Compare Lead Management, What Makes a Good Lead Management Software?

Lead Management Software is increasingly a sales force necessity as more and more sales leads are coming from Internet lead generation. The need for real-time lead distribution, sales force automation, lead routing, immediate customer contact, and lead analysis make traditional CRM systems incapable of achieving acceptable sales production levels. Given the need for a good lead management software, what should you look for?

Lead Management Software

In order to effectively compare Lead Management Software it is important to start with your own business objectives. Here is a short list of considerations:

Lead Generation: Understand exactly how your organization generates leads and make sure your lead management system is equipped to automate and streamline as much of this lead capture process as possible.
Sales Organization: How is your sales organized? Will you be in a centralized call center? Or maybe distributed regionally in local sales offices? Or perhaps you are leveraging tele-commuting or home-based agents? These question will create unique lead distribution and routing requirements.
Products and Sales Cycle: Reviewing your product and service offerings is important to to designing sales flow and cycles. This information is critical in evaluating lead nurturing and lead work flows that your lead management software selection must be capable of.
Marketing Analysis: Ultimately all lead management systems need to provide you robust sales tracking and marketing campaign reporting. But, make sure that your software selection captures this data with minimal data entry requirements to your sales force. You should also focus on the integrity and consistency of the tracking. Are processes preformed and track the same for every sales person?

Lead Capture

You want your lead management software to be a centralized sales platform. Keeping your sales force coordinated and focused. A big part of that efficiency is in the lead capture process. A good lead management system should make getting leads into the system simple and require no technical skill. You don't want leads sitting in disparate systems, email inboxes, or worse on paper.

Simple imports of data and direct feeds into your system should be the standard. Here are some popular formats that should be supported:

Comma Separated Values (CSV), spreadsheets
MS Outlook, Apple Mail, vCard, GMail, Yahoo!, Hotmail
Direct Web form posts via XML

These simple lead capture methods should cover a multitude of lead generation sources like: trade shows, referrals, business cards, conference attendee lists, purchased data and lists, Internet lead generation, buying leads from lead providers.

If you are going to be extensively using Internet generated leads your lead capture needs some additional functionality. Make sure that your lead management software can effectively capture and track various independent advertising campaigns. Otherwise, determining campaign performance and marketing ROI will be virtually impossible.

Lead Distribution

Your leads are in your lead management software, but can it do anything useful with them. A good lead management system will allow you to automate the quick distribution of new leads to sales people. That is a minimum requirement, but for maximum sales output you want a few more things, like:

Lead routing by organization, group, or user
Lead routing by marketing channel, campaign, or attributes
Lead allocation minimums and maximums
Ability to re-route or re-distribution leads under a variety of scenarios
Ability to pre-qualify and hot transfer
Manual manager overrides to automated distribution

As your sales organization grows and you diversify your offline and online marketing you need flexibility. The ultimate objective of your lead distribution system is to match the right lead with the right sales person to close the deal.

Lead Nurturing

Sales pipelines and marketing campaigns are full of all different kinds of people. Some ready to buy, some researching, and some not sure what they should be doing. Your lead management software should assist the sales person in making each of those customers get a experience tailored to their needs. Lead nurturing is the buzzword, but it comes down to be able to do these things well:

Trigger follow-ups and call back periods based on sales activity
Dynamically change drip email campaigns based on sales actions
Tracking and manage not only the pipeline, but also the fall-out
Automate nurturing a customer inquiry into a qualified lead
Immediately notify and re-distribute leads that become responsive again

Lead nurturing, ideally, is making as painless and hands-off to your sales force the periods from prospect to lead and fall-out to requalified. While, effectively squeezing more sales out of this resource draining phases of a sales cycle.

Marketing Analysis

The most powerful value of lead management is the ability to centrally manage and track all of your marketing campaigns and close the loop between marketing and sales. Lead tracking and marketing analysis is a great way to identify opportunities. But, that is only one step in the process of producing results--you need to be able to execute on those opportunities. Good lead management software allows for you to quickly report and analyze these basic metrics:

Perform campaign management and determine performance
Track sales performance at the organization, group, and individual levels
Compare sales performance against relevant benchmarks
Monitor lead flow and sales force automation
Track lead supply and sales capacity
Forecast sales production

With all of this marketing and sales analysis you need to make sure your lead management software allows you to take action: automating workflows, adjusting campaigns, modifying sales force automation, reconfiguring lead distribution, and training sales personnel.

Compare Lead Management

When you are selecting a lead management software for your organization focus on simplicity, automation, analysis, and a dynamic workflow that keeps every opportunity viable and flowing as fast as possible through the sales pipeline. The old traditional ACT-style of CRM that is one small step from a spreadsheet and requires constant updating and data entry will slow and lose you sales. You need a lead management system that is dynamic and keeps you moving every prospect toward a closed deal.