"I think one mistake many marketers make is to think of their lead management requirements too narrowly," says Jon Miller in a recent post at Marketo. He suggests it's time to move on up—beyond just nurturing and scoring leads—to a higher level of overall lead management.

To help show the way, Miller has offered these Top Five Lead Management Best Practices:

• Be everywhere. "Cast your marketing net wide so customers will find you no matter where they are searching," he advises.
• Build prospect profiles. Create a lead database to manage and store all your leads, and then make sure you have a strategy in place to keep that database clean (e.g., lead de-duplication).
• Automate lead handoffs. He offers an example: "Define different lead status values to indicate whether someone is a qualified prospect but still nurturing, or a true sales-ready lead." Then update their lead status in the CRM system.
• Provide sales-lead insight. Give the sales rep the prospect's history, and offer insight about the "interesting moments" that caused that person to become a lead.
• Recycle leads as necessary. If your sales rep can't follow up right away, or the prospect isn't available, don't let a lead just sit and turn stale. "[H]ave a process in place to reassign the lead or escalate the issue," Miller advises.

The Po!nt: Take more control. "[M]arketers need to move away from a mindset of 'generating leads' and toward a model of 'managing leads,'" Miller concludes.

Source: Marketo. Read the full post here.

→ end article preview
Read the Full Article