You invest time, effort and budget to generates sales leads for your products and services. But your leads are only as good as your company’s ability to respond appropriately and track them through the sales process.

Research studies show that up to an astounding 80% of leads are ignored, lost or discarded. That translates to a lot of wasted resources. Some leads may be ignored or discarded by the sales team because your target customer is not properly defined or marketing is not generating the right sales lead. If this is your situation, marketing and sales must work together to create profiles of target customers and agree upon a definition of exactly what constitutes a sales leads. Part of the definition might include the prospect’s role in their organization, authority in the buying process, stage of buying process, budget and other attributes. 

Yet even if you have a clear definition of a good sales lead and are generating leads through marketing programs, the process of managing sales leads - even the best leads - might be flawed, leading to lost opportunity, wasted resources, and dissatisfaction among your sales and marketing teams.

To make the most of your lead generation efforts and to give you the best opportunity to convert leads into customers, you must define and stick to a lead management process. A lead management process will:

• Place someone in charge of lead management - Someone who has authority and influence with both sales and marketing departments should be responsible for lead management. You make someone accountable and suddenly the job gets done.
• Provide guidelines for responding to leads - Once leads come in, you need to respond to them quickly and appropriately. Today, many leads are generated on the Web, which means your prospects are on Internet time. They expect a response within 24 hours and may forget about you and move on to a competitor if they don’t hear from your company in that timeframe.
• Clearly indicate how to distribute sales leads - Some companies distribute leads geographically based on territory, others use distributors for some or all leads, others give only highly-qualified leads to sales and the others go to marketing. Every company is different and there is no right or wrong way. Just make sure you know who gets what lead.
• Let you know the status of leads at all times - Leads should be entered into a central repository that enables you to track them through the sales cycle. It could be a simple spreadsheet with a few columns added to track the nature and status of leads, or a sophisticated database-driven CRM system. Either way, whoever touches leads should have access to the tracking system to update information on leads. By tracking leads you will be able to determine which marketing programs perform.
• Continue nurturing leads that are not ready to buy - The majority of leads you generate are not ready to make an immediate purchase. Do not discard or ignore these leads! Long term leads represent significant sales opportunity down the road - as long as they keep your company in mind and remember to engage again when ready to buy. Marketing should take control of these leads and “nurture” them by sending relevant information and offers: keep them interested with white papers, articles, product announcements, Webinar invitations and more. There’s a high likelihood that someday these prospects will raise their hands again, at which point they will be a hot lead ready for your sales team.