How Lead Components Work Together
The lead life cycle includes an automated process that captures leads and then prioritizes them for sales engagement through a scoring and ranking process. Leads are distributed to appropriate sales resources for further lead qualification, follow-up, and conversion.
A sales lead cycle ends when salespeople convert a lead to an opportunity or when they retire a lead. A lead is retired if no possibility exists for converting the lead to an opportunity.
Lead Life Cycle
Leads are automatically monitored for sales representative acceptance. Unaccepted or rejected leads are reassigned as appropriate. The quality of the lead is continuously reviewed and adjusted by the lead owner at different stages of the lead life cycle. The lead owner can be a marketing resource or a sales resource, depending at what stage the lead is at in its life cycle. The lead life cycle is captured in the following sections:
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Lead Generation
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Lead Qualification
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Lead Distribution
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Lead Assessment
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Lead Conversion
Lead Generation
Leads are generated and captured from many different sources, such as:
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Campaign responses
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Third-party lead sources
Flexible lead import, customer and contact creation, and deduplication ensure that sales lead generation efforts are optimized. For example, the lead import process checks whether leads represent new or existing customers. For new customers, data must be created for the lead. If the lead is an existing customer, then part of the lead import process checks to ensure customer and lead information isn't duplicated.
Lead Qualification
Marketing departments help with the lead qualification process to ensure that only qualified leads are handed over to sales. Leads are typically ranked as Hot, Warm, or Cool. Leads are further qualified by the use of company-specific standard questions to score a lead. Lead scores are numeric values typically ranging from 1 to 100, in which a high score represents high quality.
It isn't good practice to let stale leads build up. Standardized criteria for lead qualification ensure that quality leads reach the sales representative and help maximize the conversion rate from leads to opportunities. For example, your organization has criteria and processes for ensuring that leads are either developed or retired within 30 days. When the lead age is greater than 30 days and the rank is Warm, Marketing reassigns the leads for follow-up by an internal telemarketing group. If leads can't be qualified or further developed to revenue opportunities, then rejected leads are reassigned or manually set to retired.
Lead Distribution
As the qualification of leads progresses into real potential prospects, assignment manager uses expression-based rules to associate one or more internal sales representatives with each lead. If the lead is associated with either a sales prospect or a sales account, then assignment manager uses territory definitions to associate (typically one) internal territory with each lead. The sales representative newly assigned to the lead can be related to the lead record directly through the lead team or indirectly through a territory associated with the lead. The sales representatives can view and update those leads assigned to them in the lead work area and can claim ownership of the lead by accepting the lead.
Other assigned resources can view and update the lead, but they can't make themselves the owners. If a sales prospect changes to a sales account by adding an address, assignment manager is automatically called during the next automated assignment cycle. Depending on the assignment logic, the lead can be reassigned to a different territory or sales resource. If the assigned sales representative takes no action on a lead for several days, then the lead can be manually reassigned to another sales representative.
Lead Assessment
Sales representatives must evaluate the quality of the information that they have received for the lead. They determine whether the details are sufficient to reach out to the customer and assess whether a lead is worth pursuing with the help of preconfigured assessment templates. Assessment templates help qualify the lead by:
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Reviewing the content shared with the customer during a campaign
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Framing the lead in the context of the campaign
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Ensuring the salesperson understands the information sent to the customer
You use the lead assessment feature to assess leads. Predefined questions help determine the likelihood of the lead being accepted by Sales. For example, you're a sales representative and you ask the customer a series of questions created by Marketing and Sales to assess the quality of the lead. You record the answer of each question and the lead assessment tool automatically factors the answer into the assessment score of the lead. At the end of the call, you note that the assessment lead score is high, so you request that the lead is assigned to the direct sales team. If the lead score was low, then you might want to retire the lead. If the lead needs qualifying, then you can decide to leave it in your list of leads for follow-up. Finally, if the lead is good, but the potential revenue opportunity is less than a predetermined monetary amount, for example, twenty-five thousand dollars, then you can convert the lead to an opportunity to pursue as part of the sales cycle.
Lead Conversion
After establishing that the lead has potential, the sales representative can convert the lead to an opportunity. You can schedule meetings and presentations with your lead contact to move the opportunity along the sales pipeline. To track the progress of the lead, you can capture contact notes and associate them with the contact and opportunity.
As the lead progresses through its life cycle, decisions to retire the lead are based on reasons such as:
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You can't verify the customer and lead details.
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The customer isn't interested in pursuing the lead any further.