In a previous article on this blog I used the analogy of catching your balance. The article suggests that having reports that return real time data is the best way to limit wasted resources; enabling a quick course correction when a sales agent or a lead source is underperforming. This principal of learning as you go, and constantly improving your process is one that we practice as well as preach at Leads360.

Being able to build software that is useful to clients rests on a few key practices. This article will explores how one of those key practices, Customer Service, helps product development. Our customer service team provides more than just training. They guide our clients through the process of configuring our software to adapt to the clients business practices. In many cases, configuring the software results in clients clarifying their own vision for their workflow. While adapting the software to established client workflow is a snap, many clients benefit from our best practices templates and improve their own business practices just by using our system.

On our end, we’re always learning ways to improve our software. The front-line back and forth with clients helps us gather information about how to make sure our software is a tool that works in the real world. This dialog with our clients, making sure that they get the most value out of our software, is a huge benefit to us.  This is one of the virtues of Software as a Service, the process of improving our software is continually being informed by our interactions with our clients. This means a better product for you, better than yesterday, but with plans on how to improve tomorrow.

Leads360 has two of its own nominated to be included on a list of the 50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management in 2010 by Sales Lead Management Association.

Dan Morefield, President and CEO and Jeff Solomon, Founder and Chief Evangelist are well known in the Lead Management industry and appear on the list of nominees. Voting occurs until December 6 and winners will be announced thereafter.

When you stumble, being able to right yourself depends on having a sense of balance. The fluid in your inner ear needs to stay level. When it’s not, your brain recognizes that you are falling. And if you don’t act fast, you’ll hit the ground. All day long we pick up information from our inner ear and our nerve endings that tell us when we’re engaging in something that will harm us. Conversely, we receive messages of pleasure from things that we need to do in order to stay healthy.

In the body of your sales organization, it is just as important to heed information about which practices make your company more healthy and which practices will do it harm. When the sales numbers come in, and it becomes clear that Salesperson B isn’t pulling his weight for the second month in a row, it’s easy to see that some kind of change has to be made. If your lead generation, or lead buying efforts are falling flat, you can’t continue trying the same thing and expecting different results.

Making these type of decisions is probably the easy part of managing your sales team and your marketing spend. Once you have the information about what works and what doesn’t, it’s practically an automatic response to cut the dead weight; an automatic response like catching your balance when you start to stumble. Quickly and accurately collecting and analyzing performance data is a bigger challenge.

Because unless you’re seeing information in real time about the performance of your sales agents and your lead sources, you can’t make adjustments in real time. The ability to make an immediate course correction belongs to those who can see  up to the minute information on where their sales and marketing machine is underperforming. Lead management software gives you actionable insights around your employee and campaign performance.

Managing a sales team without lead management software is choosing to make business decisions with incomplete information. Know what works and manage to win by using lead management software.

This service industry marketing blog posted today on the top three sales lead management best practices.  Their top three (not in this order) are:

-Lead Response
-Lead Nurturing
-Manage Leads with a CRM

Two out of three ain’t bad.

In terms of lead response, the best practice they advocate is that inbound calls should be answered on the first ring, and never go to voicemail. That is solid advice. But to take it a step further, how would this approach be applied to leads that come in not over the phone, but from an online form. Using lead management software, it’s possible to get a prospect on the phone within a minute of the lead submitting their request.  Some lead management software providers are integrated with as many as 1400 lead providers, and have distribution capabilities to route leads to specific sales agents using rules based distribution programs. Answer quick when they call you. And call quick when they submit an inquiry. In both scenarios, quickness is key.

The best practice this article suggests following in terms of lead nurturing is to call a lead 7-8 times over a 20 day period. Again, solid advice. According to recent research, six call attempts over two weeks is the optimal calling strategy. Beyond those limits, the likelihood of making contact diminishes to the point that the effort doesn’t justify the return.  Lead nurturing isn’t just about trying to make contact, but also includes drip email campaigns. Using the right lead management software makes lead follow up effortless. Automatically triggered emails keep you in touch with your prospects; and lead prioritization puts the lead right at the top of your queue just when it is the right time to reach out to them with a call.

The third best practice recommended in the article is that leads should be managed with a CRM. This is an all too common misconception. CRM is a great tool for Customer Relationship Management. But CRM is not the most effective tool for managing leads, i.e., prospects who are not yet customers. Prospects and customers are two entirely different categories of individuals and need to be approached as such.

If you read the original article espousing these lead management best practices, you’ll see that there are no references to the specific tools to help you execute these best practices. This is probably because the tools do not exist in a CRM. Lead management software is built specifically to turn prospects into customers. Lead management software makes it easy any sales agent to act on their every lead with speed, process, and persistence.

Too many leads. Is that a problem? That can’t possibly be a problem. A certain percentage of your leads will close. So clearly, at the most basic level, more leads means more revenue. But more leads also means more work. And for sales agents who may be operating at a level of organization that is less than perfect, more leads may mean more confusion. One problem with funneling increasing numbers of leads to sales agent and expecting them to close more deals is that the human brain isn’t infinitely scalable. There is a point where focusing and finding opportunities becomes difficult. At this point, the law of diminishing returns sets in and hard earned leads are left to rot on the docks, neglected by overwhelmed sales agents.

Here’s how ‘lead confusion’ sets in

Companies using best practices and benefiting from the ongoing research by lead management companies see improvements in speed to contact and closure rates. These improvements naturally result in business owners and sales managers buying and distributing more leads. And why not, data mining and business intelligence have empowered analysts to crack the code of the successful sale. New technologies have given them tools to automate and replicate the processes that support the successful sale. So buying more leads, and expecting a proportional increase in revenue is logical. Until you factor in the human element; the human brain, which has finite capacity, and may not deliver expected results from an increased lead buy.

Tools for clarity

Help is on the way. Lead Management software provides sales agents with tools to manipulate large numbers of leads and process amounts of information far beyond what they can keep fresh in their short term memory. One such feature that some lead management solutions provide is lead prioritization. Lead prioritization is based on proven best practices for high closure rates. It puts leads in the order of “Who needs to be called right now?” The rules that govern lead prioritization differ from industry to industry, but an example of how leads might work their way to the top of the prioritized queue in an insurance company is this:

-Leads with reminders in the next 60 minutes
-New leads
-Leads with the ‘follow-up date’ of today
-30 minutes after the 1st message is left (Contact Attempt)
-2 hours after the 2nd message is left (Contact Attempt)
-The next day after the 3rd message is left (Contact Attempt)
-Every day after the 4th, 5th, and 6th contact attempts/messages are left
-Any lead in the Contacted/Call Back, Pre-Qualified or Awaiting Decision statuses that have not been touched within the last day
-Any lead in the Win-Back status with a future Policy Renewal Date (X-Date) in the next 30 days
-Any lead in the Future Follow-up status that has not been touched in the last month

Lead Prioritization focuses your efforts on the hottest opportunities. It is fully configurable so you can tweak your prioritization rules to make them fit your own patterns of opportunity.

An article called 5 Ways to Avoid Referral Mishaps appears on Larry Bodine’s Law Marketing Blog.

Law Firms have their own set of challenges in making and tracking referrals, but many industries would list referrals among key source of new business and struggle to keep track of them with ineffective tools. Among the challenges addressed in the article are making sure you recover referral fees and keeping tabs on the how the referral is progressing through the litigation.

So why not use lead management software to track referrals? After all, what is a referral other than a lead. A referral is on one hand, just another type of lead. But on the other hand referrals can be among the hottest possible leads. They are qualified, ready to buy, and they’re being handed off to you with a recommendation.

Everyone knows that referrals have incredible value. Getting more referrals is great for any business. Increasing the number of referrals you get is achieved by cultivating relationships with parties who are in a position to make them. Building relationships takes time, and corners can’t really be cut with that process. Though there are other ways to optimize the referral process.

If building relationships that yield referrals was easy, we’d all be swimming in them, but the fact that it takes time and effort only speaks to the ultimate quality of the leads that come in through these channels.

Building relationships takes time but there are some tools that can make it a little easier. Some lead management software providers have a referral portal that makes it easy to for referrers to track the referrals they have made as they move through the sales cycle. Think about it from the referrers’ point of view; would you make more referrals if every time you did you could log in and watch its progress?  Of course you would. And people referring to you will be more likely to increase the frequency of referrals if they had more visibility.

Using lead management software with a referral portal are making it easier for people to refer them business. And they are getting more referrals because of it. Click here to see how the Leads360 referral portal works.

Would your business be better off if you always had answers to these questions:

What are your sales agents doing with the leads you provide them?

How quickly do they call the leads?

How many times do they call leads?

Are they sending emails?

How many emails and how often?

Which of my lead sources are underperforming?

Are the right leads getting to the right agents?

Companies using Lead Management Software have answers to these questions at their fingertips.

Seth Godin writes in his blog: “Most of the time, particularly [sic] in b2b and luxury sales, the competition is nothing . . . While you think your competition is that woman across town, it’s probably apathy, sitting still, ignoring the problem… nothing.” It’s easy not to change. Taking action to secure profitability in the future is often times a daunting task to consider. However, smart companies know that it’s important not to sit on the sidelines, scratching their heads about why they aren’t converting more leads, when they can take action to energize their sales process and find ways to be more efficient. Leads360 can be an invaluable tool to any sales manager looking to shake the cobwebs off of his sales staff and find ways to increase ROI by working harder and working smarter.

When it comes to sales, there might be a lot of inertia. Often times, things have been done the same way for a long time and people are hesitant to change anything. Other sales teams may be experiencing the opposite problem. New internet leads are very expensive, very valuable, and are quickly changing the business landscape in ways that sales staffs don’t understand. While many people would find it easy to succumb to the instinct to retract and fall back on tried and true methods, Leads360 can show sales teams that there’s a new way, brilliant in its simplicity and efficient in its execution.

Leads360 can show any sales team how sales automation and metrics driven lead scoring and routing will change their process forever, and help them find value where they previously didn’t know it existed. Traditional sales processes are very simple, often purchasing leads from different sources and then simply distributing them to the sales staff in a simple, unintelligent fashion. While it might seem like the simplest, best approach, Leads360 can show a company where the old ways are rife with inefficiencies. Leads360 has developed their sales process based on millions of leads and inquiries and discovered exactly what traditional business models were missing.

The drivers of lead conversion are varied, but many of them are ignored or neglected by classic sales methods. For instance, few things are more effective in eventually converting a lead than calling within the first five minutes. While traditional methods can send a lead to a sales person who can’t make a call for ten or twenty minutes, missing that all important window, Leads360 can ensure that leads are routed to the sales people ready to work them, not just the next person in line. This is also true of Lead Prioritization. Leads360′s new Lead Prioritization Engine automatically determines which leads are closest to converting at that minute and reorganizes the lead queue to reflect this, ensuring that your sales staff is making their initial and follow up calls only at those times when the leads are most likely to convert. This saves your sales staff from hours of wasted time feeling around in the dark. These are only a few of the many features of Leads360 that will help your sales staff discover just how much value there is in a consistent, automated approach that is driven by data carefully collected and recorded from each lead.

On the whole, the metrics driven, automated approach offered by Leads360 is undeniably a significant upgrade over business as usual.  Company’s employing Leads360 will see their productivity and ROI shoot up while leaving behind their competitors that have decided to stick to business as usual.