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when we're looking at a lead management framework I think the key areas are really getting both sales and marketing to the table because in some organizations we still find that they're not actually talking to each other very siloed in a lot of times when we first come in the second piece is getting that common interface point and that's usually what exactly is the definition of a lead and marketing hands lead over to sales and sales is passing something back to marketing they need to know that they both agree on what they're passing over to each other so the model for effective lead management is a term that we use called the demand funnel and that funnel has different stages to it and the very top stages are things like the inquiry stage that's where we're generating raw net new leads and as you move down different stages of the funnel like marketing qualified leads or sales accepted leads these essentially are like inventory bins but it doesn't happen automatically this is actually a framework that you need to implement within your marketing automation and CRM system and the way to do that is to actually sit down with sales and marketing and agree upon a taxonomy what are those stage is going to be called then to apply lead scoring and use a scoring system to move leads down the different stages of the upper part of the funnel and then hand off the sales so they can take it from sales accepted all the way ideally to close an important thing to keep in mind is that the demand funnel unlike manufacturing a product we're about 95% of what you put into the manufacturing process comes out as a finished good and demand generation it's only about 5% and that really talks about the criticalness of this demand funnel and that every stage is well defined the service level agreements and who owns each stage of the funnel is really important and the systems you use for tracking movement down the funnel all of those pieces have to be put together in order to operationalize this demand funnel without doing so it's really going to impact your conversion rates if you look at your lead management framework as the foundation for every other part of the demand factory you can see that without it any technologies or processes built on top of that just are never going to be very rocks now there are immediate benefits to it and then there are a longer-term benefits to it the immediate benefits to building out your lien management framework is visibility into what is happening with your demand funnel with the leads as they move from stage to stage you can see suddenly it's no longer just a bunch of leads in marketing and just the sum being passed over sales it's actually what is happening with these leads going through so given that the demand funnel is a framework often the question is well how do you apply scoring and lead nurturing to move records down the funnel well the first place let's start with scoring lead scoring primarily is going to be used to separate the enquiries from the marketing qualified leads you have a really good lead scoring system you're able to detect what's not ready to get handed off to sales what needs more engagement and that's where lead scoring can separate between your inquiries and your marketing qualified leads well how does something go from an inquiry to a marketing qualified lead how do you get more engagement and a greater profile and that's where nurturing comes in so by automating the touch points and the communication with your prospects you can track and see are they getting more engaged are they reading my emails opening the emails and downloading content on the website and so nurturing drives more engagement which increases their lead score and that helps move the records down the funnel once you have the framework in place then you can operationalize it it's in your system everybody's following the same path and basically you know where your lead is on that journey it's all going the same way bi-directional you're all in sync and you're just going to have a much more successful lead management process you