Carl Gould – Processes to Approach a Lead

When thinking about processes to approach a lead, the first thing that should be made clear is what exactly ‘lead’ is.Lead is the person that is interested in buying your product or using your services. They are very important for any business, so converting leads to customers is what every business seeks to do. If you are approaching your leads in a structured, strategic and systematic way, you can increase the number of leads and their conversion rate into customers.

The following are some steps and processes which you should follow in order to approach a lead. Focus on the leads you think are right for your business and determine what will work best for your business.
• Synchronize marketing with sales. These two parts must be aligned closely in order to achieve best results. Many businesses today are using a couple of steps for processing leads. Marketing helps in increasing leads, while sales qualify and convert the leads. In order to reach best results start by mapping out the sales process in your company, define clear criteria between marketing and sales, and establish metrics for success up front.
• Get the attention of more leads. Capturing more leads will lead towards increased business. In order to get leads, you can use web campaigns, such as search engine marketing or using social media platforms. These two are some of the most successful strategies for capturing leads. You can also import leads from e-mail applications or spreadsheets, or enter leads manually. Entering leads manually works best for approaching individual leads.
• Data should be always kept clean. Some of the ways for keeping your data clean include regular cleaning of your leads and using validation rules.
• As soon as you get a lot of leads you have to start thinking about ways how to get the most out of them. Each lead has different quality, so prioritize them in a way in which the hottest leads will come first. You can prioritize leads with lead scoring, which is using a point system for assigning different values to characteristics that are aligned with the successful sales. You can then categorize scored leads into different priority levels and final step is to use assignment rules to route leads.
• In order for you to improve the number of leads, you have to learn which marketing ways and tools are giving you best results. Are webinars, e-mail campaigns or Google campaigns giving best results? You can find out more about that if you start identifying and tracking sources. Find out where you get most of the leads. You can also use the lead history report in order to analyze different things. This report can tie the lead criteria such as the annual revenue, lead source, opportunity amounts, and industry, giving you the power to separate the revenues for different leads. Another thing which you can do is use campaigns to track the success of different lead-generation efforts, and also use reports and dashboards to get a clearer view of the entire sales process.