Lead management - Involve before you start!

A recent study from the Sales Lead Management Association (SLMA)  shows that many companies are ignoring their sales lead management.

Their 2nd annual Sales Lead Management Study, conducted with 144 businesses in Southern California, revealed the following results:

• 68.8% don’t qualify leads before sending them to their sales teams
• 52.4% have no formal process for compiling sales forecast reports
• 82.8% don’t track ROI for lead generation investments
• 55% rated low satisfaction with their SFA/CRM system, at 5 or less on a 10-point scale
• 52.1% use no SFA/CRM system to track the lead process

My View:  The gap between sales & marketing departments has only grown over the years.Sales has had a siloed process in enterprises and in my experience getting sales to see & appreciate good quality leads is always big problem. On the other hand, I have always found, lack of understanding what a good lead is the problem of most lead generation programs. Often there is a mix of science, logic and an intuitive feeling in the salesperson's mind which a software or a process cannot replicate. But, my belief is that right at the inception of a lead generation program, you need to have the buy-in of the sales team. The lead generation team must be 'considered' a part of the sales team and may be that's the reason there's a term coined as 'inside sales'! Nevertheless, the lead generation team, the software and the process must be seamlessly integrated to succeed. It has to start before the program is implemented and announced. That's the key to its success.

Comments

[Krishna Mony]

To avoid this impasse, enterprises overlay lead generation as an integral part of executive sales team. The silos just morph from LG to sales execution and back unless where the product lines are so diverse(as in GE), where each function needs separate silos.

[Travis Turner]

To avoid costly situations you need to be aware of what you need in order to be effective. Once you have an idea of what you are looking for you need to then take action to find the appropriate CRM. The problem that alot of companies face is that they do not track there ROI. Many companies spend a significant amount of money on SaaS or ASP and fail to realize the benefits from the service and eventually drop the service because they feel that it is costing them too much money. What they overlooked was the fact that the increase to their ROI was in a large way do to the fact that they implemented the CRM.