Thursday, December 18, 2008

Where and Who Do You Distribute the Leads?

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So many tried it, but a lot of them failed. This is because they may have become too reliant to technologies, allowing these man-made applications to work things for them rather than simply seeing them as tools. For example, though lead managers have become very important part in businesses, since they permit you to manage your leads more effectively, they are not the “be all end all.” The success of the business still relies on its human resources: you and your sales agents.

So how you can make sure that you can convert as many leads as possible? You can take note of these effective ways:

1. Come up with a good lead processing plan. You have to keep in mind that it’s never enough that you have leads, all arranged neatly in a database. Unless you give each one of them a call and set an appointment, they are all worthless. If you bought them from a lead generation company, then they become expenses rather than investments. It’s therefore essential that you and your team can devise a workable lead management plan. What are the best ways to nurture them? Should you implement drip marketing? How do you exactly keep track on your leads, and how should lead prioritization go? All these questions—and even more—must be answered by the plan.

Because there are a lot of uncontrolled situations that you’re going to meet along the way, there’s the possibility that you can’t follow everything in your plan. Nevertheless, the most important thing is that you have a guide that can help you get on track just in case you get lost.

2. Communicate immediately. Don’t wait for the next day or even few hours before you make that important phone call. In case you don’t know, it’s very easy for leads to change their minds, especially if you don’t pay attention to them. What you need to do is to just get an appointment with them so you can present your products and services. This would not take a long time, around 3 to 5 minutes the most.

3. Ensure that the leads will have a pleasurable experience with you. It’s all a matter of providing the best impression to your leads, even for just a short time. For one, you can increase your response time from 10 to 15 minutes for follow-up leads. You may also offer some freebies or other perks to your leads if they agree to an appointment with you. You may also offer discounts for every product that they are going to buy at a certain period of time.

4. Score your leads. Not all leads are similar. Some of them may be eager to buy your products or avail of your services. There may be also others who are just as interested in your business but would likely postpone the purchase in the next few days or months. Others will never be interested at all, and they may have been added to your database because of faulty opt-in list. With scoring your leads, you can easily determine which of these leads will be given priority. Of course, you would go for the first one, knowing that it will not take you a long time to persuade them to make a purchase from you.

You are the master of your own business. Thus, the power to make it successful or complete failure rests upon you. With the aid of dependable lead management software and excellent sales training of your staff, it will not be completely impossible. With this, you can direct your enterprise to the right direction.

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

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Lead Management Software: An Efficient Lead Distribution Tool

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We all understand that lead distribution is a process in lead management that ensures that all leads are acted upon after leads are tracked and rated according to criteria set by the marketing firm. In this step, all leads are assigned to the agents that hold the responsibility of following up to these prospects.

Because of that, we also understand that it is vital that the lead distribution process is streamlined as much as possible. A smooth lead distribution process ensures efficient assignment with as less time spent as possible in sorting through the leads and giving someone in charge of a specific lead group. More time can then be spent taking the necessary actions to close a sale with these prospects.

The Lead Management Software

It is undeniable that only an artificial intelligence has the processing power to handle such complex tasks with ease. Hence, one needs a computer and lead management software to handle these tasks in order to make the process smooth and fast. If lead management is automated, all the marketers need to do is just follow up and convince prospective customers to join the many existing customers that the company has.

Specifically, lead management software handles these tasks on behalf of its human counterparts:

• Lead tracking
Lead management software makes it possible to track a huge number of leads automatically. Marketers no longer have to keep track of individual mails and encode them on an electronic spreadsheet file. All information is handled electronically and entered into a database, where they are easily updated. New leads can also be added by just a few clicks of the mouse.

• Lead scoring
Lead management software also automatically scores a lead each time he makes a response to marketing emails. The software takes note of the status of the email and assigns a relevant score will then be based later on for lead distribution.

• Lead distribution
The software allows for quick and easy distribution by just letting marketers enter a certain criteria, and it automatically queries the database for all leads that satisfies the criteria specified by the user. Lists can then be generated and distributed to the appropriate sales agents for immediate action.

• Lead nurturing
With lead management software, marketers no longer have to send emails manually to a large group of prospective clients. Mailing lists can just be generated according to lead group, and these lists can be easily exported as recipients of any specific marketing email the company chooses to send.

Advantages of Using a Lead Management Software

As you could, lead distribution via lead management programs has several merits to your company. These merits include:

• Everything is easily categorized with small margins of allowable errors. The software can quickly query and look up data for existing leads to determine its status and lead score.

• Lead accountability is also improved. Marketers can easily check how much they’d be spending per lead with the program’s quick calculation feature.

• Programs and offerings that the lead qualifies for are easily determined by just using the lead score or priority as an index for quick searching.

• Periodic assessments of existing leads will no longer be done manually. Marketers can just use the system to check on which lead remains active, and which ones are dead and should be deleted from the system.

• Reports are easily generated into hard copies when the need arises for these documents. There is also no doubt about the accuracy and reliability of the reports since it is system-generated with little to no human intervention involved in the process.

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