It’s one thing for the marketing department of any company to invest considerable time, effort and money into a successful lead generation program. It is quite another to put a lead management process into place to effectively track leads.

Creating and maintaining an effective lead management process is often a challenging aspect particularly in companies where sales activities seem to be perpetually in a closed vault and only the sales team knows what’s inside and how to open it. In cases like this, up to 80% of sales leads that go into the vault are ever seen again by the marketing department that created them.

In lead generation, a lead tracking process needs to be in place when the program starts. Our clients often ask us to assist them with some sort of process mapping. We often recommend a process that is pretty basic but built for success.

After an appointment is made, the lead is qualified by marketing, sent to sales to be further qualified, and then the sales person determines if the lead is actually a viable prospect. During the profiling of the prospect, a written proposal and opportunity assessment is created. The final proposal is critiqued in-house to ensure that it conforms to the initial plan and once it is approved by marketing and sales, it is delivered. After the proposal is delivered and a verbal okay is received, an agreement is created, delivered, approved and signed. Now that the prospect has committed, business commences. What if the proposal is not approved or signed? At this point in the sales agent needs to make sure that the prospect has not dropped out of the sales pipeline.

The lead needs to be sent back to Marketing for requalification, rescheduling, or lead nurturing. If the proposal was completely rejected then this clearly wasn’t a lead and it is also returned to Marketing.

The most important question here is whether or not the lead ever actually went past the stage where the sales person is actively pursuing the prospect. If the answer is yes then someone needs to know why the sales person decided it was not a fit in order to evaluate the qualification process and determine how much better and quicker to identify both hot and cold leads so sales people could spend more time chasing the hotter ones.

Strengthening relationships and generating new business are some of the pluses of following this process and maintaining one of your most valuable assets – your database. In many companies we see that while it is considered valuable it is still one of the most overlooked tools in lead generation programs. We strongly recommend that if you’re going to develop a serious lead generation strategy that you have a clean, updated database as this is fundamentally an essential part of the success or failure of your lead generation investment.

The value of your database is only as good as the support given to it by every member on your lead generation team. This is such an important topic we’ll address it on its own in our next edition of Issues.