Lead Management: What is a lead and how to qualify leads?

December 8, 2006 – 6:32 am

Brian Carroll, CEO of InTouch, Inc. and author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale (McGraw-Hill 2006) maintains a blog for B2B Lead Generation. He is an expert in B2B marketing, lead generation and complex sales. He wrote an interesting article in the Target Magazine which talks about “What’s a Lead?”. In a post on his widely read blog, Jim Berkowitz, another leading CRM expert explains the salient points of Brian’s article:

  • The number one issue for most CEOs and marketers is lead generation - getting more leads to their sales team. The number one desire for salespeople, however, is more selling time with sales-ready opportunities
  • Numerous lead qualification programs have shown that as little as 5 percent to 15 percent of all inquiries are truly sales-ready opportunities
  • The biggest mistake made by marketers is to give mere inquiries to a salesperson
  • There is a systematic process for successful qualification that includes specific steps
    1. Define and Agree On What the Word “Lead” Means
    2. Consolidate and Centralize Your Prospect Information
    3. Pick Up the Phone and Qualify Prospective Leads
    4. Handing Off Leads to Sales
    5. Closing the Loop
  • More Is Not Better - Instead of concentrating on generating more leads, companies need to do a better job managing and qualifying the leads (or more likely the inquiries) they already have
  • Effective lead qualification is key to building a reliable sales pipeline

On2Biz is an ideal tool for helping you keep track of your leads. It provides a consolidated view of all leads in your pipeline. You can create a standard form for lead qualification consisting of various questions that your tele-sales team can ask before forwarding the lead to the field sales staff. It helps you to measure the leads pipeline through various stages of the sales cycle, and measure the effectiveness of lead conversion.

For hands-on trial of how On2Biz can help you to manage your lead processing, apply for an evaluation account now.

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