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What are the top tips for creating a lead management strategy?
Please list, in detail, the top 3 tips for creating a lead management strategy. High quality contributions will be considered for an upcoming report on lead management, and will receive significant promotion on the Focus network.
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5 Answers
1. Know Who Your Leads Are
Oftentimes marketing bases many decisions on market research dependent primarily on statistics and demographics. To build more effective strategies that reach customers on the human level, your buyers’ personas need to be discovered. A buyer persona defines behaviors, motivations, likes/dislikes, traits, etc.
Buyer personas provide deeper information about buyers than traditional market research. They are:
• Richly detailed archetypal representations of real buyers
• Derived from the investigative process of buyer insight gathering goal-centric at their core, which are defined through rigor and precision
• Representations of buyers who are in action and engaged in the buying process
• Windows into the unarticulated, the not-yet-discovered, and affecting mental model of buyers
• Communication tools that inform marketers on executable buyer-centric strategies to serve buyers
A persona definition provides clarity on your target for programming and for communication. In recent years, most product managers and product marketing managers have adopted the practice of creating personas to represent the types of people who buy and use their products. It has helped them identify the right approach for reaching those who buy.
Instead of asking whether to use Twitter, Facebook, a blog or trade shows, it is better to ask which channels will reach your buyer personas.
2. Provide Meaningful Content
With well-defined buyer personas, your content suddenly becomes for someone vs. everyone. This makes all the difference when trying to build a relationship with your customers through a content marketing strategy. A deeper, more personal understanding of your customers leads to content that builds trust because it demonstrates your willingness to spend the necessary time to learn the actual circumstances that affect your customers.
This change in mindset provides you a more detailed answer to the question, “For whom am I creating this content?” It narrows your focus. Your marketing will shift from being product and company centric to useful—buyer centric content for a person, not a general audience. Your content will speak to what motivates your customers, what their priorities are and the real world problems you can help them solve.
3. Track Effectiveness and Adjust Strategies
We live in a fast pace world where executables need to be completed at almost the same time the idea is hatched. Luckily, however, we also have measuring and monitoring tools to help us execute today and gradually gain the hard facts needed to make adjustments to strategies to spark more engagement and increase conversion rates.
As an example, reporting tools built into lead-automation software will show e-mail open and click-through rates. If rates are low, the marketing team can test new subject lines to create more enticement, new e-mail formats, or new content.
Many of these ideas were taken directly from our blog: http://theromgroup.com/blog/
Corenne makes several good points. I would encourage expanding thinking beyond knowing your leads to really developing three-dimensional personas.
1. Study current customers and develop archetypal personas for the champion, buyer, decision-maker, and users. Those may describe the same person or it may be several different people. Each one has different pain points, different agendas, different goals.
2. If this is a new venture without existing customers, then you have to do competitive research and customer development. Who are the customers of your nearest competitors? Find out why they decided to buy from your competitor. Is the actual experience in alignment with what they thought they were buying. What do/don't they like.
There are lots of ways to get this information. If you have the budget, hire a firm like Forrester to do your research and deliver a valuable research report you can use in your marketing. If you don't have the budget, launch your own telephone survey. If approached properly, people love to talk, love to help, love to vent. Disclaimer- In the past, I have posed as a business school student doing market research for my thesis.
3. Don't underestimate the value of an exit interview when a client calls to tell you they're taking their business elsewhere. It gives you a great opportunity to fix what's broken and consequently, use that as a selling point.
Most importantly, ask your current customers what they like, why they do business with you, what they'd like to see change.
All this takes a bit of courage. None of us want to hear what we're doing wrong. Being open to accepting whatever someone tells you and using it to build a better customer experience is priceless. When you do this, lead generation becomes much easier.
Then, implementing the best tools for your purposes and using them to track becomes almost incidental to execution of a smart strategy for delivering the best customer experience in your space.
Relevant content is important, but unless you are in the business of selling content, I don't believe that should be the focus. The product/s the company is in the business of selling is the focus. Content becomes the vehicle to drive people to buy. Reaching the right people with the right message moves product and moves your ROI into a more positive spot on all those charts.
At the end of the day, this is about people connecting to people in real world situations and communicating in everyday language. Getting away from the remove created by academic language, translating your messaging into practical, quick-to absorb wording goes a long way if you've done your homework ahead of time.
There may be multiple interpretations of what Lead Management means. My take is that it describes how leads are managed and assigned, how their quality is assessed, and how the overall lead flow is tracked. As such my top tips for creating a lead management strategy are:
1. Gain marketing and sales agreement on lead definitions (what is an MQL, SAL etc)
2. Agree on the roles in the lead management process - what does marketing do, what does sales agree to do, what does the tele-qualification team or ISRs do?
3. Define the lead management flow - how will new leads be handled. What info do we need to collect in forms, what is the numerical basis of the lead score, how can we fast track leads from strategic accounts etc
4. Define what fields and picklists need to be defined in the CRM (and perhaps the marketing automation system) to support tracking and management of leads and accountability of Sales and Marketing to their designated roles
5. What metrics will be examined every month to drive lead management efficacy.
-Kevin
1. Define a lead management process. By defining the process you ensure that all areas of the Lead Management Framework(SM) are defined and implemented. These process areas should include the following:
- Data Management
- Lead Planning
- Lead Routing
- Lead Qualification (Including assigning definitions and scoring)
- Lead Nurturing
- Content Process Development
- Metrics
2. Secondly when defining and developing the lead management process include any and all groups that have a part in your demand generation strategy. It should go without saying that marketing & sales need to collaborate on this, but if you stop there you will likely miss other important groups such as operations, IT and even outside agencies. All of these groups should have a stake in the development and implementation of process
3. Take a dynamic approach. To many think that once process is developed it is set and they can move on. To the contrary, your processes and their effectiveness should be continually monitored and measured and tweaked when necessary. With the rate businesses change today it is necessary to keep fine tuning to gain an optimal return.
Carlos Hidalgo
The Annuitas Group
@cahidalgo
Hmm - could you say a bit more about what you mean by lead management strategy? Eg starting from scoring or after... and addressing marketing pre-quals or not? I'm hoping that if you clarify, then my answer might be more useful.
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