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Lead Management Software Helps Build an Effective Sales Timeline

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Lead Management Software Helps Build an Effective Sales Timeline
 
February 23, 2017

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  By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor
 


There are few business processes that take longer than sales. Even customer support transactions, critical as they are, are over in just a few minutes. Marketing may be months in the planning, but the deployment is fast and you find out quite quickly whether your campaign worked or not. Sales professionals, both inside and outside sales, must carefully nurture leads for months, sometimes years, before the final result. Things can go wrong at any step of the process, so lead management must be carefully managed over a long period to ensure that no steps are dropped, missed or duplicated.


According to a recent blog post by VanillaSoft’s Christina Mlynski, consistency is critical in the sales process.

“Lead nurturing must remain consistent and produce meaningful communication with viable prospects,” she wrote. “It’s not about simply following up every month or so, true nurturing involves a long and circuitous path – but along the way, you’ll be building trust-filled relationships. Setting appointments for outbound and inbound leads, and following through on deals is not a ‘one-fits-all box’ of completion. It’s extremely important to remember that not all prospects are created equal.”

Seat-of-the-pants lead management is often ineffective, mostly because it’s inconsistent, and there is too much room for human error to creep into the process. There is often high turnover in sales, and when sales people leave, they take the momentum on certain leads with them unless those leads are properly documented in a telemarketing software solution that includes alerts, reminders and other automated features. It needs to be about taking the time necessary to bring a lead to its successful conclusion: a sale.

“Sometimes the journey can be long and challenging,” wrote Mlynski. “The only job is to make certain you’re nurturing your leads along the way and directing them toward the right and best decisions for their needs. It’s encouraged to walk at the buyer’s pace – even if that means taking a detour or two. If you hurry them along, you might exhaust the process and turn them to rely on one of your competitors.”

It’s not enough to simply “check in” with leads periodically. Sales teams need to ensure they’re presenting the right information to the lead at the right time, and this timeline will be different for every customer. An effective lead nurturing program can help sales professionals make a better effort to formulate a well-defined strategy to present the company as an expert in the industry.

“Lead nurturing truly wields successful results when your inside sales team’s is productive and efficient. The greatest way to accomplish this is through a queue-based lead management software,” wrote Mlynski.

Telemarketing software that includes lead management can ensure that sales people are using their time wisely, attending to leads that require some TLC at the right moment. When leads turn into customers, it’s not because the lead was content to wait until the sales organization was ready for them. It’s because the sales organization knew what the lead required, and when. 




Edited by Alicia Young

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