How Much Do You Want to Know?
How much do you want to know about how quickly your reps are contacting leads?
How much do you want to know about how your sales reps are following up on their leads?
How much do you want to know about the performance of your lead sources/marketing efforts?
Every lead you generate leaves a trail of information as it moves through the sales cycle. Where did it come from? How quickly was it contacted? How often and how consistently was it followed up on? Did it eventually close?
Are you managing your leads in a systematic way that gathers this intelligence from each lead as it moves from new to converted? If the answer is no, it is probably because the tools and techniques you use to manage your leads do not lend themselves capturing this kind of data.
Trying to leverage the information that comes from leads is impossible when the process of gathering the information would grind your sales efforts to a halt. Imagine asking every sales rep if he called every lead within 5 minutes of receiving it. Now log all their responses. Don’t forget to associate each lead with the marketing campaign or lead source that generated it. Did every agent follow up two hours later? The next day? Keep asking, keep logging, and analyze the results of the ongoing inquiry to locate inefficiencies and under-performers.
Using traditional tools to try to gather the information required to yield strategic insights would be the full time job of a whole new guy on your team. And this new guy’s title would be sales team micro-manager, momentum interrupter, and destroyer of morale.
Using traditional tools for managing leads and sales reps is tantamount to making a decision to leave most of the information about how your leads are being worked on the table. The information is out there. When you’re using lead management software, this information is captured and analyzed automatically, and it empowers people who can see it to make course corrections based on clear data about sales rep performance and lead source ROI.
So how much do you want to know?
