Uncovering Revenue Opportunities Hidden in Lead Management Processes
The difference between surviving and thriving in today’s competitive marketplace is often determined by finding untapped revenue sources in lead management processes.
We often see significant revenue potential hidden away in sales and marketing processes that not only aren’t working—they’re actually impeding the ability to generate results. That’s when it’s productive to take a closer look at the larger sales lead management picture.
And how best to do this? One way is to put into play a methodology for assessing current practices and correcting gaps in marketing and sales processes.
While there are many paths to the top of the same higher-revenue mountain, we’ve had good success working with clients on opportunity audits designed to identify current lead generation challenges and grow revenue.
With this approach, we take a deep dive into five areas and extract the information needed to assess sales and marketing process effectiveness. Here are the five areas and samples of a few audit questions:
Discovery—What percentage of this year’s revenue target is expected to originate from marketing activity vs. from sales executives’ individual efforts?
Opportunity Capture—Where are opportunities captured and how are they distributed? What are processes for sales acceptance of marketing generated opportunities, and how are they tracked?
Response Management—When and how are inbound calls, web hits, emails from forms and tradeshow leads handled, and by whom? How is data captured, tracked and measured from both sales and marketing perspectives?
Lead Generation and Lead Qualification—How is the target market identified and segmented? How are multi-media / multi-touch / multi-cycle programs planned and implemented?
Lead Nurturing—How are qualified opportunities handled when they have no immediate interest or don’t respond after expressing initial interest?
Findings are reported both as scores in the five key areas and as benchmarks for comparison with similar companies. Recommendations itemize areas for process improvement.
The bottom line: a formal audit methodology uncovers opportunities that lead to more predictable forecasts and drive revenue to higher levels.