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information on wikipedia for LEAD MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
1 Overview
2 Lead Management Architecture
2.1 Lead Generation
2.2 Lead Acquisition and Distribution
2.3 Marketing & Sales Process Operations
2.4 Communications
2.5 Analytics
3 Optimizing Lead Management
4 Technical Functionality
4.1 Lead Acquisition
4.2 Lead Filtering and Assessment
5 References
6 External links



[edit] Overview
Lead Management is a term used in general business practice to
describe methodologies, systems, and practices designed to generate
new potential business clientele, generally operated through a variety
of marketing techniques. Lead management facilitates a business's
connection between its outgoing consumer advertising and the responses
to that advertising. These processes are designed for business-to-
business and direct-to-consumer strategies. Lead management is in many
cases a precursor to sales management and customer relationship
management. This critical connectivity facilitates business
profitability through the acquisition of new customers, selling to
existing customers, and creating a market brand. This process has also
accurately been referred to as customer acquisition management.

The general principles of lead management create an ordered structure
for managing volumes of business inquiries, frequently termed leads.
The process creates an architecture for organization of data,
distributed across the various stages of a sales process, and across a
distributed sales force. With the advent of the Internet and other
information systems technologies, this process has rapidly become
technology-centric, as businesses practicing lead management
techniques have shifted much of the prior manual workload to
automation systems, though personal interaction with lead inquiries is
still vital to success.

Along with its other related business practices--marketing, brand
development, advertising, and sales--the goal of an effective lead
management initiative is to generate new business revenue, increase
visibility, and improve the general attitudes of potential clients and
the public at large for future business development.

A typical outline of a lead management process might follow the
following steps:

Business engages in a range of advertising media (Lead generation).
Recipients of advertising respond, creating a Customer inquiry, or
lead.
Respondent's information is captured (Inquiry Capture).
Captured information is then filtered to determine validity (Inquiry
filtering)
The filtered leads are then graded and prioritized for potential (Lead
grading)
Leads are then distributed to marketing and/or sales personnel (Lead
distribution).
Leads are contacted for prospecting (Sales contact).
Contacted and uncontacted leads are entered into personal and
automated follow-up processes (Lead nurturing).
End result is a new business sale (Sales result).
While simple in scope, lead (or inquiry) flow process can become
complex as clients, prospective clients, and sales professionals
interact. Interactions and subsequent actions create a variety of
potential outcomes, both productive and counter-productive to business
development. This ever-increasing number of scenarios creates
functional disconnects, in other words, critical opportunities to
mishandle an inquiry that reduces or destroys its potential value.
Appropriate management of these scenarios is the function of lead
management.


[edit] Lead Management Architecture

[edit] Lead Generation
Generating a lead, or lead generation can relate to a myriad of
marketing technologies and methodologies. Regardless of how it is
achieved, however, from an architectural perspective lead generation
is simply the ability to attract the interest of a consumer and
capture enough data to validate and prioritize their interest, then
contact them.

A few examples:

1. Mortgage Lead Generation

LendingTree runs TV advertising that touts that "when banks compete,
you win" and directs you to visit lendingtree.com. After watching this
advertisement, and being depressed that you rent a 300 square-foot
studio apartment, you flip on your computer and go to their website.

Upon reaching the website, you surf around a bit and read some
information about buying a house, and how the mortgage process works
with LendingTree. This convinces you to give it a shot. You click a
link to request information, and fill out a form on their Web site to
provide information about you: name, address, telephone number,
estimated home price, and so on. Once finished, you submit the
information to LendingTree, and your information is immediately
compiled into an electronic lead.

2. White Paper Lead Generation

You are surfing the Internet and you decide there has to be a good way
to make a lot of money on the Internet. So, you go to Google and
search for "make money on the Internet." This search reveals an
interesting link that says, "10 steps to becoming a millionaire using
the Web." Sounds good to you, so you click the link and arrive at a
page with a brief sales pitch for making money on the Web and a brief
web form asking for you name and email in order to download the sacred
PDF white paper with the 10 steps. Once you have filled out the form,
submitted, and received your PDF--again, you are a lead.

3. Infomercial

You're at home, awake late at night due to insomnia, and while
watching TV you see a paid advertisement for the "Sleep Number Bed" by
Select Comfort. Thinking that your old mattress is falling apart, and
one of the likely causes for your insomnia, your call the toll-free
phone number listed in the infomercial to receive more information
about the product being offered. An agent captures your information in
a computer system, and agrees to mail you a brochure discussing the
features and benefits of the Sleep Number Bed. You are now a lead in
the system.


[edit] Lead Acquisition and Distribution
Lead acquisition is the first, and possibly the most critical
potential disconnect in the lead management process. With billions
being spent on advertising, in many cases the value of those
expenditures is reduced because relevant information from responses is
not collected or distributed. The value of this process is tightly
linked to a variety of consumer response theories that highlight the
relevance and responsiveness of the customer experience as being key
ingredients in turning potential customers into actual customers. Once
acquired, the speed, accuracy, and relevance of response can greatly
influence a potential consumer's decision to buy, or not buy a product
or service.

One extremely relevant example of this process is the use of the
Internet, online marketing, and Web analytics for high-level lead
generation. A consumer generally uses the Internet and makes Internet
inquiries for products and services out of a desire for convenience
and efficiency of their time. Consequently, they expect a timely,
relevant response to inquiries made. If the acquisition and
distribution of data collected during during their inquiry is not
effective, the consumer experience will be negative. No response, poor
response, too-early or too late response = negative impact on consumer
attitudes and behavior.

For this particular medium, the lead acquisition architecture
generally consist of a Web form to collect consumer data, a database
to temporarily or persistently store that information for subsequent
distribution, and a software application to distribute the data at
appropriate levels.

The distribution architecture will vary widely depending upon the
objective of the lead generation. Generation for the purpose of
selling the inquiry itself to another organization would typically
include a methodology for selecting one or more buyers and then
transmitting the lead via a variety of potential means, like: XML,
named-value pairs, fax, email, telephone. In the case of leads
generated for an organization's own use it may simply consist of a web
page to render the contents of the lead database or a simple email
action from the Web form itself.


[edit] Marketing & Sales Process Operations
Once the lead information is collected and distributed, it is then
transferred to a marketing and/or sales management department, who
will continue to implement lead management practices in pursuit of
completion of a sale. Established lead management practices should
provide the needed connectivity and accountability between those two
operational units, and when managed properly, enhances the
effectiveness of both operations.

The architectural relationship is much akin to the order carousel in a
short order diner. This carousel is the communication and
accountability between the waiter and the cook. Without this simple
coordination orders would be lost, prepared incorrectly, or prepared
in random order missing the expectations of the customer.

For management teams with a solid foundation in lead management
principles, the process should create increased efficiency and
accountability between marketing and sales activities. As stated
previously, the increasing technological foundation of lead and sales
management practices provides a number of "closed loop" data circuits,
tracking the overall effectiveness of everything from lead generation,
to prioritization, to distribution, to final disposition, and then
back again to re-calibrate the process.

For marketing, this portion of the architecture primarily manages the
analytics of the lead generation, distribution, and disposition. For
sales, the architecture provides a fast, accurate method of
distribution, in addition to improved management and accountability
processes for sales activity.


[edit] Communications
The central hub of the lead management process once the prior
architectures are in place is communication. Effective lead management
principles requires intensive and accurate high-level communication,
both internally within organizations, and externally to the lead
inquiries.

Communications functions should include intelligent sourcing of
inquiry information, and provide appropriate vehicles for overt
contacting methods such as phone, email, or other communication forms.
In addition to overt communication methods, technologies now also now
provide marketing systems the ability to do extensive lead nurturing
activities through automation systems, which often include opt-in
email listings, automated telephone dialing systems, or hard copy
mailing lists to increase visibility, touch on customer need, and
increase brand visibility. In many cases, especially where inquiries
may not be ready to work with businesses immediately, it is crucial to
maintain ongoing nurturing communications that cultivate a lead into a
future sales, and effective lead management practices include these
methods.


[edit] Analytics
The analytics architecture is the last, and once the other
architectures are in place, the most critical piece of an effective
lead management system. This portion of the architecture allows for
the dynamic review and analysis of lead actions, marketing channels,
and sales performance.

For many organizations this information can be vital in assisting
management teams make decisions that improve production, return on
investment, and the overall performance and cost benefits of their
marketing and sales strategies.


[edit] Optimizing Lead Management
As larger vendors work with partner organizations such as distributors
(see distribution (business)), resellers, brokers and other channel
partners, those vendors often distribute leads to their respective
partners to provide a local contact to those prospects and also 'feed'
partners with new business opportunities. Today there are two major
methods for distributing sales leads to partners: Push or Pull.

PUSH The push method sends leads to specific partners assuming that
those partners will follow up and work on those leads. The challenge
with 'push' is the fact that often the local sales people may not be
able to react immediately for various reasons: not available, busy, on
vacation... Many large vendors report disappointment when asked about
their lead follow-up rate through partners after the leads where
pushed out to those partners.

Pull The pull method was invented and patented by a German Engineer,
Axel Schultze, who was frustrated with the lead follow up results of
the push method and decided to let the available and motivated sales
people 'pull' leads from an online available system. Patent was
granted by the US Patent Office in May 2006. The pull method became
widely accepted in the high tech industry where thousands of resellers
from companies including Avaya, Nortel, Juniper and others distributed
leads that way. The PULL Method became superior over the PUSH method,
and lead closure rates grew on average by 300% as white papers from
BlueRoads indicate.


[edit] Technical Functionality

[edit] Lead Acquisition
The lead acquisition functionality should allow for the simple and
efficient acquisition of lead data into the lead management system.
The acquisition functions must be able to support a variety of
marketing channels and methods of capturing data. Some examples
include:

Electronic Data Transfer
This acquisition function may include the transfer of discrete lead
data via technologies like name-value pairs, XML, RSS, HTTP POST, and
FTP. These technologies can be used in conjunction with an
organization's own website or third party lead provider. Often lead
providers will deliver leads via a standard email. These leads can be
electronically captured by parsing the email and then submitting the
lead using one of the methods described above.

Batch Imports
This acquisition function may include imports of multiple leads' data
via technologies like Microsoft Excel, CSV, or other formatted batch
data values. These technologies can be used to acquire leads that have
been stored in other systems, assembled from lists, or other volume
sources.

Quick Apply Web Forms
This acquisition function may include Web landing pages or sales
interfaces. This technology can be used to acquire discrete lead data
via manual input into an application-type form.


[edit] Lead Filtering and Assessment
Most lead management systems will have some intelligent methodology
for filtering and assessing lead data into useful categorizations.
There are a myriad of ways to accomplish this process and some of them
may be specific to industries. The following is a suggested list of
possible functions:

Data verification (i.e., telephone numbers, zip codes, address
scrubbing)
Fraud screening
Data appending (e.g., appending third-party data such as credit,
preferences, purchase history)
Grading
Prioritization

[edit] References
Lead Generation for the Complex Sale (ISBN 0-07-145897-2)
Managing Sales Leads: How To Turn Every Prospect Into A Customer (ISBN
84423-3599-7)
Managing Sales Leads: Turning Cold Prospects Into Hot Customers (ISBN
0-324-20546-5) (ISBN 978-0-324-20546-6)
Sales & Marketing 365 (ISBN 0-9704515-5-5)
Shopper, Buyer, and Consumer Behavior (ISBN 1-931442-08-8)

[edit] External links
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_management"
Categories: Sales | Marketing | Personal selling
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This page was last modified on 15 July 2008, at 03:11. All text is
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