LEAD MANAGEMENT SYSTEM AT SALES-LEAD-MANAGEMENT.COM

Lead Management System at Sales-Lead-Management.com helps you manage your marketing efforts; Track your prospects; Manage your customers.

Do you know the answer to these questions?

What was your most successful marketing campaign last year?
What was your return on investment for each marketing campaign?
Do you track prospects effectively?
How long does it take for your prospects to become customers?
Are there any bottlenecks in your sales process?
Do you know how many prospects each of your employees is working with right now and where they are in the pipeline?

Many sales organizations use the image of a funnel to represent the sales process. If you visualize a funnel, you'll be able to see instantly the number of suspects, prospects and customers you're working with. A single glance will tell you exactly where you stand and where you need to focus your sales activities. To a salesperson, there are three kinds of people in the world:

Suspects: People who've never heard of you before hover above the top of your funnel, waiting for some action from a salesperson to move them into the next group or confirm that they don't belong in the funnel at all.

Prospects: These are people who are interested in learning more about what you have to offer. They have taken part in some form of sales outreach effort; the closer they are to making a commitment to buy your products, services or solutions, the deeper inside the funnel they go. The fact that the funnel gets narrower, of course, reflects the fact that many prospects are removed from the sales cycle, for any number of good reasons—lack of money, lack of interest, industrial downturns, new management philosophy—and, in fact, never make it to the "exit" point as a customer.

Customers: Finally, some prospects appear as new customers, coming out of the funnel.

The funnel model is an extremely effective method of visualizing the transitions these people make. Lots of suspects turn into a smaller number of prospects, which eventually turn into a still smaller number of customers.

Track Your Prospects Now

Keeping your prospects moving through your sales pipeline is the lifeblood of your business. You should not have to guess at how many prospects you have, where they are in the pipeline, or where your bottlenecks are.

Lead Tracking Software allows you to:

Track prospects and where they are in the pipeline
Track the time involved for each step in the pipeline
See bottlenecks in the pipeline

This timely information allows you to work with your account managers to eliminate bottlenecks.

You need to maximize your return on investment for marketing and advertising and track where your prospects are coming from, including: Lead Source, Campaign, Region.

Save money by knowing which activities are the most productive and which campaigns work best in which areas. Prospect tracking provides you with the information you need to make informed decisions about your marketing efforts.

Manage Prospects by turning them into Customers

You must know the total elapsed time of how long it takes you to move an enterprise or individual from prospect to customer. Take a moment now and divide your total sales cycle time into the following three priorities:

Priority One: Revenue-Generating Activity. Prospects in this area are your "highest-risk" prospects—the ones you've got the most time and resources invested in; the ones that you've educated, nurtured and given your best ideas to. Therefore, these prospects could be easy pickings for your competition. As we all know too well, this is also the place where things can go suddenly and mysteriously wrong. Prospects can get cold feet, priorities can change, and opportunities can vaporize.

Clearly, your first priority has to be to take all the steps necessary to manage prospects and to make the sale happen with each prospect that sits in this area. We have to make turning these prospects into customers, making sure their experience with your organization is superb, a top priority.

If you're not sure who falls in this area, use the following rules of thumb:

You and your prospect have agreed to the terms and conditions of the sale, and they have an approved budget. The decision-maker of the sale has agreed to the time frame to begin the business relationship. All that's left now is for the decision-maker to sign your contract. Priority Two: Qualifying Activity. The next priority is to move anyone who is in your sales process (that has shown initial interest in whatever you sell) to the next level of the buy commitment. In other words, these are the prospects that you've met with or talked to over the phone that have a need for what you sell and have the budget to purchase what you sell. They have more than a casual interest, you need to manage these prospects with extra attention.

Priority Three: Conversion Activity. This is where you move your best prospects from priority two into the final stages of making your sale happen. This typically involves product demos, responding with written proposals, finalizing the numbers and perhaps providing referrals.