With Internet as a major medium for sourcing of sales leads, Automated Lead Management and Tracking has become a mainstream process for small and medium businesses. In the past, most companies used to track the leads with manually intensive processes and tools such as Excel spreadsheets, Access databases, Outlook or other locally installed contact management software.

Why Lead Management?

When the volume of leads are low, business owners and salespeople can easily keep track of the leads without automation. Also, cost of generating leads was also relatively low. For example, Yellow pages, Newspapers and Local Radio are the common staple of small business advertising.

Now that the consumer market has undergone tremendous changes, traditional advertising and marketing methods are fast losing the importance.

Small businesses and professional service providers such as contractors, realtors / real estate agents, mortgage brokers, insurance service providers, franchisees, spas, dentists and others are switching to digital marketing and advertising. Buying internet leads is a common practice among them.

Internet and Social Media as Lead Sources

Large volume of sales leads originate from Internet Search Engines such as Google and Bing, either directly through their own websites or through third party, independent lead generation and distribution companies. Social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and Blogs are driving more consumers to the internet to research and purchase products and services online. These online leads cost significant amount of money; if the prospects are not managed, followed up and tracked promptly lot of money can be lost in short period of time.

Automated Lead Management Process

Automation of Lead Management (also known as Inquiry Management) starts with capturing of the leads directly from the website forms (aka landing pages) or lead distribution and posting systems used by lead sellers.

Once the leads are captured in the system, the leads are to be assigned to the sales reps based on the pre-defined distribution rules. Lead Management Systems such as LeadPro247 automates the lead routing process using a variety of rules such as sales territory (geography – county, state, zip code), product or service, etc.

The lead management system can also send automated emails to the prospective customer with introduction / welcome information, product details and the sales agent contact information.

In addition, the system will also send lead email alerts to the field sales reps intimating that a prospect in their area has shown interest in one of their services or products. The sales reps can immediately call up the prospect, even while on the road.

If there is an inside sales team, email lead alerts will go to them automatically. Based on the alerts they could qualify the leads and then inform the respective sales rep accordingly. This process helps prioritizing the sales leads and plan the follow-up activities.

Followup activities by the inside sales coordinators as well as the field sales reps can be updated in the system with brief notes. A suitable sales stage can be assigned to each lead for future follow up. Reminders could be setup along with follow up tasks.

The business owner / sales manager / administrator can view the entire sequence of activities from their computer systems in real time. The lead tracking and management system also includes comprehensive lead tracking and summary reports in the analytics module. For example, leads can be summarized and viewed by Lead Source / by Sales Rep / by Product, etc.

Each prospect’s profile, right from capture to the current stage, can be viewed in one place with all the activities such as email messages sent, followup tasks and notes, telephone calls and personal visits.

When a sale is closed or a prospect is lost, the status can be updated for proper filing and future reference. During the sales process, one or more email messages can be sent to the prospect via event triggered drip email campaigns. This is part of lead engagement and nurturing process.

Online Surveys can also be used to engage the prospects and get feedback during and completion of the sales process.

Lead Management as a Web Based Software

Most lead management services are available as a web based software unlike the traditional server or PC based solutions. Hence the system can be configured in a few hours for a specific business. Using a web based lead management system is much easier than the traditional software. Above all, there is no need for any upfront investment as the fees will be paid as a reasonable monthly subscription.

Business Owners, do you need to know where your small or medium business stands in Online Visibility? Are you already spending money on online advertising such as Internet Yellow Pages (IYP), Googles Adwords and Local Search marketing? AmIvisible service might help you in providing a better understanding. Your Internet Lead Generation capabilities (via SEM / SEO / Web 2.0 tools) are directly proportional to the online visibility of your business to the local community.

AmIvisible.org is a service for local business owners who are interested in understanding and improving their online visibility. The service shows how visible any given business is to potential customers, compared with its direct, local competitors. By covering millions of web pages on the leading search engines, yellow pages directories and popular local search sites, AmIvisible.org provides the most comprehensive analysis of local businesses’ online visibility.

AmIvisible is a unit of Palore (www.palore.com), the largest provider of SMBs (small and medium businesses) online information. Palore has been serving the SMB online advertising industry for the past four years, publishing reports on leading publications such as Search Engine Land and speaking regularly at industry conferences.

The service is available free of cost for businesses. If you are interested in improving your online visibility with SEM, SEO and Local Search experts, the service can also refer to experts and online marketing agencies in the respective fields.

The service is currently in beta testing in several US markets and will expand nationwide soon. Head to AmIvisible.org today and check out if your business shows up and how visible your business is on the internet.

Just as first responders save more lives, marketers and sales professionals who respond to the prospects first have very high probability of converting the leads to customers.

We all know that first responders such as fire service personnel, paramedics, police and doctors value the first hour after an emergency as ‘golden hour’. Actions taken in the golden hour saves countless lives and damage to the properties. Responding to a prospect who has raised his / her hand with an online registration or quote request is no different.

When a lead comes through your sales lead tracking and management software system, make sure that you respond in minutes, not in hours or days. Even if the product or service that you are selling has a long sales cycle, it is essential to reach out to the prospects at the shortest possible time lag. Note that an autoresponder (or drip email)  message sent by lead system is not a replacement for your personal telephone call or email message.

Also, it does not matter if you are selling to businesses (B2B) or consumers (B2C). Remember that you are selling to people in either case. Decisions are made by human beings, not soul less corporations!

Here are the keys for increasing lead conversion:

• Respond to prospects in Minutes, not Hours or Days
• If the prospects are not yet ready for sale, nurture with resources such as:
  • • Whitepapers
    • eBooks, Presentations, etc.
    • Webinar recordings
    • Newsletters
    • Tutorial Videos
    • Case studies and success stories
• Stay in touch via phone calls and emails with the leads until they are ready to move to the next stage.
• Determine the frequency of touches and use appropriate contact methods

Establishing a process to monitor,  respond and track the inbound marketing leads is a critical requirement in your marketing and sales strategy. Don’t let another lead slip through the cracks by delaying your first response!

Why use Lead Management best practices and tools? Real estate professionals should leverage the internet and social media for real estate lead generation and lead tracking and management software tools to nurture, engage, follow-up, and convert prospects to customers.

Here is the slide deck from the presentation made by Jonathan Nicholas for a leading real estate organization. He captures the gist of internet marketing for real estate agents and brokers in this short presentation.

Though this presentation is with reference to lead management for real estate professionals, real estate lead generation and internet marketing, these concepts can be used by any marketer / organization generating / buying internet leads such as Insurance agencies and Mortgage agents, brokers and loan officers.

While this blog serves as a lead management resource center for small and medium sized businesses and marketing professionals, a dedicated blog has been launched by LeadPro247 lead distribution, tracking and management service providers to cater to the Insurance Lead management needs of Agents, Brokers and professionals. Insurance lead segment is one of the competitive areas in internet lead generation and agents have started using internet generated leads increasingly. The entire insurance lead generation and management domain has undergone a sea change in the past couple of years.

The blog is located at http://www.Insurance-Leads-Management.Com. The subjects covered in the resource center include Insurance lead generation, leveraging social media by agents, buying internet leads, evaluating third party lead companies and lead providers / vendors, assessing insurance lead quality, lead tracking best practices, lead delivery and tracking processes, drip emails (autoresponders) for lead nurturing and automatic follow-up, insurance lead tracking software tools, lead management tips, tricks and guidelines, automating routing of leads to insurance agents, and effective lead conversion methods.

The entire spectrum of the insurance industry is covered. Health, Life, Auto, Home, Commercial / Business, Annuities, Renters and other insurance lead management professionals can benefit from these resources. The insurance industry centric blog will be a great complementary tool in you are in the insurance service industry.

With the economy shrinking, Google, Microsoft and Apple ruling the digital world, news papers and magazines folding every month, it is no wonder that businesses are forced to follow their customers and consumers. It is doubtful if any business can survive without leveraging internet for sales lead generation, engagement and conversion. If you are a newbie to the Web Lead Acquisition world or just planning to test the waters, here is a mini guide on why buying internet leads could make business sense.

It does not matter what business you are in, internet can / should be leveraged for marketing and web leads generation. However online lead generation may not be for everyone; certainly not for the fainthearted as you can easily bleed with pay per click, media buying, SEO and other related approaches, if you don’t know what you are doing.

What are Internet Leads?

As the terminology implies, sales leads generated using web sites are referred to as Internet Leads or Website Leads. You can generate your own leads or you can buy the leads acquired by other lead generation companies. Landing pages, which are basic web registration forms, are used to get prospect information. Generally, minimal information such as name, email and phone number will be collected. While designing and creating landing pages may look easy, there is a lot of underlying technology to be understood and used in order to maximize the value and increase lead quality.

Once the landing pages are up and running, the next step will be driving consumer web traffic to these pages. This is where the traffic generation approaches such as PPC and SEO come into play. These processes are time taking and costly in terms of efforts as well advertisement costs. While you may start testing these procedures with very little money, the end results may be insignificant.

Why Buy Internet Leads?

Firstly, you cannot ignore internet as a lead generation medium. Over 65% of the consumers start their buying process on the internet, though the final conversion may happen off-site or even in brick and mortar retail settings. Secondly, you can focus on your business and core competency; you don’t need to become an internet wizard. Thirdly, it is affordable. You can test with small investment and then grow as you become comfortable with the process. Finally, it is fully scalable. You can buy 100 leads in a week, if you have the resources for follow up and conversion. The next week you can just by 25 leads, if your work load is heavy.

How to Buy Internet Leads?

The most important factors to be taken into consideration while buying leads generated by third parties are: (1) Quality of Leads, (2) Cost of Leads, and (3) Timely Delivery of Leads.

Unless the leads are of high quality, there is no meaning in buying leads. Hence focus on the lead vendors, their lead generation processes and web sites used, and their past history. You may take a look at the post on 10 Secrets of Successful Internet Lead Buying for great Conversion rates for related discussion.

Follow the following steps in your day to day operations:

• Receive the website leads in a Lead Tracking and Management system. Lead Providers might provide access to a basic lead retrieval and tracking system as part of Lead Generation and Distribution Software; however, if you are buying leads from multiple providers, you may be better off with your own software subscription.
• Distribute the leads received from the provider to your sales team / agents immediately. Your sales lead tracking system with a flexible automatic lead distribution engine (with sales territory management feature) will be of great benefit here.
• Nurture, Track and Manage prospects proactively. Leverage Drip Email Marketing function of your lead tracking system effectively to communicate with the prospects.
• Measure, Analyze and Improve on an ongoing basis. Lead analytics reporting provided by the lead management system will provide a lot of information to analyze and measure the lead quality and conversion statistics.

If you use videos for web lead generation on your web sites and blogs, and leverage YouTube as a medium, you got a big news. YouTube has announced that true High Definition (HD) videos at 1080p resolution will be supported. Currently the resolution is restricted to 720p. See their brief blog post on YouTube 1080p support.

Of course your video should have the 1080p resolution to playback in full HD. For those of you who have already posted videos in 1080p, the system will re-encode the video. If you are not in the game, it is high time to get into it and look for video cameras with HD support.

Regarding the video length, YouTube says that it should still be within 10 minutes. However, the file size will be much higher in the case of true HD video, so we can expect relaxation of file size limit soon.

Whether you are running a business or working for business, you just cannot ignore Social Media. Not anymore. It is not just about lead generation or sales growth. Social networking media combined with the web 2.0 tools and resources is becoming an ecosystem. Take look at the following brief video about social media and its impact on the consumers and businesses.

Obviously, you are buying internet leads right now or planning to buy leads in the near future. Otherwise you may not be on this lead management resources blog post. I keep hearing all the horror stories of buying leads and getting burnt. In fact, some of them who took a plunge by pumping lot of money into buying leads may have realized that running a business with leads generated on the internet is not an easy task. I hope that these stories are exceptions rather than wide spread events.

Just like any other business initiative, buying leads from external lead generation service providers also comes with its own inherent risks. However, the rewards are multi-fold, if you know what your are doing, have done the research, and following the rules.

Here are 10 secrets that everyone buying internet leads from lead providers or on the verge of getting into the game should know, understand and practice methodically.

1. Learn to generate some of your own leads: Well, unless you have been in the trenches, you would not have known the tricks of the trade. Whatever theoretical knowledge that you gain may not give you the depth of the understanding that you gain from actually doing lead generation. This is not to advise you to deviate from your core business practice and get into internet programming or avoid outsourcing. Once you understand the basic technology and issues in internet lead generation, you will become a pro in lead buying.
2. Evaluate the Lead Providers: Before handing over big chunks of money to lead providers, do evaluate a select list of providers. There are several resources both online and offline. Keep in mind that Big need not be Better always. In fact some small providers may be nimble, proactive and cheap!
3. Research on the Internet: Do your homework using the Internet. Compare the lead providers in your vertical. Whether you are in Debt settlement, Loan modification, Mortgage services, Insurance, Education or some other niche you can find many competing service providers.
4. Assess Lead Provider Website Resources: Most lead providers will have lots of information on their websites. Spend some time on these sites and understand the differences within various companies.
5. Study Lead Generation Methods: As mentioned in Step 1, if you know what it takes to generate leads, you can ask all the right questions. Review their lead generation sites, landing pages and registration forms. Understand the implications of collecting leads using various methods such as co-registration and incentivization.
6. Analyze the Landing Pages: Make sure that the content and instructions provided on the landing pages work for your business. Analyze the data collected as part of the lead capture and assess if it will work for your business scenario.
7. Focus on Quality of Leads: Unless the leads you buy convert in significant ratio, there is no meaning in buying boat loads of leads; your sales team will be frustrated and overwhelmed. Evaluate if you can buy pre-qualified leads and see if it will be cost effective. Understand the validations and verification procedures employed, if any, by the lead provider.
8. Decide: Exclusive or Shared leads? Exclusive leads will be pricey, but the conversion rates may be higher. Note that many lead providers such as mortgage, debt and insurance lead providers may not provide exclusive leads and may force you to choose Shared leads.
9. Recognize and utilize Good Lead Providers: You may have noticed some of the lead providers, even if they are new or small, will be better than others, easy to work with, flexible and provide great service. Recognize them and try to leverage their knowledge in lead generation industry and their experience with other customers.
10. Track and Manage Leads effectively: Do not start buying leads, unless a you have a internet sales lead tracking software system in place and understood what you can do with it. With lead management system, you can collect leads from lead providers directly, assign to your sales agents / reps, track the sales progress, and measure the performance in term of  lead conversion, agent productivity, and business results.

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Lead Response Management is the process of responding to and managing the inquiries / sales leads in a timely, consistent fashion. While choosing and deploying a Sales Lead Collection, Tracking and Management software system will help you in the process, this alone will not result in lead conversion. The business lead management software is just a tool in the hands of a marketer which helps to capture leads from internet and other sources, route to sales reps, provide real time alerts and management the sales process. Lead Management includes lead response management phase.

Lead Tracking and Management Processes

In the era of Internet Lead Generation and sky high expectations from the consumers and prospects, it is essential to equip yourselves with resources and lead management processes for achieving a great sales conversion rate. Here is set of great resources on lead response management and allied areas, including research studies from MIT and Kellogg.

http://www.leadresponsemanagement.org/research

If you are converting the leads for your business, then effective lead response management is a critical phase of your marketing and sales process.

If you are an internet lead generation company and distribute the captured leads to the buyers, it is essential to deliver the prospect information to the end buyers in real time using a lead collection and distribution software system as the delay in response will result in lost customers.