Lead Management – Sales Lead Definitions
Written by ShamrockCRM on July 24, 2009 – 3:49 pm -The Salesforce.com marketing bloggers have written a few interesting posts regarding best practices for Lead Management within Salesforce.com. They describe the definition of leads, the interrelation of Sales and Marketing when it comes to Leads, the true definition of “qualified leads” and more:\
Definition of a Sales Lead:
A Lead is a name, an email address, contact details, etc of an employee, someone you have met, someone you have talked to that MIGHT…just might…be interested in possibly doing business with you.
Leads are acquired in all different manners. You could be provided a list of email addresses from a trade show that you had a booth at. All of these emails would be “Sales Leads.” You could have received a business card from someone that you met at Wal-Mart that is interested in your business. You could have received a simple email or web inquiry from your website asking for a quote or asking for your hourly service rates.
The commonality here is that you do not know THAT much about these individuals and you are not sure HOW interested they are in your product/service/offering. You might not know if they even have budget allocated to do business with you or not. Leads are not necessarily “serious” business YET. Leads are essentially “pre-opportunities.”
Leads also allow you to separate the “junk” contact information from you Customer data that consists of truly paying customers. It allows you to quarantine bad leads from your good customers.
There can be “hot leads” and “cold leads.” Hot leads would be Leads that you have a good feeling about and would like to actively pursue.
There are different Lead Statuses. A New Lead would be a fresh Lead that has never been contacted. Contacted would of course mean someone has reached out to the Lead. Unqualified would mean the person does not have budget, is not interested, has bad references, etc. “Unqualified Leads” are bad Leads NOW, but could be re-marketable at a later time. “Qualified” leads pass your own internal qualification process to determine if they could really buy what you are selling. This qualification could be as simple as “we provided a quote, the customer responded favorably and asked more questions, they are now qualified and can be converted into an Opportunity.”
The above topics and ideas are not related strictly to Salesforce.com. Every company has Leads, whether you call them Leads or not. Let me repeat that…ALL companies have Leads in some way or another. Lead Management is a business process in the CRM realm. This is simply mapped into Salesforce.com.
Salesforce.com Marketing Best Practices
Related posts:
- Salesforce.com Lead Management – Re-Marketing to Leads
- Sales Leads – Automating Your Leads
- Salesforce.com Lead Activity History Report
- Sales and Marketing Process Maps
- Salesforce.com to SMS
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