What is Lead Management? 
Category:  Knowledge Base 
Group:  Best Practices 

Lead Management is a term used in general business practice to describe methodologies, systems, and practices designed to generate new potential business, generally operated through a variety of marketing techniques. Lead management facilitates a business's connection between its advertising and the responses to that advertising. These processes are designed for business-to-business and direct-to-consumer strategies. Lead management is in many cases a precursor to sales management and customer relationship management. This critical connectivity facilitates business profitability through the acquisition of new customers, selling to existing customers, and creating a market brand. This process has also accurately been referred to as customer acquisition management.

The general principles of lead management create an ordered structure for managing volumes of business inquiries, frequently termed leads. The process creates an architecture for organization of data, distributed across the various stages of a sales process, and across a distributed sales force. With the advent of the Internet and other information systems technologies, this process has rapidly become technology-centric, as businesses practicing lead management techniques have shifted much of the prior manual workload to automation systems, though personal interaction with lead inquiries is still vital to success.
Along with its other related business practices--marketing, brand development, advertising, and sales--the goal of an effective lead management initiative is to generate new business revenue, increase visibility, and improve the general attitudes of potential clients and the public at large for future business development.

A typical outline of a lead management process might follow the following steps:

• Business engages in a range of advertising media (Lead generation).
• Recipients of advertising respond, creating a Customer inquiry, or lead.
• Respondent's information is captured (Contact Capture).
• Captured information is then filtered to determine validity (Inquiry filtering)
• The filtered leads are then graded and prioritized for potential (Lead scoring)
• Leads are then distributed to marketing and/or sales personnel (Lead distribution).
• Leads are contacted for prospecting (Sales contact).
• Contacted and uncontacted leads are entered into personal and automated follow-up processes (Lead nurturing).
• End result is a new business sale (Sales Conversion).

While simple in scope, lead (or inquiry) flow process can become complex as clients, prospective clients, and sales professionals interact. Interactions and subsequent actions create a variety of potential outcomes, both productive and counter-productive to business development. This ever-increasing number of scenarios creates functional disconnects, in other words, critical opportunities to mishandle an inquiry that reduces or destroys its potential value. Appropriate management of these scenarios is the function of lead management.
 

(Publish Dt) 10/23/2010
Buzz: Lead Management,lead management process,lead scoring,customer relationship management,CRM,Lead distribution,Sales Conversion

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