New leads are like water for many companies, essential for health
and growth. Indeed, many consumer facing
companies spend 60-80% of their marketing budget to generate new leads and keep
pipelines flowing. As a result sales and
marketing teams place significant focus on optimizing their lead gen investment,
developing sophisticated attribution models to ascribe conversion success back
to the source marketing message. While
the debate on accurate attribution rages on, many companies still lack the basic
plumbing necessary to accurately capture, assess, and segment their precious lead
flow.
Not at all sexy or scandalous, lead management is the plumbing that ensures your precious lead liquid is under
control. Effective lead management
ensures four important functions occur:
- Capture: all leads from all sources are captured and logged for future processing. A reliable log is critical for managing the process quality and cycle time. Also critical here is enforcing standards so all lead sources have common log data and tagging protocol.
- DeDupe: Duplicate leads are processed with business logic defining how the core contact is impacted while removing redundant contacts from the list. Don’t let the name fool you, superior smarts are needed to ensure proper classification of re-inquiries of prior leads essential for mixed media attribution models to function.
- Append: Matches the raw but deduped input from the source and appends it (often for a fee) with additional fields through matching personal info. This could include DoNotCall registry, known class action legal trolls, cell # look up for SMS, and a rich assortment of demographic data matched to 3rd party registry’s including family, income, education, past purchase behavior, and hundreds more fields.
- Segment: Now with a clean list appended with additional details, it is possible to segment and score the leads to define different priority, messaging, and channel/frequency strategies. In this stage, lead management is responsible for providing the sales and marketing teams the essential data fields to fuel their segmentation strategy.
Got leaks?
The above four steps seem basic enough and most lead generation teams
intend to support them. Unfortunately several realities increase the probability for companies to lose control over these basic tenants of
a healthy lead management process. These include:
·
New
Channels: New channels and technologies are a big part of the rapidly
evolving marketing landscape. While it
would be nice to build these new lead sources correctly, often in the rush to
launch date, the channels are connected with complex workarounds and business
logic that undermines the universal approach to lead management.
·
Multiple CRM
systems: Some companies support multiple CRM systems and stumble on the challenge
of integrating leads from disparate systems and data architecture into the
universal view desired. Defining the “gold standard” record source and
universal lead management protocols are essential to managing this
schizophrenic CRM setup.
·
The pace
of change: Most digital marketing teams are a hive of innovation, running
pilots, a/b, and multivariate test scenarios to continuously optimize the
experience. In this rush it’s easy to
layer on temporary and undocumented fixes that support a launch date but not
lead governance. Its rare teams will
allocate precious development resources to rebuild successful pilot structures the
correct way, creating a mess of business rules and exclusions that make lead
management and testing extremely difficult.
Five Questions to Improve
Your Lead Management
Luckily, its relatively easy to assess your level of control
by asking these 5 questions:
1.
What’s my
capture rate? Due to system and
process bugs, capture rate is rarely 100%.
But is your match rate sustainable and is it improving over time?
2.
What’s my
confidence in the dedupe process?
Duplicate leads are a bad customer and agent experience. They also inflate lead counts in pipeline
performance dashboards.
3.
What % of
my total leads are assessed & appended? Match rates vary by data provider, but it’s
not uncommon for companies to match only 65%-85% of their total leads. Are your match rates sustainable and do you
have a viable strategy for the unmatched population?
4.
Can I use
the assessment & appends to segment the population and deliver personalized
contact strategies? This is the hardest part to master and requires clear
definition of the priority fields. Many
err on the side of capturing too many fields without a clear plan how to employ
them. This “more is more” approach ignores
the physics of data flows and can significantly slow down the processing
time.
5.
What is
the speed to process a new lead? Speed to outreach is critical in both B2B and B2C arenas. If optimal outreach is
within 15 minutes, a 5 minute lead processing time is not acceptable. In these cases, go back to your flow and
strive for greater simplicity.
How to keep your leads
from leaking in the future: For the reasons mentioned above, effective lead
management requires constant vigilance.
Here are four areas to help maintain control.
- Lead Management Governance: Define a universal process and record protocol, then apply to all existing and new channels.
- Add lead gen to your impact testing: few development teams incorporate lead management in their testing routine to ensure new features don't impact with your ability to quickly and accurately process leads. Reconsider this gap using the $'s invested in lead gen to help prioritize.
- Performance tracking: While lead management is foundational to media attribution and much easier to achieve. Embrace the quantifiable nature of lead capture, accuracy, append quality, processing speed and cost to continue to track and improve lead flow.
- Documentation: document all the new rules, workarounds, and stories employed to manage future builds and troubleshooting efforts. This will help the entire team, including the IT team who tests new releases impact on leads (#2).
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