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March 2009 • Volume 7 • Issue 1
Sage announced the winners of its inaugural Customer Award Program. Thirteen companies were recognized in seven categories: Best Innovation, Rookie of the Year, Best End-to-End Deployment, Best Use of Customization, Community Stewardship, Best Use of Multiple Sage Software Products/Services, and Lifetime Achievement. Nominations for the 2009 awards will open in summer 2009.
Powerful lead management apabilities enable you to qualify each lead and convert the lead quickly into an account and an opportunity.
When economic times are tough, it’s understandable that many of us focus our attention on securing quick sales. However, even companies with a typically short sales cycle should also pay attention to those prospects who are not yet ready to buy and nurture them until they are. In this article, we discuss the importance of nurturing your leads and show you how Sage SalesLogix Version 7.5 simplifies the entire lead management process.
Nurture Your Leads
Marketing research indicates that most companies leave 50 to 80 percent of potential sales on the table by ignoring prospects that are not yet ready to buy. Sales teams generally focus on the leads that show a high probability of closing quickly. However, to keep your sales pipeline full, your marketing team needs to focus on the leads that for whatever reason have longer buying horizons.
Consider the likely scenario that perhaps only 25 percent of your leads will be ready to make a purchase within six months. Your sales team logically focuses on this group of leads, since their job performance is measured on short-term wins. What happens to the remaining 75 percent of those leads, some of which may be ready to buy within one year, others within 18 months or longer? If your marketing department is not paying attention to these longer-term prospects, those sales are likely going to your competition.
The powerful Lead database feature within Sage SalesLogix enables your company to manage your leads effectively and efficiently. From the moment you enter or import the lead to the day it is converted to an opportunity or classified as dead, Sage SalesLogix gives you the tools to communicate, record, measure, and optimize your marketing activities to ensure that no lead is overlooked.
Let’s learn more about the Lead Management features in Sage SalesLogix, specifically the new features added in Version 7.5. Some of these features, already present in the Windows Client, expand the functionality to the Web Client in Version 7.5.
The new Lead Import wizard will streamline your lead management process and make it easier than ever to populate Sage SalesLogix with your leads and get those leads into the right hands quickly.
This step-by-step wizard simplifies lead importation and processing, and it distributes leads automatically to the individuals or teams you designate. You can assign a default Lead Source to the incoming leads, add the imported leads to an ad-hoc group you name, and save the import setup as a template for future use. Note: This feature is available for Web client only in Version7.5.
Sophisticated Lead De-duplication is new for the Web Client. Your imported leads can be automatically checked against existing Leads and Contacts to identify potential
duplicates. Through a series of options, you can finely control what the software will consider a duplicate. Here are examples of some of the options:
Based on your inputs, Sage SalesLogix will automatically resolve duplicates for you, eliminating the complex task of manual deduplication, and ensuring that only clean data enters your CRM database.
You likely have taken advantage of the powerful workflow features elsewhere in Sage SalesLogix, and Version 7.5 adds more of this functionality to lead handling. You
can now customize lead routing rules so that leads are directed automatically to individuals based on criteria you define. For example, you can automatically route all leads from California to a specific sales representative. This enhances your marketing efficiencies, eliminates manual processes, and increases your sales opportunities.
The Assign Activities To Leads feature is new to both the Web and Windows Clients in Version 7.5. Now, before a Lead is converted to a Contact, you can assign various activities to the lead that will follow it through the conversion. For example, you can schedule a meeting, phone call, or to-do task before the lead is converted to a contact. This is a powerful feature that fits well into the workflow of many organizations, ensuring that the proper action is taken as a Lead is converted into a Contact and/or an Opportunity.
Lead management processes vary from one company to the next. Sage SalesLogix Version 7.5 provides you with the flexibility to manage leads according to your business processes. When importing and managing leads, you can flag a lead as a Response, to remind the sales representatives that a contact has expressed interest in a product or service.
Before Version 7.5, Responses were tied to a campaign, now they can be associated with a lead as well. Think of a Response as a preopportunity, a way to track how your lead has responded or the specific information they have requested. A Response can contain a note indicating the specific information the lead has requested and the manner in which the lead responded, such as returning a business reply card.
Use Responses to track leads that are not ready to be converted into an Opportunity or for leads that are not associated with a particular campaign, ensuring no leads fall through the cracks. Note: This feature is available for Web client only in Version7.5.
In Version 7.5, you can assign actions to your leads as you import them, saving time and effort and ensuring your leads are immediately in circulation. You can apply one or more actions such as adding a note, associating the leads with a particular campaign, or scheduling a to-do or a phone call to all leads in the import at once.
We would love to help you better manage your leads within Sage SalesLogix, please give us a call with your questions.
