Define Your Process

When I think about best practices in lead management, the first thing that comes to mind is process. A well documented process that everyone in your organization clearly understands and abides by is the key to success for any company trying to streamline lead management. Since this is usually the point of hand off between marketing and sales, it’s important that both teams are involved in defining the process, what the feedback mechanism is, and what the measure of success is.

Some basic questions to get you started in defining your process:

What is a lead?
I know this may seem like a silly question, but it’s a great first place to start. Will everything that enters your CRM system be considered a lead and passed over to sales? In some instances this may be the right way to go, especially if your sales team has the bandwidth and their compensation structure incites them to follow up on marketing leads.  But keep in mind, sending over all of your  marketing generated leads could overwhelm your sales organization and if a large number of these leads don’t pan out, it could leave a bad impression and keep sales from following up on future leads.

How many times will sales try to reach a marketing lead?
This could vary depending on the type of lead. For example, whitepaper leads may only warrant 1 touch from sales but if a lead engages in a product demo, we might require 3 touches. Whatever you decide, the # of required touch points should be documented and if it varies by type of lead be sure you are capturing each type on the lead record.

How will sales “pass back” a lead to marketing?
Just because a lead isn’t ready for prime time when its generated doesn’t mean it is lost forever. Once your sales team has determined a lead isn’t qualified what is the process for passing it back? An easy way to do this is create a custom lead status value of "marketing" or "archived" that indicates marketing can continue to cultivate the lead until it is ready again for sales.

What is a qualified lead?
This is typically the key metric marketers use to determine the success of a program and where future budget dollars should be allocated so its important to be consistent across your organization as to when a lead is qualified and how. This could be as simple as creating an opportunity in Salesforce once a first meeting has been booked or when budget has been identified.

I can’t stress enough the importance of documenting your process once it has been defined. It will help you identify any gaps in your process and it’s a great tool to get your entire company on the same page. Check out an example posted earlier on successforce here:
http://blogs.salesforce.com/processes/2006/07/sales_process_m.html

Learn more about how Salesforce can optimize the flow of Sales Leads, or view the Lead Management functionality within Salesforce Marketing, our Marketing Automation SaaS product. Salesforce.com - the world's favorite CRM Software as a Service.