How do you develop a lead management system that can improve sales? Planning, execution, and follow-though are key; then make sure that your focus stays on the customer.
You can check out some great resources to help with these efforts at MarketingProfs.
Here are excerpts from a recent article to help get you started:
From Six best practices to improve sales and marketing Alignment by Laura Patterson – some great tips that will help turn leads into buyers. Some key recommendations are:
- Use the customer-buying process as the foundation for aligning both organizations.
- Track and score leads based on prospect behavior.
- Leverage opportunity-nurturing programs.
These tips are obviously focused outward, on the customer. Why expect buyers to bend at the will of your sales process? Now that your focus is on the customer, you can create a customer-buying pipeline instead of a sales pipeline. Five of the steps to accomplish that are:
- Define the customer buying process and each incremental behavioral commitment for each buying segment.
- Group the behaviors into buying stages that map to the buying process.
- Map marketing and sales tools and processes to each stage.
- Configure marketing-automation, sales-automation, and campaign-management systems.
- Monitor, measure, and report results and payback, and modify as needed.
In these examples, Marketing and Sales have both been tasked to take a fresh look at the process. In this manner, neither department faces the angst of having to change their systems to accommodate the other department. Rather, both are aligning their processes and systems to the customer’s behavior. The outward focus not only keeps the kids from bickering, it serves the customer best!