The Life Cycle of a Lead: Improve

Your sales, marketing, and corporate administrative teams have a lot of different tasks going on at any given time.  Even when everything in your Lead Management Framework is working smoothly, determining what data to look at to make decisions for future improvements can seem like a daunting task.   Luckily, if you have built a system that keeps your data integrated (see the previous posts from this series), this task will begin develop into a solution on its own.  Ultimately, you are looking for data related to:

• Your Corporate Objectives
• Your Sales Objectives
• Your Marketing Objectives
• Any specific pain points that you know exist in your marketing/sales process

We work with our clients all the time to help them identify the types of reports that will help them make both long and short term improvements.  However, one common thing stands out among the most successful.  If you force yourself to be limited to the top 5-7 reports for each of the areas listed above, then you are also forcing yourself to focus on those areas that will provide the highest level of ROI.  You will also tend to drop a lot of unnecessary data to avoid confusion at the same time.

As an example, we recently dealt with a company who was having a very specific issue concerning dealer compliance and used our services to aid in finding a solution.

The Problem
Various dealers’ sales people weren’t entering data into the manufacturer’s SmartLead lead management system, making it impossible for the manufacturer to produce:

• accurate reports
• conversion rates
• analysis

The manufacturer wanted to close the communications loop by getting the dealers’ sales people to report sales results.

The Solution
The SmartLead Contact Center regularly contacts each dealer to follow-up on the leads distributed to the dealer. Dealers are encouraged to record sales results where the system tracks:

• marketing effectiveness
• dealer compliance
• sales conversion rates

The Result

• The call center program increased dealer compliance by 122% during the first 18 months of the call center program.
• Reported sales conversion rates increased by 48% during the first 12 months.
• Based on the SmartLead system’s “Marketing Effectiveness” reports, the manufacturer fine-tuned its television advertising efforts.

While these results are specific to a certain client, we have seen high adoption of dealer compliance resulting in other types of improvements, including:

• new product lines
• changes to major media advertising efforts
• optimized number of communications to the lead