By Jim Berkowitz, CRM Mastery
In State of the Art Lead Tracking it's noted that:
"No matter how good the technology, CRM strategy will never succeed without the staff adopting the technology and having the right business processes in place," says Greg Gianforte, CEO and founder of RightNow.
Capturing and acting on leads was supposed to be one of the big benefits of CRM and the crucial link in marketing automation success. For many companies, reality falls far short of expectations.
"Most companies lose track of between 40 percent and 80 percent of all leads somewhere along the sales cycle. Technologies are still struggling to close the loop," Yankee Group analyst Sheryl Kingstone told NewsFactor.
"Lead escalation must be managed via business rules. If the rules are not set up or defined well, leads will be dropped. For example, the rules should include automatic notifications to management when leads are not being addressed," says Kingstone.
In an attempt to overcome people problems that could lead to a misjudgement on the effectiveness of marketing automation programs, vendors increasingly are adding seamless features to idiot-proof the user process.
My experience with most of the industry-leading B2B CRM solutions is that they only provide very basic lead management capabilities such as very basic lead data capture and automatic lead record assignment. They leave the "heavy lifting" as far as lead qualification data capture and lead process flow to their customers.
The first issue I have with the "Lead Management" component of most B2B CRM solutions is that a "Lead Data Record" is typically a person; the person who responded to some marketing event. The problems begin to arise when the person who initially responded is not the decision maker; or, maybe there's even two or three key people involved. The Lead Management area of most CRM solutions don't provide a means to easily track multiple people related to a single potential selling opportunity (by linking lead records together or without double or triple counting marketing event response rates) until the lead record is converted to an "Opportunity" record; something that many companies don't want to do unless the lead is qualified and being handed off to the Sales Professional who will be responsible for trying to "close" the deal. Also, when converting Lead records to Opportunity records, most systems will uncover duplicates leads, but most won't create a single Opportunity record with multiple Contact (people) records simultaneously from multiple lead records.
The second issue is that most B2B CRM solutions use a "Lead Status" data field to track what's going on with each lead. For example, when the new lead is created, the status may be defined as "Open." When a contact attempt is made, via phone, email, etc. the Status may be changed to "Attempted Contact." The Status will remain "Attempted Contact" until someone is able to talk with the lead (person) at which point the Status might be changed again to "Qualification in Process, Not Qualified, Qualified-Buying or Future Potential Buyer." The problem is that if you'd like to track (via a report or graphic dashboard object) how long the lead was in ANY GIVEN status position (to find lead management bottlenecks, or how long it took in its entirety to get "processed" you'll find this difficult at best, and maybe even impossible without system customization.
Thirdly, Lead Data Records typically don't include any of the demographic data or lead qualification data elements that you may want to capture. For example if you want to keep track of the lead's level of "Need, Urgency or Fit" for your offerings or if (in addition to the "Lead Status") you'd like to classify qualified leads as "Hot, Good or Poor", you'll need to add these custom data fields to the CRM database and Lead Data Record View.
Finally, "best practice" lead management systems are difficult to implement because they can involve maybe up to three separate organizations within an enterprise; marketing, inside sales and outside field sales. In many enterprises the communication and coordination between these groups is poor to nonexistent. Marketing is trying to generate as many leads from each campaign as they can (often regardless of quality or whether the staff is available to follow up with the leads on a timely basis); after all, their performance is judged on marketing event response rates.
After marketing assigns the leads to the people who will be responsible for following up on them, say Inside Sales; these people may need to reassign a fair number of leads back to marketing for on-going follow up. For example, leads that they couldn't contact or who are not in a buying process now, but are good future potential buyers. Unfortunately in most companies, marketing is not really interested in theses leads because they are not measured by what they produce from this excellent pool of potential selling opportunities; it's on to the next campaign.
Even more problematic for some companies is if they send all of the leads generated from marketing directly to sales professionals. It doesn't take the sales professionals (who are under the gun to close business now) to learn to cherry pick only the best leads, while leaving the bulk of the leads to fall by the wayside.
"Best practice" Lead Management will require workflow automation rules, extensive lead tracking data capture and superior lead management reporting and analysis systems; much of which will not be available "out-of-the box" with most CRM solutions; they'll require some significant configuration or system customization work to set up.
Yes, CRM solutions can provide a basic framework for lead management, but if you want a world-class, best-practice lead management system in your company, you'll need to plan on spending the needed time to create what you need from the basics you're given.
