Lead Management

Introduction To Lead Management

Lead Management is the foundation for any succesful lead generation campaign. As you collect the contact information of potential customers, it is important to keep track of everyone. A new lead is much more than an opportunity for a single sales interaction, it is an opportunity for a new life-long relationship of trust, loyalty and constant referrals. Not all sales or service inquiries will result in an immediate sale. Often times it depends where the customer is at in their decision-making process. If they reach out to you during their initial information search, they may not be ready to commit. If they reach out to you as they evaluate their alternatives, they are closer to a purchase decision, but may still be comparing you to your competitors.  These are simple examples of two inquiries that are equally important, but should be treated differently. Categorizing your leads is one way to differentiate and keep track of leads through different sales pipelines. Lead management tools can be as simple as a spreadsheet or as complex as a custom-built application that collects information from multiple sources and integrates with your customer relationship management tools and marketing automation. The important thing is that you have a system that works for your business and allows you to stay connected to your leads and understand their needs.

Lead Management In Calgary

There is a severe lack of truly customizeable marketing solutions for small and medium size businesses in Calgary. Part of the problem is that lead generation tools are seperated from lead management tools which are seperated from customer relationship management and communication tools. This leaves business operators juggling information between multiple applications. Application developers have done a good job at creating several industry-specific tools that attempt to be an all-in-one solution, but the most common feedback from business owners is that they are paying the full subscription price and only using a few of the features. Calgary has a unique business environment with many highly fragmented industries. Each business is set up differently with unique operational procedures. This makes it difficult for business owners to find a digital solution that suites their needs. If they are lucky, they can get close enough to what they need.

At the lowest level of efficiency are the businesses that rely almost exclusively on email. All new leads are recieved in an inbox and maybe tagged or labelled for easy retrieval. Potential customers are then contacted by email (probably unformatted) and then forgotten unless they reply back. Innovative companies have already realized that there are better solutions. They have set up systems where new leads are imported directly into a generic lead management tool where they can track the status of each lead and keep notes. The most forward thinking companies have gone far beyond this to integrate their lead collection with automated marketing streams and an in-depth management system. The integration is the key. However many systems you require to support your operations, you should be able to look in one place to see all your new leads and sales information.

Our Approach To Lead Management

Our number one goal with Lead Management is to help you get more value from you inbound leads without making you do any extra work. We first integrate all inbound lead sources into one stream. Then we find out who needs to be notified and how you would like to recieve notifications. If you are working with a management tool already we will help you optimize it based on your company’s workflows. If not, we will give you a dashboard that shows you only the information you want to see – not too much, not too little.

The most exciting aspect of lead management is the host of automated services we can provide. The goal of any marketing automation is to save you time. Instead of manually contacting and qualifying each lead, we can set up automatic email marketing with customizeable messages to do the work for you. We can automatically request more infomation from a potential customer via email or SMS and connect them with the proper sales or service representatives or automated sales stream. You can watch how your leads are progressing and only get involved when you want to. We use both native and third-party applications to integrate platforms and automate workflows. Talk to us any time about your business and how automation can make your life easier.