into useful categorizations. There are a myriad of ways to accomplish this process and some of them may be specific to industries. The following is a suggested list of possible functions:

* Data verification (i.e., telephone numbers, zip codes, address scrubbing)
* Device Intelligence (i.e., device fingerprint, botnet proxy detection, true geo location [ [http://www.threatmetrix.com/fraud-control-device-fingerprint/resources/article-trueGeo/trueGeo.html ThreatMETRIX Fraud Control - True Geo Intelligence Article] ] , true ip detection)
* Fraud screening
* Data appending (e.g., appending third-party data such as credit, preferences, purchase history)
* Grading
* Prioritization

References

*"Lead Generation for the Complex Sale" (ISBN 0-07-145897-2)
*"Managing Sales Leads: How To Turn Every Prospect Into A Customer" (ISBN 84423-3599-7)
*"Managing Sales Leads: Turning Cold Prospects Into Hot Customers" (ISBN 0-324-20546-5) (ISBN 978-0-324-20546-6)
*"Sales & Marketing 365" (ISBN 0-9704515-5-5)
*"Shopper, Buyer, and Consumer Behavior" (ISBN 1-931442-08-8)

External links