Inside Sales Lead Management Featured Article

Businesses invest an average of between $30 and $200 per marketing lead generated in the B2B segment. Yet the majority of these leads are ignored or underutilized, according to a recent paper by Alhassan Ohiomah, Morad Benyoucef and Pavel Andreev at the University of Ottawa.

This finding led the researchers to ask: What could improve lead utilization among businesses?

What they found was that queue-based lead management systems could make a substantial improvement to lead utilization.

The use of lead management systems affects inside sales performance via improving a salesperson’s adaptive selling ability, lead follow-up effort and competency, according to the paper. It reported that together these explained more than 51 percent of the variances between high-performing sales organizations and those that were wasting their leads.

“We found that salespeople who effectively use lead management systems increase their sales performance through task efficiency, improved sales behavior, and enriched information-based skills and knowledge,” noted the authors of the paper. “It also provides them with the proper tools to effectively demonstrate their products and services while sustaining quality conversation with leads. The information-based gains from lead management systems allow salespeople to better understand the needs and purchasing abilities of leads and how to better sell to those leads.”

The use of queue-based systems also increased call productivity and improved adaptive selling, lead follow-up effort and competency.

“Inside sales organizations should leverage the benefits of queue-based systems to realize competency gains, task efficiency and enriched sales behavior,” noted the authors. “The use of queue-based lead management systems can help salespeople substantially increase the number of calls they make, increase their contact speed, increase phone contact attempts to leads, improve their contact ratio and lessen lead decay rate.”

These findings should be a wake-up call to businesses that don’t currently use lead management solutions.