Classifying Your Leads: A Step in Lead Scoring and Ranking

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Why is it very important for you to go through lead ranking or lead prioritization? There are too many reasons. First, not all leads are effective for your business, which means that there are just people who are not really interested in what you’re offering. If you have a mailing list to generate these sales leads, for example, there might be some of them who have accidentally listed their e-mail addresses. Second, even if your sales leads are potential leads, they still need to be classified according to your product segments. If you’re running an electronics website, not all of the leads will be buying cameras or mobile phones. Only a percentage of them will, and lead scoring will help you determine who these people are.

Common Classifications of Sales Leads

Before you can go on with lead prioritization or lead scoring, though, you have to come up with a set of criteria first. This way, it becomes a lot easier for you and you sales agent to classify every lead. To start with, you can classify your sales leads according to the following:

1. Product Segment. This is ideal for businesses that may be selling different types of products or offering variety of services. As mentioned, your sales leads may be interested in some products but not all. Thus, what you can do is to identify the product lines that you have and then check among the sales leads. You can make it more convenient for you if you can come up with different mailing lists for each product line.

2. Confidence Level. This talks about how easy or hard it will be for you to sell a particular product to your sales lead. The rule is that if the confidence level is high, you can expect easy lead conversion. The opposite will happen if the confidence level falls short. For instance, if you’re selling baby products online, you will have better chances with brand-new mothers than those women who have growing-up kids. When it comes to lead ranking or lead prioritization, those with highest confidence level should be the utmost priority.

3. Lead Value. This is perhaps the most basic classification level of your sales leads. All you need to do is to determine the worth of the lead based on the information that you have. Of course, those that are branded as high value should be the priorities of your sales agents, since it’s a lot easier for them to talk about products and services to high-value sales leads.

4. Existing Relationships. Your sales leads a few months ago can still be used as your sales leads now, especially if you have new products or services coming in. However, if you want to obtain greater success in this classification, you have to establish the relationship between your product now and the product before. For example, your sales leads who have bought or shown interest over coffee makers of a particular brand may also be worth checking out to once you start selling microwave ovens from the same company.

A Lead Prioritization Software Makes Things Easier

It may be a little surprising to know but there are still small-time companies that are doing lead scoring through the use of Excel sheets—that’s definitely not an issue, as long as you can manage it well. However, once your business starts to grow or you have too many leads to track, it becomes a problem. A lead prioritization program could be something that you need. You can assign values to your every lead and then sort them out based on their ranks.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

Finding out How Your Leads Work for You: Lead Analytics and Performance

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When you enter a particular marketing strategy, you would want to know how effective such a strategy is in creating the much-needed revenues your companies hanker for. This can be done with the use of lead analytics or lead performance tracking. Tracking and analyzing how your leads translate into dollars and cents can help you realize which types of leads are more lucrative for your business. The use of lead analytics is also ideal for those companies who want to streamline their marketing strategies to cover only the avenues that are in tune with the services and the products that they provide.

Lead analytics do not begin and end at the marketing side but continue on until a deal is concluded and a customer is billed. The analysis of how successful the lead is or how such a kind of lead can be beneficial to the company is often tracked from the beginning of the marketing process. You can say that the moment you and your company pitch the product to a prospective client is when the analysis of the program begins. It continues on to track how the prospect takes to the many different marketing tools you use to get them to essentially buy from you and your company. Analysis of the lead and the kind of lead that does succumb to your marketing ploys is often noted and taken into consideration by the company. Sometimes the performance of the agent who closes the deal is also taken into account when the analysis is being concluded.

The importance of lead performance tracking and the use of lead analytics is often seen in the decline or increase of sales for certain products and services as well as the rise and fall of the satisfaction of your leads. You can also find out the reasons why such a rise and fall is being seen in your marketing and what should be done or changed to remedy the situation. How you can determine where your marketing ploys fall off or are in need of major changes is done with the use of tools that show you the hows and whys of such a movement. Included in the tools used for such an analysis are scorecards or performance trackers that show you which sales team or marketing team is lagging in terms of producing favorable results for your company. Such an analysis will then help you determine a course of action that may involve a shifting around of personnel, a retraining of sales teams or marketing teams, a rethinking of strategies, and a whole lot of other solutions to address the poor performances that can be seen with your analysis.

If you are looking for a step up in the way you do your business and you wish to narrow down the areas where your sales and marketing strategies are lacking, you may want to consider putting a lead analytics program into your current setup. This kind of a program can help you effectively weed out the undesirable marketing strategies you may have put into place, help you determine who in your team is producing the kinds of results that you want and need, as well as find out why some of the people who work for you may be falling behind in terms of turning up revenues for the company. The use of such analytic tools can cut short the time it might take to figure out where you need to change things or where you need to focus your energies on to exact positive results. This is why more and more companies are looking to analytics and performance trackers to maximize their production capabilities.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

Sales Prioritization: Determining the Real Value of Sales Leads to Your Business

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It is definitely not a question that sales leads are very important for businesses. However, not all sales leads will be beneficial. That’s why it’s never enough to gather names. You have to filter them out until you can come up with your targeted sales leads.

Targeted sales leads are those individuals who have the highest interest to the product or service you’re offering. Since they already have the curiosity, it would not take long before you can sell your business to them. They are also the most eager to recommend you to their friends and family and would definitely be one of the loyal customers you’ll ever have in your company. Moreover, since you don’t need to spend more time with them in terms of your marketing efforts, you can definitely reduce your marketing costs.

But for you to come up with targeted sales leads among your thousands, you have to do one thing: lead ranking and lead prioritization.

Lead Ranking: the Different Categories of Sales Leads
So it becomes very easy for you to rank and prioritize your sales leads, it’s better to come up with categories. Each category, furthermore, should be properly described. Lead scoring is also an essential component during the categorization. The scores will be the basis of which of the following leads must be prioritized in terms of business marketing and promotion.

Here are a number of common classifications of your sales leads:

1. Far-off Leads. The profiles of these individuals are something that you really don’t know much about, only that they could possibly be interested of what you’re selling or offering to them. More often than not, they are not contacted by sales agents at all, and one needs more intensive research on them.

2. Sales leads from competitors. Your competitors can also be a great source of sales leads, and actually, it’s a good thing. First you don’t have to do much evaluating if they would have the same interest to your niche, considering that they have been customers of your competitors. You can also easily obtain their demographics. The problem, however, is that some of them may already be showing signs of loyalty to their company. It may take stronger marketing efforts before you can actually persuade them to be your customers.

3. Potential Sales Leads. If you happen to become part of a trade show or an exhibition, you may have come across individuals who show deep interest in your product or service, and if given a chance, they would love to get to know your business a little more. They are also vocal of potentially buying your product or using your service once you already go full blast into the market. It’s important that their contact details must be determined, as they can be one of the priorities among the sales leads.

Sales Prioritization: the Criteria
When you already have gone through the lead scoring, it becomes very easy for you to prioritize your sales leads. Nevertheless, it’s still important that you can compare the classifications with the different considerations that you can possibly use for your sales leads prioritization:

1. Existing customers should be one of the highest priorities. As much as possible, you should hold on to your existing customers, since they can definitely compose the bigger portion of your customer base. These are the ones that have already purchased a product from you and would definitely like to do a repeat. Moreover, these are also the best individuals to talk to when you have new products coming into the market. In reality, it takes less amount of effort to convince them to buy from you than when you’re marketing to fresh sales leads.

2. If there is time constraint, the sales leads should be treated with high priority. For example, if you’re running a marketing campaign that sales leads that purchase something from a given time period will be given 50 percent discounts, then these sales leads should be one of the priorities. Your goal is to make sure that they take the bait. Besides, convincing them to do something for you, either to buy a product or use a service, is the hardest. But once you’re over it, marketing with them is already somewhat convenient.

3. A sales lead that expresses great amount of interest is a priority. Interest is the start of everything, and when it’s basically very high, the sales lead should be a priority, so you can take action immediately. You don’t want his interest to wane.

Tip: Lead ranking and lead prioritization will be more convenient and systematic when you make use of a lead management software. You can easily group and filter your sales leads according to categories. The web-based ones can also be accessed by your sales agents, so they don’t end up ranking and scoring the same person twice.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com