Lead Management is a term used in general business practice to describe

methodologies, systems, and practices designed to generate new potential business clientele,
generally operated through a variety of marketing techniques. Lead management facilitates a
business's connection between its outgoing consumer advertising and the responses to that
advertising. These processes are designed for business-to-business and direct-to-consumer
strategies. Lead management is in many cases a precursor to sales management and customer
relationship management. This critical connectivity facilitates business profitability through
the acquisition of new customers, selling to existing customers, and creating a market brand.
This process has also accurately been referred to as customer acquisition management.

The general principles of lead management create an ordered structure for managing
volumes of business inquiries, frequently termed leads. The process creates an architecture
for organization of data, distributed across the various stages of a sales process, and across a
distributed sales force. With the advent of the Internet and other information systems
technologies, this process has rapidly become technology-centric, as businesses practicing
lead management techniques have shifted much of the prior manual workload to automation
systems, though personal interaction with lead inquiries is still vital to success.

Along with its other related business practices--marketing, brand development, advertising,
and sales--the goal of an effective lead management initiative is to generate new business
revenue, increase visibility, and improve the general attitudes of potential clients and the
public at large for future business development.

A typical outline of a lead management process might follow the following steps:

1. Business engages in a range of advertising media (Lead generation).

2. Recipients of advertising respond, creating a Customer inquiry, or lead.
3. Respondent's information is captured (Inquiry Capture).
4. Captured information is then filtered to determine validity (Inquiry filtering)
5. The filtered leads are then graded and prioritized for potential (Lead grading)
6. Leads are then distributed to marketing and/or sales personnel (Lead distribution).
7. Leads are contacted for prospecting (Sales contact).
8. Contacted and uncontacted leads are entered into personal and automated follow-up
processes (Lead nurturing).
9. End result is a new business sale (Sales result).

While simple in scope, lead (or inquiry) flow process can become complex as clients,
prospective clients, and sales professionals interact. Interactions and subsequent actions
create a variety of potential outcomes, both productive and counter-productive to business
development. This ever-increasing number of scenarios creates functional disconnects, in
other words, critical opportunities to mishandle an inquiry that reduces or destroys its
potential value. Appropriate management of these scenarios is the function of lead
management.
Lead Management Architecture

Lead Generation

Generating a lead, or lead generation can relate to a myriad of marketing technologies and
methodologies. Regardless of how it is achieved, however, from an architectural perspective
lead generation is simply the ability to attract the interest of a consumer and capture enough
data to validate and prioritize their interest, then contact them.

A few examples:

1. Mortgage Lead Generation

LendingTree runs TV advertising that touts that "when banks compete, you win" and directs
you to visit lendingtree.com. After watching this advertisement, and being depressed that you
rent a 300-square-foot (28 m2) studio apartment, you flip on your computer and go to their
website.

Upon reaching the website, you surf around a bit and read some information about buying a
house, and how the mortgage process works with LendingTree. This convinces you to give it
a shot. You click a link to request information, and fill out a form on their Web site to
provide information about you: name, address, telephone number, estimated home price, and
so on. Once finished, you submit the information to LendingTree, and your information is
immediately compiled into an electronic lead.

2. White Paper Lead Generation

You are surfing the Internet and you decide there has to be a good way to make a lot of
money on the Internet. So, you go to Google and search for "make money on the Internet."
This search reveals an interesting link that says, "10 steps to becoming a millionaire using the
Web." Sounds good to you, so you click the link and arrive at a page with a brief sales pitch
for making money on the Web and a brief web form asking for you name and email in order
to download the sacred PDF white paper with the 10 steps. Once you have filled out the form,
submitted, and received your PDF—again, you are a lead.

3. Infomercial

You're at home, awake late at night due to insomnia, and while watching TV you see a paid
advertisement for the "Sleep Number Bed" by Select Comfort. Thinking that your old
mattress is falling apart, and one of the likely causes for your insomnia, your call the toll-free
phone number listed in the infomercial to receive more information about the product being
offered. An agent captures your information in a computer system, and agrees to mail you a
brochure discussing the features and benefits of the Sleep Number Bed. You are now a lead
in the system.

Lead acquisition and distribution

Lead acquisition is the first, and possibly the most critical potential disconnect in the lead
management process. With billions being spent on advertising expenditures,[1] in many cases
the value of those expenditures is reduced because relevant information from responses is not
collected or distributed. The value of this process is tightly linked to a variety of consumer
response theories that highlight the relevance and responsiveness of the customer experience
as being key ingredients in turning potential customers into actual customers. Once acquired,
the speed, accuracy, and relevance of response can greatly influence a potential consumer's
decision to buy, or not buy, a product or service.

One extremely relevant example of this process is the use of the Internet, online marketing,
and Web analytics for high-level lead generation. A consumer generally uses the Internet and
makes Internet inquiries for products and services out of a desire for convenience and
efficiency of their time. Consequently, they expect a timely, relevant response to inquiries
made. If the acquisition and distribution of data collected during their inquiry is not effective,
the consumer experience will be negative. No response, poor response, too-early or too late
response equals negative impact on consumer attitudes and behavior.

For this particular medium, the lead acquisition architecture generally consists of a Web form
to collect consumer data, a database to temporarily or persistently store that information for
subsequent distribution, and a software application to distribute the data at appropriate levels.

The distribution architecture will vary widely depending upon the objective of the lead
generation. Generation for the purpose of selling the inquiry itself to another organization
would typically include a methodology for selecting one or more buyers and then
transmitting the lead via a variety of potential means, like: XML, named-value pairs, fax,
email, telephone. In the case of leads generated for an organization's own use it may simply
consist of a web page to render the contents of the lead database or a simple email action
from the Web form itself.

Marketing & Sales Process Operations

Once the lead information is collected and distributed, it is then transferred to a marketing
and/or sales management department, who will continue to implement lead management
practices in pursuit of completion of a sale. Established lead management practices should
provide the needed connectivity and accountability between those two operational units, and
when managed properly, enhances the effectiveness of both operations.

The architectural relationship is much akin to the order carousel in a short order diner. This
carousel is the communication and accountability between the waiter and the cook. Without
this simple coordination orders would be lost, prepared incorrectly, or prepared in random
order missing the expectations of the customer.
For management teams with a solid foundation in lead management principles, the process
should create increased efficiency and accountability between marketing and sales activities.
As stated previously, the increasing technological foundation of lead and sales management
practices provides a number of "closed loop" data circuits, tracking the overall effectiveness
of everything from lead generation, to prioritization, to distribution, to final disposition, and
then back again to re-calibrate the process.

For marketing, this portion of the architecture primarily manages the analytics of the lead
generation, distribution, and disposition. For sales, the architecture provides a fast, accurate
method of distribution, in addition to improved management and accountability processes for
sales activity.

Communications

The central hub of the lead management process once the prior architectures are in place is
communication. Effective lead management principles requires intensive and accurate high-
level communication, both internally within organizations, and externally to the lead
inquiries.

Communications functions should include intelligent sourcing of inquiry information, and

provide appropriate vehicles for overt contacting methods such as phone, email, or other
communication forms. In addition to overt communication methods, technologies now also
now provide marketing systems the ability to do extensive lead nurturing activities through
automation systems, which often include opt-in email listings, automated telephone dialing
systems, or hard copy mailing lists to increase visibility, touch on customer need, and
increase brand visibility. In many cases, especially where inquiries may not be ready to work
with businesses immediately, it is crucial to maintain ongoing nurturing communications that
cultivate a lead into a future sales, and effective lead management practices include these
methods.

Analytics

The analytics architecture is the last, and once the other architectures are in place, the most
critical piece of an effective lead management system. This portion of the architecture allows
for the dynamic review and analysis of lead actions, marketing channels, and sales
performance.

For many organizations this information can be vital in assisting management teams make
decisions that improve production, return on investment, and the overall performance and
cost benefits of their marketing and sales strategies.

Optimizing Lead Management

As larger vendors work with partner organizations such as distributors (see distribution
(business)), resellers, brokers and other channel partners, those vendors often distribute leads
to their respective partners to provide a local contact to those prospects and also 'feed'
partners with new business opportunities. Today there are two major methods for distributing
sales leads to partners: Push or Pull.

PUSH The push method sends leads to specific partners assuming that those partners will
follow up and work on those leads. The challenge with 'push' is the fact that often the local
sales people may not be able to react immediately for various reasons: not available, busy, on
vacation... Many large vendors report disappointment when asked about their lead follow-up
rate through partners after the leads where pushed out to those partners.

Pull The pull method was invented and patented by a German Engineer, Axel Schultze, who
was frustrated with the lead follow up results of the push method and decided to let the
available and motivated sales people 'pull' leads from an online available system. Patent was
granted by the US Patent Office in May 2006. The pull method became widely accepted in
the high tech industry where thousands of resellers from companies including Avaya, Nortel,
Juniper and others distributed leads that way. The PULL Method became superior over the
PUSH method, and lead closure rates grew on average by 300% as white papers from
BlueRoads indicate.