4 Principles for Effective Lead Management

Lead management is part of any business that has leads — that is, any business that requires consideration before making a purchase decision.

There are many organizations that lack a cross-functional process that’s required in order to manage leads. It’s not that they don’t want to have a process, it’s that the organization’s leadership just hasn’t made it a focus. Sad but true.

In order to have a lead management process that works, you need these four components:

Shared Vocabulary

Set Expectations

Clear Accountability

Constant Communication

Shared Vocabulary

Seems simple, but if you think about it, makes complete sense. Whenever you’re part of a group, or a team, or a family even, you tend to make up words, or use phrases, or acronyms, that don’t mean much to those who are outside of the group, or team, or family. We do this because it allows us to have a tighter bond with the people that we spend a lot of our waking lives with — but at the same time, you wouldn’t use that same language outside of your close circle because you know you’re not going to be understood.

Yet, when Marketing talks about what a “Lead” is and when Sales talks about what a “Lead” is, they are talking about different things.

This, of course, creates a lot of confusion since two distinct groups use the same word to mean different things, and the result is a miscommunication resulting in mutual frustration.

Example:

Marketing Definition: Lead — A person with a valid email address that has expressed an interest in a product/service

Sales Definition: Lead  — A person from a company in my territory who talked to me at an event.

You solve this problem by bringing different groups together and defining the key terms, words, and acronyms that you use in your daily lives so that everyone has proper context and understanding of the language, and then language becomes the foundation on which you build everything else on.