5 Biggest Lead Management Blunders

One of the nice things about consulting is that you get to help people. It’s very satisfying to spend a day checking out someone’s Salesforce.com implementation and give them a set of recommendations for how they can build/fix/improve their processes and use of technology to give them the data they need to make better marketing decisions.

I’ve been working on a couple of lead management projects that caused me to wonder — how did they get here? By here, I mean to this state where they’re bringing in a consultant to help them figure this out. Not that I’m complaining as I’m the one who gets to help, but how does an organization end up needing lead management consulting? Are there any lessons to be learned by the rest of us on how not to end up in that place?

As I dig and do the analysis, I’ve discovered a few common areas where these organizations and others I’ve been part of veer left instead of right and find themselves off course. Below is my list of the 5 Biggest Lead Management Blunders, and as a caveat, the list is geared towards mistakes made using Salesforce.com, my CRM of choice:

1. Not mapping your lead management process. I spoke about the importance of this in my previous post, Defining Your Lead Management Strategy.
2. Incorrect set-up and use of Campaigns. I’ve seen several organizations fail to implement Campaigns properly. They did not tie the Campaign Name to Leads which enables you to track through to Opportunities and get your campaign ROI. Another benefit of using Campaigns is you can use Activities to enter in all of the tasks associated with a campaign and assign the tasks to users. Then, you can schedule a weekly report that sends out your Marketing Production schedule — kind of a lite version of Marketing Resource Management.
3. Incorrect use of Campaign Name and Lead Source fields. When I started my last job, I discovered my predecessor did not use Campaigns, but instead used campaign values in the Lead Source field. This was a mistake on several fronts. You want to create the fewest number of Lead Sources that accurately convey all the ways that you generate Sales and Marketing-sourced Leads. Your campaigns should map to Lead Source values such as Demos, Webinars, Podcasts, Trade Shows, Seminars, etc. In this way you can monitor the effectiveness not only at the campaign level, but also at a more macro Lead Source level. Your goal here is to identify the Lead Sources that generate the most opportunities and deals at the lowest possible cost, and eliminate activities in poor performing Lead Sources.
4. No standards for country, state/province values or phone format. Do yourself a favor and set value and format standards for Country, State/Province and Phone. When you pull lists, it’s much easier to only pull on your standard value instead of thinking of any number of variations on how a state or country may be represented in the database. It’s an easy 3 step process: 1) set the values in your Web-to-Lead forms, 2) create validation rules in Salesforce.com to enforce how users enter the data manually and 3) edit the data in your spreadsheet prior to a manual lead or contact import.
5. No agreement with Sales on appropriate lead follow-up timelines. I’m working with a client who generated about 11,000 leads this year of which only 1,400 had been unconverted. The remaining 9,700 leads were still in the Open stage and most had not even been read by the sales rep — eek!! Makes you wonder why you generate leads if Sales isn’t going to do anything with them. Gain agreement from Sales to a standard follow-up timeline to disposition the leads. I’ve generally seen the range to be 14-21 days, which gives a rep ample time to place several phone calls and send email. The rep needs to disqualify the lead or convert it if the contact/account meet qualification criteria. The lead bucket should be a transitory repository where leads enter, get worked and get actioned as either a qualified lead that is converted or a disqualified lead that remains in the lead bucket.

I encourage you to take the time and look at your lead management process and how you’re using your CRM technology to support the process. It’s never too late to tweak and tune the system.