Inside Sales Lead Management Featured Article

If your company is finding a lot of roadblocks in the sales process, it’s time to create a plan to clear them. Making sales is hard enough; trying to sell without the right materials, the right contacts & leads and the right technology makes it harder.

Today, many companies are asking how they can better enable their sales team, which leads to better lead management, taking away the distractions and instead providing them with a plethora of well-organized tools in order to do so. Marketing plays in important role in this process, for it is marketing’s job to prepare materials that will pique potential customers’ interest, according to a recent article by Doug Winter writing for Business2Community. This critical fact is often forgotten (particularly by marketing).

“It is the job of the marketing team to create content that aligns to the sales process,” writes Winter. “The biggest problem marketing and sales teams have isn’t that the right content doesn’t exist, but that it’s hard to find. More specifically, the biggest problem for sales is not having easy access to the content that marketing creates.”

Sales members find themselves needing to dig – sometimes for the same material over and over again – and then find the material isn’t in the format they require. Most importantly, the right information needs to be available at every step of the sales journey. If you haven’t officially mapped out this journey, it will be harder to determine what information you’ll need when you reach each step, so this is a good place to start. Companies need to catalog existing information, update it if necessary or put it into a more convenient format, determine what’s missing and create that content in a user-friendly way that will be assist sales team members.

“Now that marketing has figured out what sort of content exists, they can fill in existing holes and create new content,” writes Winter. “This approach is much more efficient than simply responding to one-off emails by members of the sales team, as the right pieces of content will be delivered to everyone, rather than to only the individuals who requested it.”

The point is to make it easy, and this process can be greatly assisted with the use of a cutting-edge lead-management solution. Solutions such as those from VanillaSoft bring together a robust feature set that includes next-best-lead routing, progressive dialing, on-board intelligent messaging, integrated email, real-time lead distribution, live dashboard and digital call recording. An effective lead management system will also tie into the customer relationship management (CRM) solution, ensuring that sales personnel have the right information before they call, and an appointment-setting feature to ensure the leads are being correctly followed up.

If your sales team is turning in lackluster performance when it comes to generating, acting on and following up leads, perhaps it’s time to evaluate the tools you’ve given them and see if they’re hindering rather than helping. A few changes in the lead management process can make all the difference in the world.