New Business Opportunities in 2020 & Lead Management Process
New Business Opportunities, in this article, we’ll examine why so many of the sales lead generated by marketing organizations for a great deal of time and money are ignored or underutilized.
We’ll also provide a systematized approach for improving your lead management process based on these key principles:
Introduction to New Business Opportunities in 2020
It’s a simple fact: Qualified leads are the lifeblood of any sales organization.
- Sales and marketing organizations are better served by spending marginally less on lead
generation and more on the process of lead management. - All leads are not created equal. Identifying “sales-ready” points is a critical step in the edge
generation and management process. - Leads that are not sales-ready today should be nurtured and cultivated to be
sales-ready in the future.
The Prospect to Customer Lifecycle
Of the primary stages in the lifecycle, lead management can be the most challenging. But it can set you apart from the competition and hard to find New Business Opportunities.
10 Steps to Improve Your Lead Management Process:
- Understanding the Mindset of Your Sales Force
- Mapping the Sales Cycle of Your Best Customers
- Capturing Lead Data Consistently and Promptly
- Fulfilling Leads Appropriately
- Identifying Marketing-Qualified Leads
- Distributing Marketing-Qualified Leads to Your Sales Force or Channel Partners
- Managing the Sales Pipeline Through Reports and Metrics
- Getting Your Sales Force to Update the Status of Leads
- Nurturing Non-Marketing-Qualified Leads for Future Benefits
- Preventing the Process from Rotting Over Time
1. New Business Opportunities: Understanding the Mindset of Your Sales Force
Frustration with the sales force seems to be universal, over lead follow-up, order processing, communication of activities, or organization and attention to detail.
It’s not uncommon to hear statements about salespeople being overpaid, not working hard enough, or coming across as unfocused prima donnas, or something else.
It is also very common to listen to edicts on prospecting and lead follow-up as if making such proclamations actually means they will happen.
The fact is, most salespeople are hard-working, well-intentioned folks simply doing the best with the resources and tools they’re given.
It’s also a fact that most salespeople will focus on what they believe will net them the most money, even if that means servicing existing customers or spending significant time developing opportunities deep into the pipeline at the expense of following up new leads.
The challenge for your organization is to recognize the “blockers” that keep the sales team from promptly and effectively following up sales leads, and to develop processes and support materials that break down those blockers.
- Do they need better information about each lead?
- Are customer needs better assets to support a more effective follow-up?
- Your sales to create a better reporting system to determine which salespeople are following up?
Is it a question of better integration between your CRM and marketing automation system?
Read more : New Business Opportunity : Mapping the Sales Cycle
