We have been sucked into this paradigm of sale leads needing 360 degree views. Lead management should be a vector (magnitude and direction), not a 360 degree process cycle.
Every time I hear this sort of analogy for sales I think of a treadmill--lots of motion, but no forward progress. Your lead management tools should be designed to drive prospects through the sales funnel to a close.
Qualify Every Lead
Jump off the 360 lead cycle. Typically sales people get into a vicious cycle of round robin distribution of new opportunities and then cycling through the same nondescript lead over and over. The result: frustrated sales agent and frustrated customer.
The quickest way to exit this cycle is to specialize your sales process to continually qualify the lead. This starts from the moment it enters the sales queue.
Some teams actually use a front line team of junior sales representatives to triage and categorize each lead. Other sales organizations use technology within their CRM software to do this early qualification.
However you decide to accomplish the task, the goal should be clear--qualification and soft sell. The priority for this initial qualification is to properly categorize and route the lead. This gives the customer and the sales person the best opportunity for a good experience.
Sales Leads
Getting the top performance from your sales team requires them to be focusing most of their time on sales leads. Following up on general inquiries and making prospecting calls is not productive sales activity. Soft inquiries and general requests for information should be a different process. Feeding these "suspects" into experienced sales professionals is a losing proposition. They will lose motivation and you will lose performance.
Leads can be qualified by through a variety of methods, from automation to human triage. Make sure you qualify. Mindlessly loading lists or recycling leads is hoping for a miracle.
Clean Sales Pipeline
Most sales effectiveness is lost in the pipeline. Which makes it not entirely ironic that this is where the 360 degree lead analogy originates. Leads get trapped in vicious cycle of calling and emailing. I call it the sales blender. The effect: no relationship and a lot of abused customers.
Prevent this meaningless churn by placing a disposition or status on every lead as it is handled. This lead status should determine if it stays in the pipeline or is transferred to another process.
This status typically is associated with a propensity to close. At some point your efforts on a prospect has declining returns. When this point is reached, efficiently clean it out and hop off the treadmill.
Lead Nurturing
The best place for most of these ejected leads is in a lead nurturing process. That's right it is a sales process. And it's not a cycle. It is another methodology designed with forward motion in mind.
Lead nurturing does not mean recycling the leads. It is more akin to a marketing process than a sales process. Lead nurturing is a systematic process of touching the customer with information and contacts to stay top of mind and seed the buying intent.
Most likely the customer did not close simply because the product or the timing were not right. Keep in touch with email, mail, and calls to see if that changes.
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