Start your sales and marketing conversation now to set up a full lead management life cycle

Lead Management is a critical framework within a business’ entire sales process. It’s no surprise many organizations struggle to not only generate quality leads but also to manage them. From creating and nurturing quality leads to qualifying sales-ready leads, marketers are responsible for structuring the seamless lead management life cycle that meets their organization’s best interests.

The first step in building a lead management process is to bring sales and marketing together. Hold a workshop to talk through all the activities that go into nurturing a lead from start to finish. Here are some talking points you may consider:

1. Set a goal for each sales and marketing team collectively and collaboratively
2. Define what a lead is to both sales and marketing
3. Lay out the entire sales process from start to finish. Define the following terms:
   1. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
   2. Sales Accepted Leads (SALs)
   3. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)
4. Set up a lead scoring model
   1. Define the criteria for a lead to proceed to the next stage of the lead life cycle
   2. Decide what score a lead becomes sales-ready
   3. Determine how to pass a lead onto sales
5. Decide when a lead should be deleted or recycled from the marketing database
6. Define the process after business is closed/won for further sales opportunities

Once a full lead management life cycle is agreed upon between sales and marketing teams, marketers can begin structuring the detailed process for the marketing portion of the lead management funnel. Using a tool to automatically send leads through the journey is one way to easily and steadily manage leads. Before mapping the lead journey, you may consider the following:

1. Inquiries
   1. Who is the target audience?
   2. What are the sources of inquiries?
   3. How will you assign leads (based on territory, product, status, etc.)?
2. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
   1. What interactions and behaviors do you expect from an ideal customer?
   2. What quality are you looking in leads?
   3. How do you score leads?
3. Sales Accepted Leads (SALs)
   1. At what point does a lead become sales-ready?
   2. How does a SAL get handed over to sales? What’s the process?

Setting up the full lead management life cycle is probably the most challenging task in sales and marketing planning. Though, once that’s figured out, your next steps to drawing out detailed processes will be much easier and your sales and marketing will be more effective.

Coffee + Dunn is an industry leading connected experience partner uniquely focused on building effective customer engagements through the strong alignment of technology, operations, and strategy.​ Our award-winning services enable customers to drive growth and optimize value across various industries, including financial services, professional + collegiate sports, manufacturing, healthcare and education.