Inside Sales Lead Management Featured Article

It stands to reason that a smart company should never engage in a business process without calculating the return on investment, but this is a truism that is far easier said than done, especially when it comes to the sales process. Campaign ROI is often impossible to calculate in a business-to-business environment because solutions are often cobbled together, sometimes manually, and it’s often difficult to induce an entire sales team to use technology consistently.

In addition, according to Kevin Miller writing for Click Z, the many systems that companies use to manage leads, execute campaigns and track sales opportunities are siloed from one another because they are managed by completely different departments: sales, customer relationship management, the call center or marketing.

‘Marketing automation systems have come a long way in how they integrate key processes around lead management into the core customer relationship management (CRM) platforms that are in place at most companies,” writes Miller. “Traditionally, marketing systems did not focus on lead management; rather they were built from the ground up to facilitate the execution of a variety of different types of campaigns.”

A disability to determine return on investment isn’t the only problem this haphazard model raises. With disparate systems being managed by different departments, leads are often mismanaged and lost, effort is often duplicated and mistakes are more likely to occur. The handoff of information between marketing and sales is often a clumsy and laborious process, which wastes a lot of time that could be spent selling.

According to Miller, there are a few logical steps marketing and sales can take to not only ensure ROI is properly tracked, but that leads are not lost. These involve integration of marketing automation and CRM at the database level, an alignment between the two departments on the process of lead management and handoffs, ensuring marketing source data like lead source and campaign IDs are mapped to the CRM records, and a CRM system that will support workflow that automatically copies the originating lead source to each subsequent table in the CRM.

While the solution isn’t easy and simple, and it may involve the purchase of new solutions and upgrade to existing IT systems, the end result will be a way to ensure leads are properly managed and shared and campaigns can be fully and effectively tracked, including their return on investment.