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This article called For-Profit Schools: They Get IT delves into the differences between the adoption of technology at private schools and for-profit schools. The upshot is that For-Profit schools are better with technology. They spend more than 10% of their operating budgets on technology infrastructure where their counterparts in the private sector spend less than 3%. Among the reasons cited for making technology so central to the enterprise with the for-proifts is the desire to provide students with flexibility and to let them have the access to technology at school that they have in the rest of their lives.

There is an interesting section on Page 5 of the article that deals with the role of technology in marketing and student recruitment. It says that “When a student inquires at a for-profit, they’re going to get a response within a couple of hours. But when some of the not-for-profit schools get a similar inquiry, they might not respond for months. The for-profits know that they can’t afford to be that unresponsive–that students are their lifeblood–and they use the available technology to connect fast.”

Responding quickly to student inquiries is indeed critical to the success of the for-profit school. Response times within hours are not uncommon, but it is possible to respond to students within minutes. Using lead management software, students can be provided a nearly immediate a virtual appointment after submitting an online inquiry. Intelligent distribution of inquiries funnels students to the enrollment counselor best suited to help each student. Using lead management is the best way to intelligently distribute inquiries and speed up response times.

Should we even call it customer service? When talking about how prospects are served, it’s common to borrow the phrase customer service. But that’s really a misnomer.  It is not possible, strictly speaking, to provide customer service to a prospect for the simple fact that prospects are not yet customers.

It may not seem like an important distinction at first glance since so many of the principles of customer service would obviously apply to prospect service. It’s important to be knowledgeable, friendly, trustworthy, etc… whether you are dealing with customers or prospects. But using the same approach towards prospects that you would towards customers is a mistake.

Customer service is all about nurturing and capitalizing on a relationship that already exists. Prospect service is about establishing a new relationship. The principles of prospect service are as follows:

Be fast – The first principle of prospect service is that it is critical to be the first on the phone. If a prospect is of a mind to buy what you are selling, they are going to buy it from you or one of your competitors. They will be more likely to buy from the person who establishes contact with them first.

Be consistent – The second principle of prospect service is that fast and steady wins the race. When prospects do not immediately respond to a sales rep it is important to follow up consistently. It is important to follow up on leads strategically, providing varied and meaningful communication that makes it clear your business practices are sound.

Be aware – It is said that people walk backwards through time. They can see where they’ve been, but can’t see where they’re going. Given that serving a large number of prospects is in many ways a highly repetitive process, it’s critical to always be leveraging your experience and learning lessons from past successes and failures alike. Having an easy way to report on the performance of lead sources, sales reps, lead distribution strategies, etc. is an important way to make sure you are even trying to serve the right prospects.

Don’t be so quick to assume that the principles of customer service apply to prospect service. And by extension don’t make the mistake of trying to do lead management with a CRM.

A successful sales operation is smooth. It glides like a swan. Calls are made and deals are closed. It appears effortless and inevitable. The successful salesman is in complete command of his craft and navigates his daily challenges with grace. His success resides in the marriage of technique and inspiration. He knows the rules, and he knows when to break them. And his head is clear. He is not focused on the minutiae of handling his daily work. His work is organized and prioritized. He’s able to stay focused on the higher level tasks of meeting the needs of his prospects.

But while it may appear smooth, beneath the surface, there is a lot that goes into a successful sales enterprise. The organization and prioritization of leads and lead follow up has to be executed strategically. The more prospects there are in the pipeline, the more opportunities there are for drag to develop in the system. The triviality of the administrative aspects of the sales job decreases in proportion to the number of leads in the pipeline. So the successful salesman glides like a swan above the water, but is paddling like mad beneath the water.

In reality, it’s not necessary to expend so much energy on managing minutiae in a sales reps day. Lead management software is a great way to automate much of the administrative work that goes along with the sales job. Following up on leads, making and keeping appointments, distributing leads and contacting them as quickly as possible; all of this is part of the work done by sales teams that result in deals being made.  With lead management it is possible to automate much of this kind of work and free up the time and concentration of sales reps to allow them to do what they do best, sell.

It is kind of a difficult problem to understand, but sometimes when people are working, and they can’t figure out what to do next, they can stall out. The stalling may last minutes, it may last hours. One example of the problem is in the context of a sales team. When confronted with the decision of whom to call next, a sales rep must switch his thinking from selling to scheduling and prioritizing. Scheduling and prioritizing, it might be argued, are part of the sales reps job. And this assertion is fair. But the administrative tasks that must be performed by a sales rep are really just a necessary evil. Necessary, because a sales rep can’t reach blindly into their list of leads and evil because when you’re looking for it, there is a lot of administrative work to be done. And it can easily expand to fill the time of a sales rep. It is work that does little to make sales reps better at selling.

Lead Management software automatically prioritizes leads to put the one lead at the top of the list that is most in need of a contact attempt. Lead prioritization rules can be configured to fit any workflow. But at a glance, here’s how they work out of the box: Any lead with a scheduled appointment in the next few minutes tops your list of prioritized leads. Then come brand new leads with zero contact attempts. Then leads are listed according to an optimal lead follow-up strategy that dictates that each lead receives six call attempts before being shifted into a nurture status. The six calls attempts are scheduled at strategic intervals and cause leads to appear at the top of the prioritized list only when the time has come for their next contact attempt.

Switching out of selling mode into administrative mode is not just costly in terms of how much time it takes. Making this cognitive switch takes a sales rep out of the selling zone. The selling zone is where each call is preparation for the next and success compounds success. The selling zone is where sales reps gather momentum and gain confidence. Minimizing administrative decision making keeps a sales reps mind fresh and focused on selling.

What milestones do leads hit between brand new and closed? Having them mapped out is an important aspect of reproducing your success. A lead passes through several dispositions after it enters your funnel. What are they? Probably a lead goes from “New” to “Contacted”; from “Contacted” to “Qualified”; etc… How are you ensuring that leads follow your established best practices? Or can sales reps work leads as they see fit?

If your sales reps are free to work leads according to their own standards, by what means are you able find out if leads are being ignored.

If you are using lead management, you can define these stages of the sales cycle to ensure that none of them are missed. All of your leads are being worked according to your best practices. It is not only possible to make sure that leads pass through all of the required milestones but to see performance metrics that show at what percentages, and at what speed leads are reaching milestones.

Creating an enforceable, repeatable approach to working leads is the best way to make sure that you are getting the most ROI on your marketing spend.

Here’s a post about lead management best practices in Salesforce.  It has some good suggestions for how to manage leads using the Salesforce CRM. But the problem with using a CRM to manage leads, of course, is that leads and customers are not the same thing and should be treated as different entities with different needs. Customer Relationship Management may offer some tools for managing leads, but the fact of the matter is that CRM is developed to accomplish the task of managing customer relationships, not establishing them. Devotees of CRM can think of lead management software as CRE, Customer Relationship Establishment. Lead management is built to achieve a few certain results better than any other solution; e.g., be the first to get a prospect on the phone and stay in regular contact with the prospect until it closes. If those simple truths sound obvious, like foregone conclusions, consider this new research on lead response in the mortgage industry which found that in general, lenders averaged more than six days to call a new loan inquiry and more than half of lenders failed to make more than a single attempt to call the leads they received.

The value of lead management software is that it distributes leads immediately to eligible sales reps by ringing their phone. When a prospect submits an online inquiry, that prospect will get a call from a rep in under a minute. That rep has the first opportunity to build a relationship with the lead, and is reaching the lead while the leads mind is focused on wanting to know more about the product or service the rep is offering.

The post linked at the top of this page talks about customizing statuses of leads in Salesforce to track leads through the sales cycle. Lead management software ships with a best practices workflow as well as lead prioritization to ensure that all leads are contacted quickly and followed up on in accordance with best practices and company policy.

Salesforce is great at helping companies manage customer relationships, but trying to convert leads with any CRM equals a decision to be slower and more inconsistent than any competitor who is using LMS.

Last week there was an interesting post on the SLMA blog. The SLMA asked all of their new members what were the biggest problems they were facing. There were five answers that generated the most responses. The problems break down 55%/32%/13% into three main categories: Generating Leads, Working Leads, and Calculating ROI. Click here for the full breakdown.

Each of these problems can be helped by lead management software. The first category of issues, Generating Leads, coming in with 55% of responses is not the primary focus of lead management software. There are some tools and solutions that can be leveraged to generate more leads, but this is not the core feature set of lead management software. What LMS can provide as a way of generating more leads is a custom form generator that enables you to create web forms that can be easily embedded on different landing pages on your website. Admittedly, this is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to generating new leads. The purpose of this feature is really to ensure that leads captured on your website are followed up on in accordance with best practices. So it pre-supposes that you have a search marketing strategies in place.

The other two categories, Working Leads and Calculating ROI are problems that lead management software was developed to solve. Together, these two received 32% of the responses. The two answers that were listed under the rubric of working leads were “Managing Inquiries” and “Working with Sales Management on Follow-up.” Managing Inquires includes ensuring that leads are contacted quickly and followed up on consistently. Lead management achieves these goals with an intelligent distribution engine that works in conjunction with a lead dialer to make get sales reps on the phone with leads within minutes of leads inquiry. Automated Drip Marketing Emails and Lead Prioritization make sure that prospects are followed up on appropriately both via email and on the phone.

The third category, Calculating ROI, received 13%  of the responses. Lead management software offers you a clear view of the performance of all of your lead sources and sales reps. The reporting features are easy to use and comprehensive in their scope. If you want to review the efficacy of any aspect of your lead management strategy, it is easy to create a custom report to do so. You don’t have to stop at questions like, “How well are my lead sources performing?”  You can drill down to view performance data on every aspect of your business and answer questions like: “How well are my lead distribution strategies working?” or “What percentage of leads from a given lead source are qualified by one sales rep versus another?” Running reports helps you gain insights that can help you manage your sales team better and get better results.

Lead management software solves a lot of the most common problems.

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The virtues of Software as a Service are many. When people think about Software as a Service, it’s not uncommon for them to think about the ‘Service’ element in terms of technical support. And to be sure, customer service is a critical component of successful SaaS; but a less obvious part of this service is the speed and intelligence with which the software can develop in response to client needs. In the case of lead management software, data is generated whenever the software is used by clients. With software as a service it is possible to continue developing the software in response to how it is being used. When it is discovered that lead close rates are dramatically better when the prospect is contacted in under a minute, a solution is developed to ensure that you’ll be the first on the phone with the prospect. When it is discovered that the effectiveness of contact attempts drops off after the sixth contact attempt, leads are prioritized to be contacted six times by phone and only by email thereafter.

Companies using lead management software are able to create a winning workflow and maximize ROI for their company. It’s fully configurable, but out of the box it is set up to leverage the analysis of the massive amount of accumulated data. The accumulated data, its analysis, and the product features that are added are an often overlooked but major part of the service. And it should go without saying, that the more clients a SaaS provider has, the more data, the better the conclusions drawn about best practices.

The part of the service that contributes most directly to client success is one that most people rarely consider; that a SaaS platform is developed directly in response client use and client need.