I estimate that about two out of every three conversations I have with organizations today revolve around lead management. Some of these conversations focus on predictive models that estimate the value of prospects. Some conversations talk about a seamless integration between sales and marketing efforts. Some conversations talk about nurturing opportunities into closed sales. Yet other conversations talk about campaign management. And some talk about lead scoring. Is lead management really that complicated, varied, and ambiguous? I don’t think so, but I do believe all of these conversations regard core lead management processes and technology.

As organizations develop their strategies to react to the economy, one thing is clear: every opportunity counts. Whereas an older definition of lead may be more like a prospect, nowadays a lead is any business opportunity. Leads come from suspects, prospects, customers, and partners. The core principle of lead management is that each lead coincides with a very specific, tactical, timely, and relevant reaction. To enable this type of trigger-based marketing, customer intelligence systems need to consolidate leads, score them, route and assign them, take action and evaluate the result.

Lead Consolidation

Though marketers are always talking about the exploding amount of outbound channels at their disposal, the same explosion has occurred with inbound channels. Inbound inquiries, requests, quotes, and interactions are perhaps more varied than their outbound counterparts. When you consider that many organizations partner with external web sites (like insurance or mortgage quote sites), the different structures and frequency of inbound lead generation is staggering. Numbers like 250,000 to 600,000 to millions of leads a month (sometimes per week) are not out of the ordinary.

Consolidating these leads into something that can be interpreted and actionable is the first step. The different lead management vendors take different perspectives of how to address the issue. Most of the lead management vendors like Eloqua, Unica, or Marketo have some sort of import technology in order to load leads into the system. Some are very sophisticated and require proprietary or open standards programming. Others are simplistic like importing a file into Excel. The more sophisticated vendors can address data in a variety of formats like flat files, database tables, XML, or webpage tagging. Some vendors are real-time focused and some are batch-focused.

What none of the vendors seem to be addressing is the difficult process of de-duping, standardizing, and merging leads. Inevitably, the same lead/customer may come through a variety of inbound sources and not understanding that it is the same customer or business could reduce efficiencies or create multiple, inconsistent reactions to the behavior. For this reason, consolidating leads into your marketing database or data warehouse makes quite a bit of sense. However, real-time or near real-time lead processing requirements could make that architecture choice infeasible.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is part of the lead management process. Scoring typically entails assigning weights, priorities, or values to certain events, behaviors or states. For instance, if you sell your product to travel agencies, an agency with 100 agents may be scored higher than an agency with 5. From this point, things can get much more complicated. Some applications like Pardot, WebTrends, or LeadLife accept clickstream information (sometimes real-time clicks) through page tagging. These clicks or actions could then be leveraged in a lead scoring algorithm. For instance, downloading a white paper may score high, but completing an online quote may score higher.

Unica can integrate their predictive modeling technology into the scoring algorithm. For instance, models can be built to predict responsiveness to specific offers or products. Or most powerfully, models can be used to place leads into certain value segments (or future value segments). However they are calculated, scores provide insight into how leads may be routed or leveraged once received.

Lead Routing and Assignment

There is absolutely no doubt that every salesperson would like the hottest, best leads (in fact, wasn’t there a movie with Alec Baldwin based solely on this concept?). However, that is typically not the way the world works. Leads are typically routed based on corporate rules (many times tied to compensation), the lead score, availability or relevance. Algorithms that are typically leveraged in these implementations include:

• Match leads to resources in their geography.
  
  
• Match industries in business to business scenarios.
  
  
• Match to product experts.
  
  
• Round robin or random assignments.
  
  
• Match to resources that have availability and the bandwidth to service the lead.
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• Match to the best resources based on metrics like win/loss percentage or closed percentage.
  
  
• Leveraging the lead score to understand the priority of the lead.

Many organizations use a combination of these algorithms and add their unique rules. Whereas lead management was originally envisioned to make sure the right sales representative received the right leads, the idea of channel is now very prevalent in routing algorithms. For instance, some leads may be serviced by direct sales, others may be serviced by different marketing channels like e-mail, telemarketing, or direct mail. This allows a firm to rightsize their investment in different leads.

Still, in other cases, leads may not be assigned in a completely automated fashion. Sometimes leads may be forwarded to managers who then manually assign leads to individuals. As resources leave the firm, leads need to be forwarded to new salespeople and territory to make sure they are not forgotten.

Actions and Reactions

Technically, the simplest piece, though arguably the most important piece, is to decide what to do with the lead once it is assigned and routed. For direct sales organizations, these technologies provide user interfaces so that users can work the lead. These screens display leads almost like an e-mail inbox (a leadbox). Users can annotate the lead, set up follow-up activities, and disposition the leads (closed, lost, no opportunity, etc.). More proactively, alerts can be instituted based on changes (or non-changes) to the information. Escalation rules can be constructed so that un-worked or stale leads are automatically forwarded, sales reps are proactively notified of new hot leads, or management is identified as leads enter a certain life cycle or disposition.

For many organizations, the direct sales channel is not the only method of lead follow-up. For more cost effective follow up, telemarketing or email may be used. These functions look more like standard campaign management. Unica combines its campaign management offering with its leads module to deliver this type of functionality while Eloqua, Marketo, LeadLife, and Pardot provide an all in one solution for email delivery.

Evaluation

What would any marketing process be without closing the loop? As with all marketing response attribution, lead conversion and tracking can be extremely difficult. If sales users leverage the application’s user interface and fill out the dispositions or statuses, closing the loop becomes fairly easy. However, many clients send the assigned leads to channels and applications outside the lead management system.

For instance, some clients perform e-mail through ESPs like Exact Target. Or some direct sales organizations already have a CRM tool like salesforce.com, RightNow technologies or Microsoft CRM where the lead is worked and dispositioned. Or most difficult, some companies, like Media, send leads to their partners or clients. In the case of Media, leads generated by their content offerings may be sent to advertisers as a revenue generating activity. In these external assignment cases, partners must send back results to completely close the loop.

All of these disconnected processes make it difficult to figure out lead conversion rates. Data in these external systems (or external organizations) must be reintegrated with the lead information to produce reports, insight, and understand performance of the different follow up activities and channels. Unica’s open architecture, on-premise model, and response attribution function plug this hole while the hosted vendors like Marketo and LeadLife are adapting their systems to become more open and integrate bidirectionally with other systems.

Some vendors like Pardot and Eloqua have pre-built integrations with CRM vendors while others provide an open API to perform the integration.

Summary

As marketing makes investments in generating leads, it becomes critical that the hand-off between marketing and sales is as seamless, efficient, and effective as possible. Sales and marketing executives are pressuring their organizations to make the most of every opportunity, and excuses of data transfer failures are becoming less tolerated. At the same time, executives want to make sure that lead follow up is cost efficient by making sure that the right investment is made in the right lead. Not all leads are created equally.

Lead management vendors are stepping up to provide consolidation, scoring, assignment and analytics so that organizations can capitalize and quantify their lead volumes. The exact right approach and right solution probably differs by organization, but this market is heating up and vendors are racing to provide new versions in order to leapfrog the pack. Decisions on the right vendor for you can easily be evaluated by looking at your requirements regarding lead consolidation, lead scoring, assignment, and evaluation.

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