Archive for May, 2010

Make the Most of Your Leads with a Lead Management System

Sunday, May 30th, 2010

New research by the Aberdeen Group, in conjunction with SmartLead reveals how top companies are achieving better sales conversion from their leads. The January, 2010 study reports that 63 percent of the businesses who have reached the highest levels of annual growth in lead to sales revenue and customer acquisition have done so as a result of investing in lead management technology. These companies indicated that they are seeing measurable ROI after implementing the new lead management systems.

The report, Crossing the Chasm with Automated Lead Management, details the results these companies are seeing after adopting a lead management system:

  • 79 percent improved their company-wide annual revenue growth, increasing average performance by 59 percent.
  • 75 percent improved their current lead-to-sales conversion, reporting an average of 23 percent improvement.
  • 86 percent noted an increase in lead-to-sales conversion over the past year (versus 39 percent for all other companies).

The organizations in the study cited the need to increase their new customer acquisition revenue as the number one reason for acquiring the technology.

How Does a Lead Management System Help Businesses Improve ROI?

Utilizing lead management solutions such as CRM (Customer Relations Management) in conjunction with best practices in lead management, can streamline sales administrative processes, and allow your sales team to focus that much more of their time and efforts doing what they do best–converting your sales leads into revenue for your business. While most larger corporations are already making full use of a lead management system, many small businesses have yet to realize the advantages it can offer.

This technology has numerous benefits such as lead data tracking that lets you easily calculate ROI on a regular basis, so you can adjust your focus on the leads that are generating the best income stream. It also maintains easy access to data on every single customer, which can help your sales team to shorten the sales cycle, and also ensure that you never lose a lead within the system.

If you decide to invest in lead management technology for your company, take the time with your sales department to learn how to use the system to your company’s best advantage, and maintain open communication between management and sales regarding the new strategies and practices involved.

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Seven Steps to Increase the Productivity of Your Sales Team

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

A new white paper released by the Sales Lead Management Association offers some insight into the question of why some businesses fail to see a satisfactory ROI, even with high quality, real time leads.

The reason is that the majority of leads are simply wasted. A survey by the SLMA found that 75 to 90 percent of all leads turned over to salespeople are not followed up on. How do you know if this is happening in your company?

  1. Track your ROI. A separate study by the SLMA found that more than 60 percent of businesses do not do this, even though most sales software comes with ROI tracking built into the program.
  2. Identify and isolate issues related to meeting your ROI, and establish a plan to overcome these issues and meet your ROI goals. Include some of the steps below to increase the productivity of your sales team.
  3. Establish a policy that requires 100% follow up on leads.
  4. Observe whether your team is spending too much time between calls. If so, minimizing distractions will help them stay on track—and on the phone with those leads while they’re fresh.
  5. Use progressive dialing, which will automatically start to dial the next number in line as soon as the salesperson ends the current call. (Not to be confused with predictive dialing, which causes a pause when calls are answered; most people will recognize this as an automated call.)
  6. Next best call routing is also an excellent tool. It eliminates the need for the sales rep to stop and analyze which call will be the best one to take, which can eat up a surprising amount of time. The system will select and route the next best calls to each rep, based upon criteria selected by the company owner or manager.
  7. Make certain your leads are properly nurtured. Have a plan in place for following up on leads that do not result in a purchase on the initial call. These are still very valuable leads, but are often ignored by salespeople.

By taking these simple but effective steps, and continually tracking your results using the ROI tracking aspect of your sales program, you should see a higher percentage of your leads turning into customers.

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Posted in Lead Management | 4 Comments »