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In most organisations the sales & marketing cycle goes like this. The marketing programmes generate leads, the leads are passed to the sales team, the sales team follows up the leads. More than half are qualified out right away, the rest go through the sales cycle with perhaps 10% of the original leads being converted to sales.
So what happens to the other 90% of leads that marketing generated? They get marked as “Dead”, or “Lost”, or deleted, and are never seen again.
Yet these are people who were interested enough in your organisation to have a conversation with a sales person, and although they may no longer be “hot” leads, compared to most of the names on the marketing database they are at least warm.
When a lead is qualified out at an early stage it is often for budget, timescale or fit. When a deal is lost at a later stage, it is often to a competitor or because the project is cancelled. In all of the above cases though, things can change after six months: requirements change, priorities are reassessed, the competitor’s product didn’t live up to expectations, the contact moved to another company or came across another requirement. In the slagheap of “dead” leads are nuggets of opportunity just waiting to found, probably a higher percentage than from the rest of your marketing database who have never contacted you at all.
When a lead is qualified out or lost it should never be deleted but should be passed back to the marketing system for incorporation into subsequent campaigns, so that if and when a need occurs again you are still on their radar. The best way to make sure that this happens is to keep all the sales and marketing data in the same system, so that data can easily be moved from marketing to sales and back again at the click of a mouse, and the sales and marketing history of interactions follows the contact.
Get the sales people to pass the leads back to marketing, and let marketing see
if they can turn them back into new leads again.
There’s gold in them thar data!
One of the many reasons that users fall out of love with CRM systems is when they are slow, so we spend a lot of time here at Really Simple Systems making sure
that our system is “lightning fast”, as our user CommNet describes it. As well as optimising our code, we recently upgraded our servers and replaced the back end database with MySQL, the open source database that powers some the world’s largest web sites, including Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr. Like Google, we now put our page times on each
page request, and are currently running at 0.03 seconds to bring up a complete Account screen.
We welcome accountants Bentley Jennison, solicitors Kingsley Napley, engineers DSSR, the Leatherhead Golf Club, logistics specialist Advanced Processing and payment specialists Alaric as new Really Simple Systems users, among many others. Thank you all for choosing Really Simple Systems!
There’s a new range of CRM case studies on our web site.
Drivers called Ben and Sophie are most likely to crash their cars in the UK, drivers called Ian and Ann the least likely. Dean, Alex, Natalie and Maria were also high risks. Thanks to Admiral Insurance who unearthed this gem.
Chaucer, the father of English literature, hath a blog. Verily. We particularly like "Travel Tips from Sir John Mandeville, in whych gentil rederes write with questiouns of travel". More at Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog.
Help a friend or colleague, point them our way and we’ll send you a few bottles of Hunter Sauvignon Blanc for your trouble.
You may not know that Yorkshire has its own airline. The promotional video is at Yorkshire Airlines or search YouTube for “Yorkshire Airlines”.
Really Simple Systems offers straightforward, easy to use hosted CRM systems to companies of all sizes. To find out more about how simple CRM can be, please visit our home page.
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