Data 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,.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.
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.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 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.LEAD FILTERING AND ASSESSMENT
Every business today has to keep track of all inquiries and sales leads that are generated. There are numerous sources from where different leads are generated. For various organizations it’s very difficult to manage inquiry and tracking of those leads and most importantly to know the conversion from the source of various sales leads. A good inquiry management system saves a lot of time and efforts and in turn saves a lot of man hours for a company. Most lead management systems will have some intelligent methodology for filtering and assessing lead data into useful categorizations. There are a myriad of ways to accomplish this process and some of them may be specific to industries. The following is a suggested list of possible functions:- Data verification
- Device Intelligence
- Fraud screening
- Data appending
- Grading/Lead Scoring