Marketing works hard to build market awareness, make business developments and new products visible to customers, and manage the external communications programs so critical to building a successful company. One of the difficult problems the management team struggles with is making sure the leads that marketing identifies get handled efficiently and turned into new business opportunities and, ultimately, new orders and revenue. Our customers get leads from a wide variety of sources, including rep/distributor registrations, website leads, tradeshows, online campaigns, print advertising, calls, web advertising, social media activities and referrals, etc.
Knowing what source works, and what does not, is important not only in allocating marketing dollars, but also in measuring the effectiveness of different marketing messages.
The typical measurements of web hits, clicks, and business cards from trade shows, are all numbers of times customers touch your company. But using just the number of these interactions is not a very good metric to identify the business value of these interactions. Sometimes the web hits or clicks are competitors, students, hobbyists or other low-value leads.
The trick is to capture all the leads that come into the company and
Do an evaluation of potential value
Steer the leads to the right part of the team for follow up, and
Track what happens after the process starts
Did sales contact them? How long did it take to get back to them? Was there a potential opportunity? Did it turn into new business?
Your lead system should be able to show you all these metrics for it to be an effective lead management process and solution.
The NEHANET Lead Management module provides an excellent way to track and manage leads and, among other things, to assign a Lead Source to each lead to keep track of its origin. The NEHANET Rules Engine helps propagate this information out to the Contact and Opportunity associated with the leads; and furthermore, out to the Orders that are associated with this lead (and while that is a topic in and of itself, it is worth highlighting that NEHANET has a strong order-to-opportunity reconciliation mechanism that does a good deal of auto-reconciliation, thereby reducing the burden on the users).
Running reports and gaining visibility into what orders tie to what lead sources, therefore, becomes information that is just a few clicks away. Now you can make sure you are engaging with good leads, aware of what marketing programs drive new business most effectively, and investing in programs or activities that give you the most bang for the buck. NEHANET makes it all work seamlessly with the current sales process and drives new customer engagements as a result of all the marketing activities you plan over the next year.
A perfect plan and a vision.
For a limited time, ManufacturerCRM is offering a FREE Gap Analysis! Enter your information below for industry-specific solutions built for your business.
Sign-up now for a 30 day Free Trial!
The post Are You Evaluating Leads Effectively? appeared first on NEHANET Corporation.