LEAD DISTRIBUTION AT SALES-LEAD-MANAGEMENT.COM

Lead Distribution at Sales-Lead-Management.com is about planning a successful campaign begins with a strong sense of what has and hasn’t worked in the past with a particular audience. It also starts with lining up the necessary resources and processes to handle the leads when they come in. This is at the heart of today’s lead management – teams need to go beyond meeting lead quotas, and focus on what it will take to close the loop and foster sales success.

In the following illustration, the funnel on the left shows a traditional sales and marketing organization. The funnel on the right shows an organization with automated lead management.

Leads feed into the top of the sales funnel as a result of marketing campaigns. Then, they are distributed to pre-sales professionals for qualification, and finally to the sales team for closing. Only when a lead has moved far down the funnel do sales professionals begin working to close the most qualified leads. However, many companies have holes in their sales funnel, through which leads and opportunities can slip and be lost. In the funnel on the left, the marketing reach in a traditional marketing department is much narrower than that of a company using a marketing automation solution.

This wider reach means more leads, but also means more highly qualified leads of the right kind. After all, it’s expensive to move a lead through the funnel and into sales. By the time a sales rep is assigned to engage with a prospect, that prospect needs to be deeply qualified. If a ‘cool’ lead – or the wrong lead -- is sent through prematurely, valuable sales resources can be wasted. Smart lead planning and tracking ensures that the most thoroughly qualified leads are given the green light to move forward, and also helps marketing to advance the most profitable leads at the optimal moment.

To bring a lead management software like this to life, sales and marketing teams need to work together to create a lead processing plan. Together, they should define:

Qualification questions and processes
Lead distribution rules
Lead scoring: specific definitions of A, B and C-level leads
Components and duration of the sales cycle
How to manage atypical leads or out-of-profile leads
Ownership of each stage of the process

Once the lead process is defined, marketing automation powers both the planning and execution of campaigns. This technology streamlines workflow planning and resource allocation, provides the infrastructure to execute campaigns rapidly and make changes dynamically, and to test campaigns in real-time.

Distribution & Follow-up

Lead Qualification - Far too often, marketing teams focus on generating large numbers of leads, but fail when it comes to qualifying those leads. By making effective use of marketing automation tools, together with an appropriate lead management strategy and process, it is possible to bridge the gap between quantity and quality.

The ideal result is a high number of qualified leads that are likely to convert to sales. Leads will be uneven or of indeterminate quality if the strategy, process and technology used in qualifying them is inadequate. An unqualified lead will distract sales representatives with low-value leads, while high-value leads languish at the bottom of the pile getting cold. ‘Raw’ leads can also distract the additional resources, especially if you use a live person to call into a lead that has a high chance of being cold or non-pursuable.

With proper lead qualification, leads are captured, collected and consolidated. Then they’re enriched with any existing data the company may hold about the prospect (Marketing automation solutions can help amass progressive profile data and large amounts of behavioral data in activity logs, surveys, and other vehicles).

Finally, leads must by qualified and prioritized – either manually or in an automated fashion according to predetermined business rules. Lead prioritization - or “scoring” - will determine how leads are distributed.

Lead qualification, since it triggers which path a lead takes (whether the lead is passed to sales, moved into a longer-term nurture campaign, or dropped), is critical to sales success. It’s all about timing, and being able to identify when a lead is ready to buy.

For example, in the early stages of reviewing its lead handling and management process, Sharp Electronics surveyed the buying history of a representative sample of prospects, and they made a fascinating discovery. Of the prospects tagged as “cold” leads, 58% of them actually did make a purchase of a Sharp LCD product within six months of making contact with Sharp.

The consequences of this mistake were huge – consider all the opportunities that were lost. The only reason prospects made a purchase is because they took the initiative to engage with the company, rather than the company being proactive at the right time. The question for Sharp was then, “how much revenue did we let slip through, by not reaching out to prospects that needed us?”

Distribute Leads - Time is of the essence when a customer is ready to buy. Any delay may mean losing a sale. After all this effort, can companies afford not to distribute leads effectively?

Lead distribution is more than simply e-mailing or faxing leads off to sales teams or channel partners. Lead distribution consists of routing leads to the appropriate member of the sales team or channel partner based on predetermined rules -- not only to the right person, but at the right time.

The distribution process should include methods for the sales team to interact with those who have assigned the leads to them. They may need further information or lead enrichment. Likewise, this interaction will help marketing refine the lead generation, qualifying and distribution process. Both marketing and sales teams should be able to track the progress of leads as they progress through the sales cycle.

Moving forward means taking a hard look at how leads are distributed - and what might be done to do this more effectively. Some companies distribute leads to dealers by fax, depending upon their ranking. This is not the most effective distribution mechanism. Technology can – and often does – fail, with fax machines running out of paper, transmissions getting lost or buried under others, or transmissions getting stuck in the fax machine’s memory buffer. But even worse, there is no clear view into what happens on the other end of the fax machine. Even if leads were successfully faxed and received, what happened to them? Were they even followed up? Many companies discover that leads sent to dealers and VARs were never followed-up.

The problem with manual lead distribution is clear. Different processes are always required for different channels; however, and that with manual processes there was not only technology failure but lack of coordination and integration. Moving to a marketing automation solution helps re-engineer the process on the strength of the technology, eliminating many of the manual elements and providing a framework for co-ordination and integration. This increases the visibility into marketing’s impact on the end result: closed deals, which means more business for everyone involved, and better, faster service to end customers.

Nurture Leads - Not everyone is ready to buy the first time they hear about a product or service. Many are only in the early stages of the purchase process when they enquire – and they can be passed over by sales teams eager to pick only the ‘low hanging fruit’ – or prospects who appear to want to buy quickly.

The best lead management practice is to nurture leads over time through segmenting them by product, service and purchase readiness, targeting them with further communication relating to their interest – and then tracking responses and promoting leads to a higher level of sales opportunity at the appropriate time. Throughout this nurturing process, all communication with the prospect should again be held in the CRM system. Marketing automation enables this critical business function that supports, encourages and assists the creation of business processes and strategies around nurturing and developing customers. A cold lead today isn’t necessarily a cold lead forever. With priorities and budgets constantly being reviewed, cold leads can quickly change to viable sales opportunities. But how can marketers ensure that when that lead is ready to start down the sales process, their company is top of mind? Many companies find that leads that are considered cold actually make a purchase months later. This is why nurturing is critical – by providing relevant information to prospects on a consistent basis will ensure a longer term relationship is built. With automation, customers can be nurtured in a cost-effective manner. And nurturing a cool lead to a hot lead is less expensive than working from scratch.