Lead Management is a term used in general business practice to describe methodologies, systems, and practices designed to generate new potential business clientele, generally operated through a variety of marketing techniques. Lead management facilitates a business's connection between its outgoing consumer 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 (Inquiry Capture).
- Captured information is then filtered to determine validity (Inquiry filtering)
- The filtered leads are then graded and prioritized for potential (Lead grading)
- 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 result).
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.
Lead Management Architecture
Lead Generation
Generating a lead, or lead generation can relate to a myriad of marketing technologies and methodologies. Regardless of how it is achieved, however, from an architectural perspective lead generation is simply the ability to attract the interest of a consumer and capture enough data to validate and prioritize their interest, then contact them.
A few examples:
1. Mortgage Lead Generation
LendingTree runs TV advertising that touts that "when banks compete, you win" and directs you to visit lendingtree.com. After watching this advertisement, and being depressed that you rent a 300-square-foot (28 m 2 ) studio apartment, you flip on your computer and go to their website.
Upon reaching the website, you surf around a bit and read some information about buying a house, and how the mortgage process works with LendingTree. This convinces you to give it a shot. You click a link to request information, and fill out a form on their Web site to provide information about you: name, address, telephone number, estimated home price, and so on. Once finished, you submit the information to LendingTree, and your information is immediately compiled into an electronic lead.
2. White Paper Lead Generation
You are surfing the Internet and you decide there has to be a good way to make a lot of money on the Internet. So, you go to Google and search for "make money on the Internet." This search reveals an interesting link that says, "10 steps to becoming a millionaire using the Web." Sounds good to you, so you click the link and arrive at a page with a brief sales pitch for making money on the Web and a brief web form asking for you name and email in order to download the sacred PDF white paper with the 10 steps. Once you have filled out the form, submitted, and received your PDF—again, you are a lead.
3. Infomercial
You're at home, awake late at night due to insomnia, and while watching TV you see a paid advertisement for the "Sleep Number Bed" by Select Comfort. Thinking that your old mattress is falling apart, and one of the likely causes for your insomnia, your call the toll-free phone number listed in the infomercial to receive more information about the product being offered. An agent captures your information in a computer system, and agrees to mail you a brochure discussing the features and benefits of the Sleep Number Bed. You are now a lead in the system.
Lead acquisition and distribution
Lead acquisition is the first, and possibly the most critical potential disconnect in the lead management process. With billions being spent on advertising expenditures, in many cases the value of those expenditures is reduced because relevant information from responses is not collected or distributed. The value of this process is tightly linked to a variety of consumer response theories that highlight the relevance and responsiveness of the customer experience as being key ingredients in turning potential customers into actual customers. Once acquired, the speed, accuracy, and relevance of response can greatly influence a potential consumer's decision to buy, or not buy, a product or service.
One extremely relevant example of this process is the use of the Internet, online marketing, and Web analytics for high-level lead generation. A consumer generally uses the Internet and makes Internet inquiries for products and services out of a desire for convenience and efficiency of their time. Consequently, they expect a timely, relevant response to inquiries made. If the acquisition and distribution of data collected during their inquiry is not effective, the consumer experience will be negative. No response, poor response, too-early or too late response equals negative impact on consumer attitudes and behavior.
For this particular medium, the lead acquisition architecture generally consists of a Web form to collect consumer data, a database to temporarily or persistently store that information for subsequent distribution, and a software application to distribute the data at appropriate levels.
The distribution architecture will vary widely depending upon the objective of the lead generation. Generation for the purpose of selling the inquiry itself to another organization would typically include a methodology for selecting one or more buyers and then transmitting the lead via a variety of potential means, like: XML, named-value pairs, fax, email, telephone. In the case of leads generated for an organization's own use it may simply consist of a web page to render the contents of the lead database or a simple email action from the Web form itself.
Marketing & Sales Process Operations
Once the lead information is collected and distributed, it is then transferred to a marketing and/or sales management department, who will continue to implement lead management practices in pursuit of completion of a sale. Established lead management practices should provide the needed connectivity and accountability between those two operational units, and when managed properly, enhances the effectiveness of both operations.
The architectural relationship is much akin to the order carousel in a short order diner. This carousel is the communication and accountability between the waiter and the cook. Without this simple coordination orders would be lost, prepared incorrectly, or prepared in random order missing the expectations of the customer.
For management teams with a solid foundation in lead management principles, the process should create increased efficiency and accountability between marketing and sales activities. As stated previously, the increasing technological foundation of lead and sales management practices provides a number of "closed loop" data circuits, tracking the overall effectiveness of everything from lead generation, to prioritization, to distribution, to final disposition, and then back again to re-calibrate the process.
For marketing, this portion of the architecture primarily manages the analytics of the lead generation, distribution, and disposition. For sales, the architecture provides a fast, accurate method of distribution, in addition to improved management and accountability processes for sales activity.
Communications
The central hub of the lead management process once the prior architectures are in place is communication. Effective lead management principles requires intensive and accurate high-le
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