The Benefits You Can Enjoy from Sales Force Automation

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With the advent of technology such as the Internet, lead generation has never been more active. Internet marketing is a very effective tool to use for advertising. Because of this, marketers practically deal with a large amount of leads every day. That can be very difficult for the salesperson and the marketer and may even result in their inefficiency and disorganization. 

That is where sales force automation (SFA) comes in. SFA is simply introducing an automated system that your sales force, comprising of sales managers, sales agents, and marketers--can use. 

Areas that SFA Covers

Sales force automation covers three important areas in your sales department. These areas are the following:

Lead management. Without an automated solution, lead management can be very inefficient and cluttered. However, with sales force automation, you can enjoy several benefits like efficiency and accuracy. For example, an automated lead management system can make sure that no two marketers or salespersons are handling the same leads. You can also make sure that the action being taken on a certain lead is appropriate for the level of interest that he or she holds for the product or service offered to him or her. 

Opportunity management. An SFA’s opportunity management feature improves greatly the productivity of your sales teams. For example, it allows them to come up with a very efficient process of handling sales leads. They are also able to pool together their skills to identify potential weak spots as well as exploit strong points in the sales process. 

An SFA also allows sales managers to streamline the operations of their salespeople, as well as accurately measure their progress by real-time tracking. 

Account management. In order to keep track of the movement of your current customers as well as organize their information, a sales department needs to maintain an account management system. While legacy account management systems have done a good job in the past, the amount of information generated by the Internet is simply too much for these systems to handle. 

By introducing sales force automation, you can accurately track and manage your customer’s accounts. You can easily access information that will allow you to team up with the salespeople based on how they can take very good care of your customers. These include pieces of information like interest in a product and previous purchases, for example. These are also data that can help you gauge whether or not this particular customer will want to buy a similar or related product in the future. 

Territory management. Territory management is simply defining who gets which lead to handle. With the territory management features of an automated sales force program, the flow of information can easily be manipulated in order to cope with any changes that may occur in your company. For example, department A was previously in charge of handling leads with very high lead scores. 

At some point, the company has decided to reorganize departments, and department A is now in charge of new and raw, unprocessed leads. With an automated system, the change can easily be adapted to with a few clicks of the mouse to facilitate reassignment. 

Contract management. Another important part in sales management is contract management. With a contract management solution in place, you can easily manipulate contracts. For example, it is easy to find which contracts are about to expire and would need renewal. This way, you can right away inform the contract holder. Contract management features of an automated sales force will also let you quickly access important information on an account through electronic databases.

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Some More Ideas on How to Do Lead Routing

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Lead routing or lead assignment is a lead management process that should not be taken for granted. Without it, your leads can be worked on by salespeople who don’t have the capacity to transform them into customers. You may also end up giving too much leads to work on to a few number of people while the rest have nothing better to do. 

But lead assignment is very complex. There are so many ways on how you do it. To give you an idea where to start, you can take a look at the list below:

Using Geographical Location Proximity

Are you a business with several branches found all over the state, country, or even the world? One of the most effective means to assign your leads is through the most ideal geographical location. For example, if you have an office located in San Francisco, California, and you have leads who came from that area, you can assign these to your salespeople in the satellite office. 

There are several advantages of doing this one. Sometimes geography can affected the purchasing decision of your prospects. You can attribute it to their location or to the culture that they are familiar with. Your sales people there would have a very good idea of the buying habits of these leads, so they basically know the best things to offer to them and how they will be able to do it. Second, they have more options on how to track leads. They can call them—since they don’t have to pay for long-distance calls—e-mail or even personally visit these prospects at their homes or offices, just in case no other communication method is available. Moreover, when they want to set up trade shows or launches, they can conveniently invite these leads as both the prospects and the company don’t have to pay for exorbitant fares. 

Using At-risk Criteria

What are considered as at-risk leads? These are actually the prospects who need your services right away. They can no longer wait for few more days or even hours before they can get the offers that they need. The problem with this in relation to lead routing is that it becomes very hard for you to determine which among your prospects are already at the at-risk state. Usually, by the time that you can recognize their presence, they are no longer interested or may have shifted their attention to another company. 

Thus, it’s very important for your salespeople to update the lead distribution software as often as possible. After all, they will be highly dependent on real-time data. Information such as pending deals should be very obvious, so they will instantly be worked on by the salesperson who is responsible for such lead. 

Coming Up with Your Own Lead Routing Rules

You may have noticed that I have already given you the different ways on how you can distribute your leads. You can follow them, or you can set up your own. What is important is that you have very clear rules on how you can route your leads to the right salespeople. An example could be this: 

New salespersons should not work on fresh leads. New leads offer higher conversion rate for you since they have the most recent need of your product or service. They do not only have the interest but also the sense of urgency. You cannot allow new salespeople to handle them since they are still not accustomed to closing important deals. Rather, you can let them work on historical leads, or those that have not been worked on for 30 days or more. 

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

The Importance of Maintaining a Database in Lead Management

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There are so few people who actually appreciate the use of a database in relation to their lead management tasks. In fact, some marketers do not maintain or use their databases at all since they are so engrossed in pursuing new leads or are spending too much time building leads that they forget to maintain or organize a database.

An electronic database is actually very useful for the lead management process. Here are just some of the reasons why marketers should purchase and maintain a database in relation to lead management. 

A Database Allows You to Access Old Leads

Some marketers have the mistaken concept that, to have a great-running business, they have to build a lot of leads. That is why great emphasis is placed on lead generation rather than lead nurturing. 

The truth is that no lead should be ignored during the process—in fact, at any stage of lead management. Most marketers would naturally reject leads and leave them rotting on the database when they give an unfavorable response to mails with offers or when they totally ignore it. They then turn their focus to looking for new leads without giving the old ones a second thought. 

Proper lead nurturing would entail follow-ups in the hope of closing a sale. This would include new and old leads. To do that, someone would need to be able to access the information from old leads. The only way to be able to do that is to maintain a database, where you can access and organize information on the old leads like contact information and others. 

It Is Easy to Assign Leads to the Right Persons 

The database contains not only names and contact information of a lead. It also has fields like lead priority, lead score, and many others. Using the information like lead priority, marketers can discern which of the many leads they have need the most urgent action from their part. They then can assign them to the best salespersons there are to maximize the chances of closing a deal with the prospective clients. 

Lead score, on the other hand, gives a hint as to how interested a lead is about the products that you are offering because a score is assigned for every action the client has done in relation to the offer. The higher the lead score, the greater the interest the lead has for a product. Like lead priority, marketers can tell using lead score if the lead requires urgent and decisive action to close a sale. 

Marketers Can Easily Evaluate Their Marketing Performance

Aside from using the database to contact leads and peddle their products, marketers can use the database as a guide as to how well they are doing with their marketing efforts. For example, the size of the database is already indicative of how effective their marketing strategies have been. It is even possible to check which advertising campaigns have had success with the market by simply checking the field that shows the source of the lead. 

There are many ways that one can use the database to evaluate their performances. Here are some examples:

Using the number of new leads produced in a period, one can already make a performance report for that period. By querying for leads produced within a set period, you can use the number of fields returned for a statistic. 

The information of the database can also be used to find out which of your products have been able to arouse interest from your target. You can simply check out how many leads have signed up for that offer. 

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

Automatic versus Manual Lead Distribution

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Lead distribution, which is a step in the entire lead nurturing process, is a process all on its own. Well, each step is a detailed procedure that needs to be done. In this case, lead distribution is necessary in order to make sure each lead is handled by somebody that is best qualified to do something with it like selling products or services. Here’s how lead distribution by a lead tracking company is done. 

The Leads Are Grouped into Categories

The first order of business for an outsourced lead handling company is to group incoming leads. The reason for this is that an outsourced lead handling firm does lead handling for several companies. If they don’t group these leads into categories, then they’ll end up sending leads to the wrong companies. Even if they manage to send the right leads to the right companies, they might end up sending non-qualified leads. 

The categories are usually the niches that the lead handling company is working on. If they get a lead from a website that is intended for promoting home improvement services, then they file that under “home improvement.” The list goes on and on. Under each category, one might also want to further segregate the leads by their scores, which makes it easy for the company to know which leads needs more “pushing” or more efforts to increase their interests in the product.

Looking into the Dealer-Company Relationship

The tricky part of referring leads to companies is the firms’ relationship to the lead handling company. For example, some lead companies are governed by contracts with a dealer that compels them to submit to them the leads that are located on the area in which the dealer is located. Some companies may be free to submit leads to whatever dealer is near to the potential customer. Afterward, the company would have to consider several other factors. These include the manner of priority in which they deliver which lead to which dealer, and many others. 

Should the Process be Automated or Still Left Manually?

And now, there arises the question on whether or not the lead handling or distribution process should be automated. We shall answer the question by looking again at the first two processes and how a company can benefit from automating the procedure. 

First, we could see how daunting and how time-consuming it is for the company to segregate the leads. Even if you have a lot of people handling the segregation for you, you can still actually save time and improve the efficiency of your business if you introduce the automation of your lead distribution function. Special software can handle the job better than a simple Excel sheet; the program has the advantage of using a database, which makes the second process better. Although entering the information into the database can be similar to entering the same information into a spreadsheet, the only difference lies on how it affects the ease or difficulty of the next process. 

With the advantage presented to you by the software’s database, it is now easier, quicker, and more efficient to distribute the leads using the factors keyed in to the data fields for each lead. For example, the program can just pull out the leads that are located in, say, Iowa and send them out to the dealers that are located in the same area. If you are still using a spreadsheet to do that, you’d have to manually send out the leads to the qualified distributors to receive them. That can take a lot of time and effort; a program clearly increases your efficiency. 

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

Why You May Think of Outsourcing Handling of Leads

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Outsourcing is a common practice among companies nowadays. Outsourcing is defined as the contract between two companies to allocate part of a core function to the second company on behalf of the first firm. Before you get on the outsourcing bandwagon, think first if outsourcing your lead handling functions can be beneficial and not detrimental to the company’s goals and visions.

Advantages of Outsourcing

Outsourcing, in the context of lead handling, has a variety of advantages. These advantages include the following:

It is less costly to outsource certain company functions to a third party. This is very true. When you outsource your lead handling functions to a third party, the only thing you need to worry about is the payment. You won’t even have to spend anything extra on payroll and equipment; the third-party company handles that for itself.

Another cost-saving feature in outsourcing lead handling is that you won’t have to train your people anymore. All you have to do is enter a contract with the third party, regularly pay the agreed fee, and they take care of the rest.

You have guaranteed expertise. The companies that handle lead handling for you are experts in the field. By outsourcing your lead handling activities, you can make sure that your company is in good hands. In fact, they could do a better job than you probably can.

You have more time for other business functions. Handling lead nurturing in-house can be good; however, it can be detrimental to the efficiency of your operation when you have to manage such a complex task. Your sales people may incur backlogs, which can be difficult to manage. Also, most of the times, these backlogs are totally ignored and not followed up on. This translates to a loss of a potentially qualified lead and potential customer.

Outsourcing greatly decreases the work load you have to encounter. You can have more time to devote to building sales since you won’t have to spend time sifting through lead information and filtering out the noise from the usable information. In addition, sales handling companies can do the research necessary for you to generate qualified leads--they are efficient. All these can be obtained for a fixed fee agreed upon on the contract.

Outsourcing gives a more professional approach to your marketing department. Lead handling services typically include 24-hour “live chat” service as well in-phone inquiries. The image of the person or company handling these services is judged greatly by how he handles inquiries. Because they are experts in the field, third parties that handle lead handling functions are able to take a more formal and professional approach to lead nurturing. This can make your company appear more impressive and reliable in the eyes of prospective customers, which is a plus point in converting leads into customers.

You have access to state-of-the-art lead distribution and data reporting solutions. As part of their expertise and specialization in the field, service companies that handle lead handling services use efficient and advantageous sales lead distribution software that makes it easy to exchange qualified leads between the service company and your salespeople. This data, when forwarded, makes it easy for you to measure the return of investment and other data necessary for making a report.

People who don’t understand the requirements of outsourcing can probably conclude that outsourcing is contradictory to a company’s goals. This is probably because you are letting a third party handle tasks that pertain to your own operation. However, if you look closely at it, outsourcing is simply delegating a part of your own tasks to someone else. It is still your company that benefits in outsourcing in the long run.


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More Ways on How to Distribute Your Leads

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If you can recall, we already talked about the different methods of distributing leads. We tackled about FIFO, LIFO, round robin, and a lot more. We also learned that even if there is really no definite and right lead distribution system, it doesn’t really mean that all of them are ideal. Some are not. For example, the round-robin approach, though the simplest, may not be appropriate to use for a number of reasons. First the leads may end up with the wrong sales agents, those who don’t know how to deal with them or sell your product lines to them. Second, it may establish unfairness in the sales team. Those who are fast in making deals will be the ones who get to do the job more than those who are slow.

Right now, you will learn more techniques. Again, keep in mind that you don’t really have to follow them to a T. I am giving these to you to provide you with more options. You do have the freedom to tweak them to suit the needs of your company.

Warm-up Telemarketing

This is one of the most popular methods these days. The concept is also simple. Once a lead places a call, a sales specialist will pick up the call and pre-qualify the leads. If the prospect is good, then the phone will be transferred automatically to the sales agent. The transfer is warm, which means that you don’t put the customer on hold or compel him to put down the phone. Moreover, these agents are trained to discuss about specific product lines. Thus, they can talk about the product extensively to the prospective customers.

There are a number of advantages of doing this. First, it can boost the morale of your sales agents since most of the leads that go through them are very easy to convert. They may already have high interest level on the product. You can also expect the conversion rate to increase. The leads, on the other hand, will feel confident over the company, as they can expect immediate response from your sales team.

But there are also downsides. As your leads continue to grow, this process may not longer prove to be inefficient for the simple reason that it’s time-consuming. There are also some leads who tend to provide wrong or incomplete information because they are not really expecting for sales agents to immediately talk to them.

Going through the Pipeline

Another method of lead distribution means the use of a sales pipeline. What is this? Sometimes called a funnel, it simply traces the movements of your leads until they become regular customers. Usually, they start out as prospects, then qualified leads. Depending on the effectiveness of the lead scoring or filtering techniques used, these qualified leads can become sales-ready ones. By then, there is almost 100 percent chance that they will purchase a product from your company once an offer is being placed.

How does the process go? Everything begins with a lead. Using their contact information—which include their phone numbers and e-mail addresses, you then qualify them. There are a lot of criteria that you can use, but usually, it’s about the capacity of the lead to buy the product you’re selling as well as his interest on it. If you are selling leather bags, for example, you may want to deal with leads who have their own businesses since they prefer luggage that can store as many documents as possible and are strong enough to last for a long time. The qualified leads will then be dealt with by the sales agents. Now replies can vary. They may say no or yes. Depending on how well you train your sales agents, those who say yes will then advance to the next level and would commonly become your new customers.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

Grave Mistakes You Do with Your Lead Distribution

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Unless you are willing to work on your leads alone—which is very impossible, you will have to assign your leads to your sales agents. They are the best people to work on them. They already have the negotiation skills. Besides, they are trained to do the job.

Sad to say, most of the flaws in lead management happen in lead distribution. When you get at this point, that’s when you start to mess up. There are actually plenty of reasons for the mistakes. Knowing them, though, will allow you to control their occurrence and even eliminate them:

1. You stick with wrong methods of lead distribution.

Today there is a variety of ways on how to distribute leads. Some consider the FIFO method. This means that sales agents will have to work on the older or the first leads in the database. Others would go with the round-robin approach because it’s simple. The leads will just have to be worked on by the agent who doesn’t have any. All these approaches may work with other companies but most definitely not with a lot. The problem is that they don’t put any value on the quality of your leads. Depending on the campaign that you have or the products you’re trying to sell, not all the prospects will qualify. You may just end up calling those who really don’t have interest over your offer.

2. You have the wrong lead distribution software.

If you just search through the World Wide Web, you will discover that there are countless lead routing programs that you can use. But not all of them will be ideal for your business. You have to consider what you need, the kind of lead distribution system you want to implement, and how it’s easy for you to customize your lead assignment program. You may also want to utilize a web-based lead distribution application. This way, you will be able to work on those leads anytime and anywhere you want to. You can also set up a centralized system to make sure that no lead will be assigned to different sales agents.

3. You failed to check your database.

You may have found the right lead distribution software, but if there’s something wrong with your database, then you’re still bound for mistakes. You may have utilized crude databases such as a spreadsheet or you failed to implement a fool-proof way of entering lead information. Thus, a lead may be listed more than once. The list will then be carried over into your lead assignment program.

4. The leads are assigned to the wrong person.

This can be one of the biggest mistakes you’ll ever do when it comes to lead assignment. Having the best sales agents doesn’t really guarantee that they are also the most ideal people for the leads that you have. It will only get worse when these leads are assigned randomly. Your sales team may only end up providing wrong or misleading information to your potential clients. Some of them will not have an idea on what to do with the leads and how to effectively convert them to your loyal customers.

5. No one updates the lead distribution software.

Once a sales agent already makes a call on the leads assigned to him, he needs to update the application. This way, the sales supervisor can determine which of the prospects are already dealt with and which ones aren’t. It will also inform him which of the agents may be finding a hard time with sales leads. However, not all will be diligent enough in doing so. Thus, a lead who may have expressed disinterest may be contacted by another of your sales agent.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com