Best Practices in Customer Acquisition or Lead Management

Lead Management or Customer Acquisition Management is designed to generate new business revenue, increase visibility and improve the attitudes of potential prospects and therefore nurture chances of future business development.

Typically an organisation will engage in some form of lead generation activity which will invoke a response from prospects and therefore generate leads. The lead information (prospect details are captured) and then graded or qualified in some manner to determine validity such as propensity to purchase. Leads are then passed to relevant sales teams for follow up and process within their sales pipeline – hopefully for an eventual sale.

Seems pretty straightforward doesn’t it? But it can become quite complex and because the process involves many steps where leads are passed through some form of automation (web forms for example) and from marketing to sales and then through a sales pipeline – there are several areas which are typically prone to weakness and which marketers should be aware.

I am not going to talk about technology here suffice to say that there are some really useful solutions to aid the process in terms of demand generation and marketing management tools that are unified in a central CRM system of record. But there are some typical challenges currently faced with many lead generation processes and some recommendations on treatments to continue to perfect your customer acquisition processes:

Not enough leads are coming in to continuously fuel the sales pipeline.

Areas to look for here are around your lead generation campaigns and what mechanisms/channels you are using to fuel your customer acquisition activities and the comparative cost per lead that is deemed to be of acceptable quality.
What is the proposition? Have you tested that it resonates with the intended audience? What other avenues have you explored? Is your lead generation program another ‘me too’ proposition that drowns in the advertising clutter surrounding us all or is it something that your intended audience will wish view? Look at your projected lead generation plan and determine whether it needs to be re-planned, so you can achieve consistent throughput of leads. What may have worked for you in the past is no guarantee that it will work for you in the future so don’t get stuck in the status quo and look to brainstorm newer, fresher ideas and test those ideas out with your channel, your customers, your sales teams and non-customers. You might sometimes blame the lack of funding you have to achieve the desired business objectives. That is only a valid point for discussion if you have explored all other possibilities and demonstrated first that you have made your current investment stretch as far as it can possibly go. That way, if necessary, you can come to future budget negotiations armed with better facts.

Marketing say they are passing across many leads but they are of a bad quality?

If you hear anything like this in your organisation then it’s probably an indication of a misaligned marketing and sales function and something that as a marketer, you have a responsibility to address. If sales people are spending more time qualifying out leads that are not relevant to the business, then that is precious selling time that is being wasted, not to mention a sign that the lead generation campaign has not achieved its purpose. Good lead management practices should provide the needed connectivity and accountability between sales and marketing, enhance the effectiveness of both operations. Go back to the drawing board and determine what constitutes an acceptable lead. Try to use a nested segmentation approach (as my other blog entry on segmentation) to get more detailed insight in the profile of an acceptable lead that has a higher propensity to become a customer. Detailed interviews with your sales teams, channels, industry analysts, customers and non-customers will help you to develop insight. Look at your lead management processes to determine what attributes of the lead you currently track. If you could obtain a little more information, would it help you and sales to better qualify the lead earlier on in the process? Go back to your lead generation activities and determine whether they are appropriate for your business. What other options may be available to you to obtain leads of a better quality. Note that it is just as important to understand how to qualify out the leads that will not transfer into revenue as it is to qualify in. The single metric of 'number of leads' alone is part of the problem and I have seen it used before. But isn't it far better to have 5 leads that will close than 100 leads that will not? So its far better to look down the sales funnel at business that is closed and the sales and marketing activities conducted to get to closed business, so you can gain more insight.

As a marketer you have no visibility on the follow up on leads

If as a marketer you pass across leads and don’t have visibility on how those progress (or don’t progress) through the sales pipeline, you are only looking at half of the opportunity. Again this is where sales and marketing need to be unified. If your organisation has a centralised CRM system you should ensure you are obtaining adequate analytics to ensure you obtain valuable insight into the success of the follow up process after leads have been developed. You should also work with sales to ensure that you are building a ‘keep informed’ database of prospects that might not be ready to purchase just yet but are nevertheless potential future customers. These are a useful pot of prospects you could use to keep informed and continue a communication dialogue with. A key area here is one of opportunity management, where leads are asked to be called back in a predetermined amount of time. Ensure policies and procedures are in place for either the sales teams to undertake this or for leads to be passed back to marketing to manage this process.

They key to successful customer acquisition management relies on involvement and buy-in from all and organisations need to take a systemic view of the whole process from cradle to grave, whatever that defined process is. It is about agreement of objectives and responsibilities of all and determination of the agreed steps and even refinement and re-evaluation if that is needed. The processes are more akin to a science whilst the specific tactics used to generate leads in the first place are more akin to an art. As a marketer you need to possess both.