Enhance Your Sales Lead Management for Inventory

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hi everybody my name is Josh Paul who here doesn't love inbound leads you create helpful insightful educational original content for your market and people just find you so they request a demo take a tour take an assessment download an e-book or a cheat sheet or a checklist and they come into your system as leaves inbound leads are amazing I grew my entire company using 100% inbound leads before we sold it but the thing about inbound leads is sales people don't know what to do with them a little story about me my first year using HubSpot to generate inbound leads this is a b2b software company and a you know thirty thousand dollar price point just so you know where I'm coming from I had generated they had taken them from 10 leads a month to 100 leads a month consistently I was so excited I had HubSpot setup I had the metrics and everything working ID leads coming in it's pushing a lot of them over to sales and after that first year I was walking into my my review meeting with the partners with a lot of swagger I was pretty excited to kind of gloat about what I had done and I sat across from them and I got the biggest shock of my life they said Josh I don't think this is gonna work out completely blindsided me I was devastated because I was at a point in my career where I felt like I was finally contributing but the thing was none of those leaves that I had passed over to sales none of those inbound leads had turned into revenue and what I did at that point is I had a bunch of choices I stuck with it they kept me around give me one more chance but the thing was I had to plateau my lead generation or at least stop putting so much time into generating leads and I had to become a student of b2b sales and understand how to get a sales team who was used to handling a few leads a month served on a silver platter contract ready to go ready to do a demo how to get them to get excited about in mark inbound leads because inbound leads come in at all different stages of the sales process that's the beauty of it you're getting people who are researching in so you're building those relationships sooner instead of just people who are ready to buy so while the sales conversations are different you're getting many more leads so what I had to do is I had to understand lead management and this is where really where I've spent the bulk of the past few years is not helping people on the traffic side and the lead generation side but helping them set up lead management for their company because they're like I'm getting traffic I'm getting 300 leads a month 400 leads a month a thousand leads a month but they're rotting on the vine and they're slipping through the cracks and that's the whole purpose behind lead management is to prevent leads good leads that you're spending money on you're investing your marketing investments your lead generation investments are bringing in leads you don't want those to go to waste nothing rots on the vine nothing falls through the cracks so let me take you through what lead management is and the five pillars that you need to get right to have a strong lead management process that helps you turn leads into revenue all right so lead management is the process of knowing what to do with leads where they go in your CRM what data gets changed how to track leads how to follow up with leads how at a management level you can look at any lead and know where they are in the sales process and from a sales level where you can know what to do and spend your time selling instead of entering data into your CRM instead of trying to research and figure out where a lead is and anyone from your team can go into that same system and say oh I know exactly where that lead is in the process whether it's on the management level level whether you're going on vacation as a sales rep and you need to hand it off to somebody everybody's playing from the same process playbook so the first thing you need is definitions and these are clear company-wide agreed-upon definitions for what turns into a deal you know what gets a lead on to the what is that criteria what are the definitions for all of the deal stages what is the lead status what are the definitions for all of the different lead status how are they used how do you track next actions if the next action is set to connect or qualifying or scheduled demo what does that mean so that everybody is playing from the same playbook and that means your data is clean and consistent so definitions is number one nothing moves forward without them what is an mql what is your definition for an SQL making sure everybody is an agreement as to what those are this is a massive white boarding workshop that we conduct with our clients before we even touch the technology alright second thing is the process when a lien comes in and something it's sometimes it's straightforward you have one product one market one way that leads come in and where does it get routed what are the steps of the salesperson takes to connect with that lead if they connect with them great where does it go if they don't connect with them if they connect with them and they're qualified but not ready to talk to sales yet what happens what are all the scenarios that's what we call them in our workshops what are the all the scenarios that you need to be able to accommodate at every point in the sales process mapping that out and then you have to go deep and complicated to make it as simple as possible I did a recent podcast episode on on that where it's not even if you're using a simple CRM you need to go and do that deep dive into your complex sales process in order to bring it back up and make it make it as clean and simple for your sales team as possible the next thing is automation there's so much that you can do people think of automation they think marketing they think drip campaigns the big value for automation is actually on the sales side and helping keep the data clean and having sales touch as few fields as possible and everything that happens on the back end to make sure that your lead management framework stays intact the next thing is accountability and make helping setting up accountability so that your sales team knows what they're responsible for which metrics which they're gonna get dinged on manually you know the sales manager is going to come over and say hey this is this month in which that the system is going to automatically remind them of so making sure that because your data is clean and because people are mapping their sales process to the the lead management structure built into your CRM then making sure that they know what they're accountable for and so to easy without the definitions the process and the automation it's too easy for salespeople to to fudge their numbers yeah I'm working on that yeah I need to follow up with that it's not salespeople as phones because there is no lead management process built into your system so accountability is really really important then the last thing is is reporting so with reporting that's where because you have your definitions in your process everything else becomes clear it's we save it till the end it's the last part but you're your managers your marketing managers your executives your sales VPS get to step out of the technology and say all right here's what I would like to see as a lay person from a business level here's what I would like to be able to report on daily weekly quarterly monthly and because you have your data structured in that way because you have a lead management process in place you're able to get that reporting and make it part of their their process before they go into a sales meeting they know exactly the three reports that they need to look at when they address sales people in that sales meeting because they have much more data to work with and they've ever had before because they really didn't have a lead management process in place when they address their salespeople the salespeople know exactly what they're talking about you're on the same page saying we're trying to move this metric on this property to this metric great let's all we're all on the same page so the accountability is a lot easier to boil it down lead management is essential to any b2b company if you have the concept of a lead if somebody is doesn't buy right away if there's a considered sales process maybe there's multiple decision-makers maybe it's one decision-maker but you're not making closing the deal in one call there's a follow-up and there's the reason this is important the reason to get this right is because with inbound leads you go from 10 a month to 100 a month there 200 a month and you it snowballs really quickly you need a way a very simple way to be able to identify where people are in the process when you come in the morning as a sales rep you need to be able to identify alright here's what I need to call it here's what I need to call them about and here's when I need to do it you can look at your entire week that way because today you're gonna get 20 more leads assigned to you or 10 more leads assigned to you and every lead is going to be a different point in their buying process or in your sales process if you look at it that way so you need a lead management framework to be able to manage that without overwhelming your salespeople because when they get overwhelmed they stop following up with those leads those leads stop closing and who gets blamed if leads stop closing it's usually the marketing department that's why that we're talking about sales and lead management here but this message is just as important for the marketers out here so what it with lead management you need definitions clear definitions you need your lead management process you need automation on the back end there's going to be specific to your sales process that you've overlaid on to your CRM you need accountability built in and that communicated to your team and then that allows you to set up your reporting if you have any questions about this to go ahead and comment on this video I'm really excited to share this with you guys and I'll see you online