sales leads

Lead generation is what you need to do when you don’t have any sales leads. If there are no prospects in the pipeline, or not enough good ones, then you need to ramp up your efforts at finding new business leads.

One of the immediate goals of a good sales lead management program is to identify and separate your long-range sales leads from your short-range sales leads.

What are short-range and long-range sales leads?

Short-range sales leads are decisive, motivated prospects who are ready to make a decision right now: yes or no.

Unfortunately, sales leads are not always so easy to classify or so quick to decide. The most challenging task in lead management is managing long-range sales leads – these are the business leads that need extra attention and careful handling over the course of many months. Even though they aren’t ready to buy today, they might change their tune in a few months.

It’s important to be consistent when managing long-range business leads by making sure that everyone on the sales team uses the same procedures. If there are 6 sales reps on your team you can’t have 6 different lead management procedures. Everyone needs to be classifying business leads in the same manner, and following up with the same (or at least similar) techniques. Here are three easy ways to keep your sales leads under control:

Create a centralized lead management database. Everyone on the sales team needs to be able to access the lead management system, so they can all see the notes on existing sales leads made by other reps.

Maintain a simple means of internal communications so appointment setting can be conducted in an orderly fashion, so no business leads slip through the cracks, and no sales leads are kept listed in the system against their will. (You don’t want to anger/annoy customers by following up or trying to do appointment setting after they’ve already said “no” to one of your other sales reps.)

Rank all business leads with consistent criteria, and make sure that long-range sales leads are marked as date-sensitive to ensure follow-up and appointment setting in the correct timeframe.

Lead generation is only part of the equation for sales success; the truth is, managing your sales leads is just as important. With solid lead management processes in place, you won’t need to spend so much time and energy on lead generation. If your lead management program is handling prospects properly, you will relieve a lot of stress from your lead generation program. That will save you time and money, and increase the number of qualified leads you see consistently over time.

Whether you need more energetic lead generation or more meticulous lead management, www.beanstalk.co.uk can help. One of the “leading light” lead generation companies, SSM specializes in lead generation services, offering appointment setters and comprehensive B2B sales and marketing consulting.