Inside Sales Lead Management Featured Article

Many sales managers take the approach that if something’s not broken, it shouldn’t be fixed. While this conventional wisdom works in some areas of life, sales is an ongoing and evolving process, and while your current program may not need to be fixed, it certainly needs to be nurtured carefully in order to remain relevant to the organization.

In order to nurture something, you need to have an accurate picture of its current health, and many sales managers simply don’t have a good grip on existing processes. A company would never leave parts of its accounting details in a confusing jumble, or allow 10 to 20 percent of its budget to remain unaccounted for. Yet, according to a recent article in the Augusta (News - Alert) Chronicle by Eddie Huff, sales managers do this all the time. 

“Without sales there is no business,” wrote Huff. “It is the lifeblood of a business. However, many great business owners do not practice the same level of inspection in [sales] process and accountability that they require in other departments of their company.”

For this reason, when sales are down or the process is showing red flags, managers often can’t recognize the warning signs until the damage is done. Or, they track the metrics that indicate problems – the “lagging indicators” -- but they don’t track the metrics that indicate success.

“Having a prospecting plan enables you to manage the ‘leading indicators’ – such things as attempts made, new conversations, appointments scheduled, appointments kept, introductions asked for, etc.,” wrote Huff.

One place to start with unifying your sales process is to ensure that all sales people are on the same page. Their methods don’t need to be the same, of course, but the underlying architecture they are working should be unified. If you have a sales team of eight and they each engage in their own process, it’s likely the department is wasting time continually reinventing the wheel. Huff recommends sales managers begin by identifying the best way to acquire a new client and the desired outcome.

“Create your process, publish it and manage to the process,” he wrote. “If you have 10 salespeople and you don’t have a template, you are managing to 10 different processes, and no manager will be effective or efficient this way.”

Formal lead management is a great way to unify the sales process and ensure that best practices are being met. By putting a process in place to ensure that leads are followed, tracked and reported on from the earliest moment until the lead’s ultimate outcome, sales managers can improve processes, be a better leader to sales personnel, cut out wasted time and effort, and improve sales figures.

Think of it as a health check-up for your sales process. By fixing what’s wrong with your sales organization today, you can ensure its health in the future.