Manila Philippines Call Centre Information
If you’re not tracking your leads, then who is?
Sales leads are the life blood of every IT organisations whether it is a corporate software giant or a one man band - If a company ceases to produce new leads, then it faces stormy weather ahead. However, setting up an efficient and effective lead generation system is by no means the end of the story. Tracking leads is just as important but is continually falling through the gaps.
A staggeringly high percentage of organisations are wasting perfectly good new business opportunities by failing to implement lead tracking policies. Jamie Vaughan, Managing Director V2 Communications, argues that marketing investment in lead generation is a waste of money if organisations continue to let new leads go un-noticed and ignored.
Lead Generation Investment is Going to Waste
Most organisations will a have a tried and tested format for lead generation whether it be advertising, direct marketing, PR or telemarketing. Investment in generating new business is consistently on the rise and the allocation of marketing budget to facilitate this continues to be a heavy burden on profits. But ultimately the cost of ensuring sales teams have a healthy pipeline of leads to follow up is worthwhile and wise investment. Or is it?
What if companies are producing high numbers of hot, quality, well qualified leads but they are not being followed up quickly enough by the sales team or worse still they are not being followed up at all? Research by Gartner indicates that a staggering 70% of leads generated are never followed up! In an increasingly competitive and congested marketplace IT vendors can ill afford to pass up the opportunity for new business.
Furthermore lead tracking has additional benefits as it can be used by the marketing department to measure the accuracy of a marketing campaign, determining return on investment and helping with the allocation of budget to future projects. Not only are potential sales being lost but the opportunity to monitor marketing spend is being wasted. Why spend £100K on an expensive piece of DM not to know what the effectiveness was. Surely it’s better to spend £85K on the DM and £15K on tracking and qualification to asses how effective the activity was – this will hep to ensure the effectiveness of future marketing spend.
Investment in lead generation techniques is being wasted… and it’s criminal.
The break down of the sales cycle is all the more galling when considered in relation to the practices put in place by many organisations to ensure that leads are of a high quality. The high uptake of sophisticated CRM software, outsourced professional telemarketing services and the myriad of other solutions means that the days of sales teams tracking back and forth across the country chasing after the proverbial wild goose are gone.
So why is it that professional, experienced sales managers are letting this happen? There are a number of reasons. In some situations, key decision makers are simply naïve to the services and technologies that are available to manage lead tracking. Often they think that the job is complete once a lead has been identified and live in the blissfully ignorant belief that once passed to the sales team it will be jumped on and actioned with verve and vigour by a hungry sales force. But the reality is very different; often a hot lead will be passed from department to department, caught in paper work and bureaucracy and unopened for days slowly getting colder and colder.
This is by no means a direct attack on the sales team itself. Indeed many sales teams are already over-run by potential leads – often as a result of increased lead generation activity. The same Gartner report supports this view claiming that, often the improvements in lead generation are at the expense of better lead management and cause an overabundance of leads that cannot be handled by current resources and sales capacity.* Supporting lead generation by implementing lead tracking is a logical and proportionately inexpensive step to take. Lead tracking can support sales teams and help them to prioritise opportunities and flag up potential leads that have not been actioned. It can also give sales directors greater visibility of performance across their sales team.
Often, the larger the organisation is, the greater the chance of sales leads being lost in the ‘corporate machine’. Poor communication between key individuals and poorly implemented processes mean that in some large organisations the time between a sales lead being identified and then followed up can be as long as three weeks as a lead works its way from new business to pre sales and ultimately to the sales team.
This is obviously unacceptable and does not just pose an immediate threat to the bottom line through a missed sale but also proves damaging to business reputation in the long term. Potential customers will have little inclination to invest heavily in software or services produced by a company who cannot be bothered or are too disorganised to follow up a lead in a timely fashion.
The problem of lead tracking is further exacerbated when applied to the channel. If a company struggles to track the attendance and follow up of leads within its own internal sales team, how can it possibly ensure that an extended network of partners, distributors and resellers are maximising their opportunities? Organisations spend millions of pounds per year marketing their brand, producing direct mail and investing in telemarketing only for leads to get ‘chucked’ down the channel with fingers crossed that partners are going to react quickly, efficiently and effectively to close deals. In reality we all know that doesn’t always happen.
When a lead comes in raw it is usually categorised and qualified based on size, budget and time scales and then directed to the appropriate sales team or reseller based on market share, location etc. Implementing lead tracking software at this stage is a step in the right direction. The software will track the progression of a lead producing email flags to ascertain what stage the deal is at and will provide complete visibility to both the sales team and sales manager.
However, the success of the software will only as good as the ‘buy-in’ from the sales team. If there are 50 enabled users but only 49 can actually be bothered to use the technology then the system will fail. A fully integrated lead tracking solution will close the sales loop by utilising third party telemarketing lead generation specialists. Follow-up calls from an external ‘real person’ ensure that contact is made with the sales team to monitor the progression of a lead. Greater feedback regarding the quality of leads can also be gained as over time telemarketers build a rapport with the sales team and help to ensure that opportunities and deadlines are met.
Investment in lead generation practices and techniques are being undermined and compromised by the simple failure to monitor and track the leads to a logical conclusion
Organisations need to reconsider their spend on marketing and lead generation and introduce tracking procedures. They need to prioritise quality over quantity and ensure that efforts are not being wasted. A simple re-evaluation of processes and procedures and the introduction of third party tracking will result in significant advances and better efficiency within the sales department.
| receive our free newsletter |
2006, www.call-centres.com