Five questions to fix your lead management leaks

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:

1. 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. 
2. 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.
3. 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 3^rd party registry’s including family, income, education, past purchase behavior, and hundreds more fields.
4. 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.

1. Lead Management Governance: Define a universal process and record protocol, then apply to all existing and new channels.
2. 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.
3. 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. 
4. 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).

Effective lead management aims to provide the most accurate and timely capture, dedupe, appends and segmentation of new leads in order to realize the best ROI.  Unlike attribution, it is entirely within your ability to establish and maintain best in class process and keep those leads flowing.