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Managing the flow of leads coming into your business and through to your sales agents is important.
This process needs to be streamlined, efficient and effective. If it isn’t, you run the risk of missing out on lucrative opportunities or inadvertently sending business to your competitors.
Implementing a leads management system is key to boosting the possibility of converting potential customers into sales. However, the steps to put this process in place require some thought.
Assessment
First you need to look at the volume of leads coming into your business and the process you currently have in place for dealing with them. This helps you to identify if a lead management system is something you actually need to implement right now, or if you need to set a growth projection to decide when.
If you already know that you need to implement a lead management system, then you should explore your options.
This includes assessing where effective lead management systems can benefit your sales process. It might be that you need a comprehensive system to log, assess, filter and track opportunities. Or it might be that while your business is developing and expanding its lead generation potential, you only really stand to benefit from a smaller part of what these systems can deliver.
Proper assessment of your needs is crucial. Not only does it help you to decide whether or not you need a lead management system, but it also helps you gauge the amount of time, budget and staff training you need to properly make use of it.
Adaptation and training
Implementing a leads management system can involve a number of changes to your current processes and practices.
Your staff might currently be using manual processes to manage leads or making use of an outdated, or disjointed, set of systems.
You might be looking at methods to bring everything into one centralised system, provide better control, and ensure that you aren’t losing out on potential opportunities.
To implement sales lead management systems means staff will require training on how to use it, and how its functionality will streamline the way they work. Training could be done prior to launch, and involve giving your team detailed guidance on what the new system does. This might result in changing processes you’ve had in place for years. So it’s important to ensure staff have plenty of time to learn and change their working style, in order to use the new system effectively.
A new lead management system might also suddenly change some of your staff’s general roles. Automated processes might mean some tasks are removed, for instance, meaning staff spend less time recording basic information and more time focussed on customers. This might mean that staff need to undertake sales training to ensure they maximise their ability to convert potential customers into sales.
Then, once the new system is live, help and support might be needed for those staff struggling with teething issues and the process of implement sales lead management.
System launch
You should decide how your new system is going to be put in place. There are a couple of ways this can be done:
- A phased rollout would see different elements of a system introduced gradually into your business. This approach gives staff time to learn and become accustomed to individual elements of your new lead management process. In turn, this can help them become more efficient and confident with its use over time.
- The other alternative is to put the system in place on a set day. This gives you a deadline to get everything figured out, in terms of training and changing strategy, and provides an immediate switchover to the new system.
Keep in mind that you should work closely with your platform provider to ensure that your launch goes smoothly. In doing this you should also ensure you minimise disruption to your business and avoid losing out on potential enquiries during the changeover.
Helping you and your team succeed with sales lead tracking
Using sales lead tracking can benefit you and your contact or call centre team in many ways – from helping you determine where leads are in the sales funnel, to giving your staff the right information to know how best to follow one up. When considering sales lead tracking, it’s wise to use tools and software that can make the process as effective as possible.
This is where FLG can help. We provide a tool set that can:
- Use powerful workflows to automate your sales processes
- Process your leads efficiently to help follow up and successfully close more sales
- Effectively integrate with other software platforms, such as Campaign Monitor and MailChimp
If you’d like to learn more about how FLG can help with your lead management, please visit our Marketing Automation page.
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