How to Avoid Leads Going to a Black Hole

Traditional, manual approaches to lead management simply can’t keep up with the pace of changing customer behaviors and expectations. Consumers expect immediate and personalized responses when interacting with brands, and if there’s a disconnect between sales teams interactions created by traditional lead management, this can result in poor customer experiences.

With traditional lead management, the money that you spend trying to generate leads doesn’t convert to sales opportunities. The money is wasted because leads are easily lost due to processes and systems are disconnected and unorganized. Sales teams can’t follow up on leads because there is no synergy between systems, processes, sales team members, and management. Leads easily become lost in this scenario and can’t be escalated and routed.

Many actionable leads aren’t being followed up on, and if people have to create individual accounts manually, this process can take weeks. In a modern consumer environment, spending weeks creating accounts is way too long, and consumers will have already moved on to other companies that can better meet their needs and expectations for quality experiences.

Manual lead routing is time wasted. If you need to augment lead rules and make changes to existing lead assignment rules, it’s extremely time consuming when you are trying to fix existing individual cases. Also, assignment rules aren’t creating error reports, so you don’t know where to make adjustments. Complex lead routing is too challenging for individual manual work.

Organizations are generating a lot of data and data environments are challenging areas to navigate. Data sets are disparate, and managing the data pipeline is difficult in scenarios such as assigning data access. Businesses who need to improve lead management are dealing with a vast amount of customer data. They need to perform analytics, and predict customer behaviour. Automated lead routing capabilities helps to align data and create 360 degree views of the customer which helps create a foundation for analytics and improving lead management best practices.

Organizations can implement automated solutions that help reinvent traditional lead management processes so that mismanaged sales leads become a thing of the past.

The sales pipeline needs to be clear so that employees can see what stage of the process that they are in compared to other employees. If there is a single streamlined dashboard available where management and sales teams can view updated records, have sales activity automatically updated, and see clear tracking data of interactions with customers, employees can enhance their target marketing efforts and improve their own workflows.

Organizations are attempting to modernize by adopting technology that helps them to overcome traditional approaches to manual lead management. Solutions such as automated lead routing and segmentation help to connect sales and marketing operations so that people have tools and interfaces at their disposal that are simple and user friendly.

Think about an example where an employee is on vacation, on leave, or they simply aren’t working. With modern automated lead management, leads can be rerouted and reassigned instantly, or management receives notifications and updates to employee schedules so that they know how to plan the best course of action.

The most seasoned and successful organizations use software to assign accounts to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of sales planning processes so that they can accurately match sales representatives to the best opportunities. Software tools help to improve sales planning, while at the same time uniting analytics and strategy development. Organizations can better segment different accounts, track decisions, and continuously update information. This creates sales pipeline transparency and consistent reporting.

Let’s say that sales representatives need to update price lists to reflect a discount. These types of requests need to go through management and be updated and tracked in real time. This process needs to happen quickly and efficiently so that when sales teams communicate with customers, they can interact with them quickly with information that is current and accurate.

Sales representatives can be matched with the right information and customer, and interactions between sales representatives and customers are tracked, which resulted in improved response time, and improved lead routing strategy, better engagement, and higher conversion rates.

Automated lead management tools will help sales teams access this information instantly, and as sales representatives interact with contacts who are there because of these discounted prices, the progress can be tracked through a dashboard and activities are logged automatically.

Don’t let leads go down a black hole and waste sales opportunities. Create consistency with automated lead management tools and software and get rid of complex sales processes so that your company can deliver the best possible services and improve the customer experience.

Labor intensive manual lead management processes are now designated to the history books. Unlock greater value and growth opportunities with professional, automated lead management solutions.

Contact LeadAngel to discover more about how you can avoid black hole leads.