Do you have an Ernestine in your company handling your leads?

#155 Expediting sales leads must be a priority. (1)

Having your lower paid employees (a receptionist or clerk) sort your sales inquiries and take their time to pass them to your highest paid employees (salespeople) is stupid.

Most of the time the inquirers (or leads) sit with the receptionist for days and weeks as they try to get around to it. Get leads into the salespeople's hands as fast as possible.

• Web leads can be directed into most CRM systems and show up in the salespersons territory immediately.

Direct mail leads that come from the use of Purls can be jammed into the CRM the same way as website leads.

Inquires from trade shows should be sent to the home office daily and whipped into the CRM system and to salespeople. (NewLeads www.newleads.com has an iPad retrieval system that connects to the web and the clients CRM system).

Use landing pages where possible as a response to lead generating activities.

Business reply cards? No they are not dead, should be entered into the system the day you get them.

Phone calls (yes they still happen) should be entered ASAP.

If you have a CRM system (80% of the companies have it) leads from the internet (35-60%) will get to reps fast. The rest should not sit until someone gets around to it (receptionist). Most of the time when this happens all the rep gets is a name and phone number. No profile information.

Do your reps a favor and make entering the leads into the CRM system a priority. Get the inquiries and leads into the reps hands within minutes or a few hours.

B2C marketers distribute inquiries and leads in minutes. B2C research indicates that for every minute that passes, the chance for making a sale is diminished. Read this research from Leads360 on the SLMA site.

 

(1) #155 appears in the following book: Obermayer, Sales & Marketing 365, Racom Communications and the Business Marketing Association, 2004, page 60.