Understanding Leads

Since we are going to work on Salesforce, a CRM product, its very important to understand the keywords here like Leads, Account, Opportunity and Contact.We'll start our discussion with Leads.
To put it in plain vanilla sentence, lets put it like this. Leads are the bread and butter of your company.Lead can be any person who is interested in your product or services.He/She has some signs of a prospective buyer.Lead can come from any campaign, a seminar, roadshow or just while shopping around in the mall.
Now,lets focus on the following topics:

• How to qualify a lead: If you have been in your business for a long time, you would know whats your clientele like.That does not mean that you take the yellow pages and start dialing the numbers right away. You need to spend enough time and money and do your due diligence to actually understand the prospective client. Lets assume you are in software services business and you provide all kinds of software solutions including web designing, eCommerce,training and consulting. Now, to identify leads for your business,you need to build a strategy. Lets first decide that we are going to work only on projects which would fetch us revenue of $100,000 or more.For this criteria, we need to target only those companies whose annual revenue is at least 10 times more than that.Now that we know what companies we need to target, we need to start our actual work.Make a list of at least 20 such companies. Go on their websites. Study their core business.Try to identify the areas where your services could be of help to them which would ultimately result in their progression. For E.g If a company is in retail business but it does not have a strong online presence then you have a  good chance here to market yourself. Make a prototype of an eCommerce website, call up the company,setup an appointment with the right person asking them for their time so you could give them  a presentation of your services which would be relevant to their company.Similarly, do the same task for all the 20 prospective clients that you have chosen. If out of 20 clients, at least 2 came back with interest in your services, you are good. In the worst case, if nobody showed up, don't give up. It was a good learning experience and now you know what works and what doesn't.
• Once qualified, how do we manage that lead: Now that we have identified leads, lets see how well we manage that lead. Leads should be assigned to the right salesperson. There are various Lead assignment rules in Salesforce which we'll see later. Right now, lets understand the very concept of Lead Management. Leads can be managed based on various factors like territory based, business domain expertise or simple some in-house rules.Don't give EMEA leads to your salesperson in USA.It might not work unless and  until there are some other factors governing the lead assignment.  It would be a good idea to have a complete data available of all your Leads which includes emails,phone numbers, activity,documents easily available. Every fortnightly, run a report on this. It would give you a fair idea about your potential customer's behavior in terms of their seriousness towards doing a business with you. Segregate them in Hot,Warm or Cold. Focus on the Leads with 'HOT' behavior  and try to convert them into a  business opportunity. Warm and Cold leads are equally important, don't ignore them. Maybe its just a matter of time.Make sure you do regular follow-ups and the turn around time in answering any queries raised  by the Leads should be real fast. However, the trick here is not to be too pushy with your clients or else it might back fire.
• Finally,how to convert that lead into a Sales opportunity: Now that we have some serious potential buyers in our list,the challenge is now how to convert them to a Sales opportunity.Start engaging your client.Try to get as many inputs as you can from them.Once the lead gets that comfort level about your services and delivery, he'll formulate the requirements for you. Work on those requirements with him.This client would have a budget and timeline for the project that he is going to work on. Now you are almost there. Sign an agreement with your client and you have a new Sales opportunity ready to work on.