Do you know what is happening with your Leads? – The key questions you should be able to answer

Posted on 22. Jun, 2011 by in Features, Lead Management, Lead Management Blog

Depending on your focus or role, reporting on your lead management process can provide valuable insight to your successes and failures. Whether your responsibilities include marketing or sales here are some key questions that your reports should answer.


From a Marketing perspective:

 

What are the best and worst Source of Leads?
Lead management Report - Source of Leads Monitor where your leads are coming from but more importantly relate the value of leads to particular sources.This gives you the ability to allocated your marketing budget based on factual ROI.

All leads should have a source recorded against them. This allows leads to be tracked by source until closure.

At what stage are my leads getting stuck?
Lead management Report - Sales Pipeline
For one reason or another some leads will not be as ready as others to convert.
Identifying the bottlenecks in your sales pipeline where leads are stalling is a vital step to improve the flow of leads in your pipeline.
With this knowledge you can use targeted marketing activities to nurture leads to the next stage.
For what reasons do we loose leads?
Lead management Report - Lost reasons It’s a fact of lead generation that not all leads generated will result in a sale. It may be the buyer was not at the right stage to buy or you may loose out to competition.By analysing why leads and opportunities are lost provides valuable insight into how your product, brand and sales team perform allowing you to realign your offering accordingly.

 
From a Sales perspective:

 

What is the value of my sales pipeline?

Lead management Report - Pipeline by User A successful company needs to know how to manage and make the most of its leads and opportunities while they’re still in the pipeline. Whether reporting at a company level or by drilling down to region, team or individual performance by forecasting the likely value at the various stages of your pipeline converting, you gain insight into upcoming activity rather than relying on historical data.
Are all my leads being followed up?
Lead management Report - Contacted?

78% of prospects convert with the company that first call them.

Identifying those leads that remain un-actioned or contacted is not only important, it often determines whether you lose out to your competition or not.

Make sure leads do not go cold before being followed up by managing your sales teams, reallocating leads and opportunities based on current workloads. Fully employ your sales resources.

How are my sales teams and sales people performing compared to one another?

Lead management Report - User Activity
 Both by setting benchmarks and measuring your sales teams and individuals against each other it is easy to identify who is not performing.Whether used to reward those that are leading the way or to name and shame those not, the nature of salespeople means that such measurement brings out the competitive side and helps drive performance.

Reports can be extremely powerful and the bedrock of sales and marketing decisions, but this will only be the case if you can trust their quality. Here are some tips:

  • Seamlessly capture report data – As the sales and marketing process becomes more automated most of the data will be generated as part of the process. Where a report relies on feedback from sales make sure it is as easy as possible for them and part of their day to day work flow. You can only trust your reports if they represent a significant quantity of data.
  • Be clear about a reports purpose – Irrespective how automated the process you will always be relying to some extent on your team to provide you with quality data. In this respect it is important to be clear about the purpose of the reports. If they feel that a marketing report is being used to monitor their sales performance the chances are data will be less than reliable as there will be an incentive for them to skew their data to look good. Don’t shy away from performance reports, just be honest about them and read them accordingly. You need to be able to trust your data.
  • Share your reports with your sales team – This does not mean you have to give them a global view as most good systems will automatically generate individual reports based on an individuals area of responsibility. Give them real time access. Make them feel like a trusted team member.

 

 

B12Leads is an online lead management tool to capture, distribute and convert leads. Everything you would expect from a CRM tool but with a focus on keeping track of leads and your sales teams. An affordable solution that has everything you need to take control of your sales pipeline.

 

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