Lead management done right.

Leads they are the life blood of your sales teams. They come from many different channels. Your company website, trade shows, search engines, and the best are from current customers. But one of the most important aspects of lead management is to actually have a process for managing them. Some of the companies I have worked for had solid processes, some had none at all. Don't spend days or weeks having meetings about how to manage leads. Your company does not need to have the best process out the gate, you just need something.

Here are some best practices that I have come across in my years in sales.

1. Have one central bucket for ALL automated inbound leads. Most will be from forms on your corporate website. When you upload leads from events, they should all be put into the same bucket. This is done for many reasons. It reduces on confusion and it allows the sales people to pull their leads quickly and act on them effectively.
2. Require basic information from the leads. Name, company, email, phone number and where the lead came from. The "where" is the ice breaker for the first call. If you don't know where you came in contact with the leads, the initial contact will be awkward at best. Any other information you require will be specific to your company. But get as much as you can from them without making them feel inundated with filling out too much information. 7-9 fields seems to work well.
3. Follow up on the leads fast. I mean within 48 hours after they are imported. Nothing will impress a prospect than a quick introduction. As a manager you should also be able to run reports on this activity. Track your new lead activities, don't lose new interested prospects. This is the one hole that many companies overlook.
4. Have a real lead status that maps each step of your sales process. For example - New, Initial call, Contact made, Discovery call... you get the idea. Most CRM systems have customizable fields for this, use them.
5. Know when your leads have become opportunities. CRM systems have different ways of doing this. Before you get one, understand this process and map your lead management around it.
6. Above all track the entire sales process so management can see where the sales people are and make the report available to the sales people so they can track this as well. This way nothing falls through the cracks.