19 January 2011

Can your CRM system generate a list of your high value leads? Can anyone in your organization compile a list of your most valuable leads? How would they do it? How long would it take them?

For most sales and marketing executives the answers would be: No, Unknown, Unknown, Unknown.

If these are your answers, then you simply cannot manage your business to optimize results. The profitability and growth that you enjoy tomorrow is heavily influenced by the prospects that you are working today. If your methods for prioritizing sales action do not include “lead value” as a critical parameter, how do you know that you are focusing your sales and marketing resources on the most desirable targets?

How well you “fit” a customer’s needs and environment determines how valuable you are to your customer. The reverse is also true. The most valuable customers that you have are those customers that are extracting very high value from your products and/or services. For these customers, you can become a valued and trusted partner. These customers will be loyal, they will be responsible about making sure that the partnership works for you as well as for them. These are customers forever and they are very high value.

Selling, a big ticket deal to a customer that is a marginal fit will often require more selling effort and cost than selling a much larger deal to a customer where the fit is excellent. Customers that have an optimal “fit” will usually have lower support costs and they will tend to provide higher spending growth over time.

In order to better prioritize leads, lead scoring is emerging as a “must have” application for marketing and sales organizations. Your lead scoring mechanism will determine which leads get passed to your sales people and if you are not optimizing the number of prospects that are the most valuable, you will compromise today's profitability as well as tomorrow's.