Managing Leads

Consider the various ways new customers interact with your business:

These are broad categories, but your first contact with a customer, will likely be through one of these methods. Further more, the contact may be initiated by you, or simply by the customer. For example:

• Phone: You may cold-call a prospective list of customers or alternately, you may receive enquiries from customers who have simply seen your web site or an ad in the yellow pages.
• eMail: You may receive email enquiries or people may reply in repsonse to email based marketing initiatives such as newsletters.
• Web: You may receive enquiries from a web based "contact us" form. In addition, you may promote your web site through various marketing initiatives such as Google Adwords.

Your business may have additional lead sources not covered here depending on your specific marketing methods. Perhaps you have door-to-door salesmen, or run campaigns via SMS text messaging. The point is, there are many sources from which you may receive contact from potential customers.

A CRM system will first of all provide you a unified way of managing those leads. So for example, with SugarCRM, enquries through a web based contact form can automatically create leads in your system. Similarly, the email integration allows one click lead creation once you've received an email. Cold call lists can be imported into the system and integrated with your telephony system so that staff can work systematically through a of leads.

Furthermore, by tracking the lead source of each and every lead, you can report on the success of marketing campaigns and measure the return on investment of those campaigns.

Key point: What is the difference between a lead and a customer?

A lead is someone who may, one day, become a customer but you're not yet sure if they will. For exmple, let's say you arrive at the office at 9am, and there is a message on the answer machine, "Hi my name is John Smith. I'm calling about your ABC product. Can you call me back on...." This lead may well become a customer. But it does need qualifying. Perhaps the caller isn't interested in buying ABC product at all. Perhaps, they're actually a supplier offering you a better price than your existing supplier. In short, until you talk to them, you can't decide.

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