The most common bottleneck I’ve seen in companies is lead management, or crossing the chasm between marketing and sales by establishing efficient methods for capturing, filtering, routing and qualifying leads before they’re passed to the salesforce. It’s one of the easiest areas to improve, and can return a fast ROI for the time invested. The low hanging fruit is to increase revenue from the leads you’re already getting.
Example Issues
* Website is confusing to prospects trying to find specific information, and doesn’t clearly route prospects to relevant content or offers
* Registration forms are too long, ask the wrong questions
* No lead management application, or it is not used (making it impossible to measure where the best leads are coming from)
* Inconsistent qualification criteria
* (If relevant) No inside sales team focused on lead qualification
* Not enough follow up on leads – it can several several tries to contact even a very interested, inbound lead
* Lack of ability to measure key metrics such as lead volume, conversion rates by lead source, and revenue by lead source
There are four main components to consider when breaking down how you manage leads.
1) Website design
The website gives visitors simple, clear and prominent ways to sign up for ‘offers’ (demos, trials, etc). Also, the website content and flows can help prospects pre-qualify themselves or disqualify themselves, reducing the work on your sales team.
* Who is coming to your site?
* What do they want to accomplish?
* Does the site clearly help them navigate and find relevant material?
2) Website offers and registration forms
The sign up forms for the offers balance fewer steps and fields to make them easy to complete with a few extra, relevant fields to gather qualifying information. Also, the form is tailored to the offer – a shorter form for a very introductory offer like a flash demo, and a longer form for a more-serious offer such as a free trial. If it’s a good lead, a sales person can always ask further qualification questions later.
* Do your sales offers relevant to your prospects?
* Are you keeping the forms as simple as necessary, with just a few key qualification questions? ‘Question-creep’ is dangerous.
3) Lead management application
Saleforce.com is the perfect application to manage your leads, but there has to be a database of some kind, not emails or email forms, ready to receive, route and track leads. Without a database or saleforce.com, you can’t track key questions like:
* How do you track how many leads you get?
* Where do they come from?
* What happens to them once they arrive – do they all get followed up on?
* How many get qualified vs. disqualified, and why?
4) Lead management and qualification process
More companies with direct sales models are moving to a “2-tier” sales system, in which a more-junior inside team exists that focuses 100% on lead generation, rather than routing leads to field sales without any kind of qualification. This system lets the quota-carrying salespeople focus on higher-value work like closing business or growing current customers, rather than lower-value qualification.
The clearer the qualification criteria and faster imperfect leads can be qualified out, the less time sales will waste on them.
* Who is responsible for following up on inbound leads?
* Do they have clear qualification criteria?
* How many times do they follow up with a lead before giving up on it? (Hint: most sales reps do not follow up enough and give up too early)
For companies with channel sales:
Ask these same kinds of questi0ns of your partners – how are they managing and following up on the leads you share with them? What are their bottlenecks, and is there something you can do to help them?
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