Your spoiled lazy sales team is destroying your lead campaigns. Well maybe it is not all their fault.

A branch manager or owner knows that keeping a sales team happy with good leads is important. Bad sales leads will turn a  team of educated grown sales people into a daycare full of babies. It is the sole resposibility of the manager or owner to provide their sales staff with good leads. However; a good sales lead is not going to close itself. The life cycle of your sales leads needs to be outlined and put into a standard operating procedure. When this is done each member of your sales team needs to be trained on the life cycle of your sales leads.

The outline of your leads life cycle needs to provide a clear picture of how each lead is handled from the time it is originated until it is a dead lead. In reality a lead should never be dead until your prospect opts out of your markeing campaign. Defining this process is going to allow you to maximize your media buys and hold your sales team accountable.

We were very interested to see how hard a sales lead generated on the Internet is worked.  We applied on 6 debt settlement websites over the last 2 months and analyized the life cycle of the lead. To say the least we were very shocked.

Out of 6 websites we applied on we found that only 2 out of the 6 worked the lead adequately. The 4 that did not work the lead well only emailed us 1 time and called us 1 time. Are you serious! On top of that everyone of these sites were found on Google PPC, probably paying $4 to &6 per click. I know I am sorry we clicked on your ads but that is not your problem. The problem is that someone paid good money to generate this lead and you have emailed and called the lead once. The company websites we applied on also did not respond to our inquiry until an hour after they received it.

The 2 companies that followed up well seem to understand how to work a lead. Here are some keypoints they followed and you need to start following today.

1. Send out an autoresponder email for each lead when it hits your system in real time. Thank them for applying, tell them who you are and tell them you are calling them right now.

2. Call the lead immediately. Not in 10 minutes but right now. A prospect that is on their pc or maybe even still on your website is going to pick up the phone. If you give them the chance to leave that space then your contact rate drops by 30% or more.

3. Use a lead management system to assure your leads are called up to 5 times over a course of 3 days. These numbers may be different for your company but the point is follow up and keep following up.

4. After 5 days put the lead into a automatted system that will email them ever 2 days and continue to call them once daily.

5. Verify the address on the lead to be valid and mail the client a letter asking them to call you immediately.

6. If after 10 days your prospect does not respond you need to continue to email the client until they opt out of your marketing campaign. Set up a new series of autoresponders to be sent to a prospect reaching this phase.

Managing your sales leads correctly, defining your leads life cycle and training your sales team on the process can increase your closing percentage by 3-5%. That increase is the difference between a good company and a great company.

We talk about lead management systems in our post each month. This month we are going to go into greater detail and explain why you need a lead management system.

The bottom line is a company with a lead management system is going to close sales leads at a higher rate than a company without a lead management system. No matter how good you are at managing your leads manually your sales team needs to have an organized system to receive, track and respond to leads.

Here are the top 5 reasons you need a good lead management system:

1. A good lead management system is going to allow you to send leads in real time to your sales team and this is done automatically. You can spend time doing other things like finding ways to increase revenues.

2. You are able to see how fast and how well your costly sales leads are being worked by your sales team. No more “I am working the leads they are just no good”.

3. You are able to hold your lead providers accountable for low closing ratios and of course praise the ones that are doing good.

4.  Increase in contact and closing ratio. The faster you get your leads to your sales team the higher your contact ratio will be, this results in more closings.

5.  Reporting - Reporting - Reporting. Stop guessing at how good your leads are performing and know the facts.

We invite providers of lead managements systems to comment on this post and provide other feedback that can help anyone looking into a lead management system. The choices over the years have grown and it takes a lot of research.

Put your comments here and we will approve them immediately.

Cost per close is the amount of money you spend to get one closing or one deal. So if you spend $1,000 on a lead package and got 5 deals closed then your cost per close is $200. Pretty simple and easy to understand. What gets lost in calculating this figure is time. The time you spent on managing the lead campaign, distributing leads, returning leads, sending payments, and so on.

It is important to factor time into the equation. It is even more important for you to figure out a way to minimize the time you spend on managing a lead campaign so your cost per close is less and your ROI is more. Here are a few ideas on how you can spend less time on your lead campaigns and more time selling and maximizing your return.

1. Get a lead management system. A lead management system that distributes leads automatically can save you hours. Not to mention you can track ROI, the life of a lead and lead vendor performance. A lead management system gives you a clear picture of how each lead campaign is doing, how your sales team is doing and saves time.

2. Try and negotiate with your lead provider a longer window for returning leads. If you can send back returns weekly then it will save you time during the week for selling.

3. Set up a time to review issues or lead quality with your point of contact at the same time each week. Lead quality goes up and down weekly. If you stop and call your lead provider every time there is an issue then you will waste valuable time. Not to mention be very frustrated.

4. If you can not afford a lead management system then just have a system. One that is organized and tracks your leads. Your ROI can be impacted greatly if you do not get credit for your bad leads.