Many organizations struggle with lead nurturing and lead conversion. Large enterprises often have complex layers managing prospects as they transverse through your customer journey. Marketing handles the initial nurture, then inside sales takes control once the lead scores high enough (or meets enough criteria), and finally the account executives close the deal.
That's all well and good for large organizations with the resources to hire large staff, but what about small and medium sized companies? When you wear multiple hats in a leaner enterprise, what is the best way to handle a lead?
Three things you should Never do...
- Don't email just for the sake of emailing. Your leads are people. Every day, they are bombarded both personally and at work with someone trying to sell them something. Be kind. Respect their time. Try to make your communications personal, but if that isn't something you can do with your resources, always offer your leads something of value in your message. If you don't have anything to say, don't hit send!
- Don't focus on conversion volume. While the ultimate goal is to convert a lead into an opportunity, you want your sales team to focus on real opportunities. If your criteria for qualifying leads is too broad, your sales people will be juggling too many deals that aren't actually opportunities. You'll waste their time, your time, and drive down your close rates. Who wants that?
- Don't ask for a lead's life story. In Salesforce, we can put literally hundreds of fields on a page layout, all juicy bits of data on a prospect that you can dive into, parse, and otherwise analyze until the cows come home. But there is such a thing as information overload. For one, the more you ask a prospect to enter, the less likely they are to engage. Keep required fields on lead forms to a minimum, and you'll get more leads overall. Second, swamping your page layouts with a ton of fields decreases usability for your actual users because they can't find the data they need to effectively nurture and convert their leads. Save the data capture for the opportunity when your prospect is willing to do business, or better yet, capture even more information once you have their business so you can start building powerful customer profiles.
And the things you should Always do...
Map out your process. This is incredibly important, but you might be surprised how many companies don't actually take the time to do this. Whenever you design a process, it's critical to actually visualize it first to understand its flow and function. It also creates a guideline for accurate reporting, flows, and data points when you're ready to implement. Without a visual framework, you'll find your lead process (or any process for that matter) becomes an unwieldy Frankenstein monster of quick fixes and patchwork updates.
Define your conversion criteria. Many organizations use BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline) for their conversion criteria, but for your business, maybe that doesn't quite work. Instead, ask yourself what exactly constitutes an opportunity for your company. For example in my organization, an opportunity is an official request for proposals. Once you've defined the entry point for an opportunity, now you can work back from there and create criteria your prospect must meet before that opportunity becomes active. In my example, we would also ask if that prospect has the authority to sigh a contract, if our offices can actually service them, and whether or not they have the budget to afford us.
Set a cadence. People are mostly creatures of habit, and you should be like most people. Be cognizant about what your customer wants. Are they looking for a deal and expect a daily email with products you have on sale? Is this a longer sales cycle and your prospects would send you to the junk folder if you emailed them more than once a week? Whatever your industry, set a cadence that's respectful in a way your customer expects.
Score leads for data integrity. Keeping your data clean is critical for building that relationship because a) dirty data makes your messaging miss the mark, and b) dirty data makes reporting useless. Create validation rules, required fields, pick lists, and other types of fields that drive your users to enter data cleanly. Your prospects will appreciate not seeing their names screamed at them in all caps and your bosses will appreciate the accurate reports.
Score leads on their level of interest. Marketing automation software like Pardot scores leads on their level of interaction with you. You can assign point values to different levels of interaction, giving, say, 5 points to a lead who clicked on a page and 40 points to a lead who filled out a form. This level of lead scoring allows you to quickly report on prospects taking an active interest in your company and can empower your sales and marketing teams to take a more active approach with prospects who have higher scores.
Be patient. Sometimes, leads will zoom through the lead lifecycle straight into an opportunity, but many times, they won't. They'll linger in the lead stage until they meet the criteria you've defined. Be patient and consistent with your communications. Use analytics to measure the performance of your messaging and adjust accordingly to make sure you're achieving your industry average open and click through rates. On average, our organization attempts more than nine communications before a lead responds, so it's critical that we maintain our messaging so as not to lose business. Be patient. Be consistent. In the end, it pays.
These are just a few (but very critical) items to keep in mind as you build out your CRM lead process. For more helpful information about Salesforce and lead management, don't forget to regularly check www.theforcefactory.com for new articles and information.