We’re always looking for some magic to make sales drop into our laps. I am here to reveal the silver bullet–it’s lead management. Marketing folks have been using similar concepts for years. If you stay top of mine and you continually reinforce your emotional value message customers will respond. Sales management is your tool to produce the same effect. Let’s explore how it works.

Managing Sales

The key to any sales force automation software or system is centralizing the management of you prospects and automating sales activities when possible. Effectively creating sales force automation can be broken down into six basic parts: customer capture, priority, distribution, nurturing, tracking, and analysis.

Lead Capture

This is probably one of the riskiest moments in managing the sales inquiry process, yet the most overlooked. It is in this moment of excitement in receiving an inquiry or referral that we are most careless. The simple ability to capture from Web inquiries, import from spreadsheets, attach email references, or easy data entry can be the difference between a sale and a sticky note being mistakenly tossed in the waste basket.

Prioritization

Once you begin to centralize your sales activity data you will begin to notice trends and indicators. This valuable insight can begin to be dialed back into your software as prioritization and scoring. Determining propensity to close becomes a key value proposition of any sales software.

Lead Distribution

Getting customers to the right person or the right place can shorten sales cycles. Again, the use of centralized sales force automation gives you easy visibility into who closes what customers the best, and automate the routing of those successes. Likewise, you can determine where the best place to deliver that inquiry. Is it an email alert or a text message to the sales person’s cell phone.

Lead Nurturing

Too many customer inquiries are discounted after the first 15-30 days. Customers don’t buy for a myriad of reasons and most have to do with timing, not intent. If you have a opt-in, direct inquiry, or referral the customer had some level of intent. There lack of buying in the short-term is probably time dependent, and the objections that cures (i.e., budget, buy-in, influence, priority), not motivation.

Using CRM to design a nurturing program can turn cold or non-responsive inquiries into an automated pipeline. Nurturing prospects is a great way to stay top of mind and create an existing database of future customers.

Lead Tracking

Reporting is the critical feedback loop to optimize customer capture, priority, distribution, and nurturing. Your sales software should allow you to easily mark or tag each customer record with a discrete status. This will allow you to follow all of your prospects through their complete life cycle.

Sales Analysis

Leveraging all of the features and advantages of a centralized sales CRM software comes to light in your sales analysis. Looking for best practices and preventing lost opportunities is the best value from any database of sales activities.

Sales management software is the easiest way to streamline, grow, and maximize your opportunities.

Bill Rice is a leading authority on lead management and the lead generation industry. He is a frequent writer, sharing insights on sales at BetterCloser.com, providing commentary on the lead generation market at LeadMarketwatch.com and speaker, featured at venues like Leads2007, LeadsCon, Ohio MBA, and Online Lead Quality Summit.

Tags: crm, lead capture, lead management software, lead management system, lead nurturing, lead management

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