An Interview with one of the "50 Most Influential Sales Lead Management Professionals":
Fred Yee, Active Conversion

Company URL

Who are your mentors and why?

What is the most helpful advice you've received to improve your business?

What is the most helpful advice you can give to help others improve their businesses?

How do you give back to the professional community?

Sponsor books and newsletters on the topic of sales and marketing. Being a member of many LinkedIn groups that I contribute to.

Contribute comments on groups and blogs.

We have blogs and eHowTo guides on lead scoring, nurturing etc. that we provide free of charge.

What is your favorite business book?

What's your recommendation of the 4 steps?

Which 4 basic skills or process steps do you recommend?

With regards to Sales Lead Management:

1. Generate leads and know how you got them.
2. Nurture those leads, and use tools to get them sales-ready.
3. Qualify the leads, and use territory management to ensure the most appropriate sales exec is on it.
4. Understand your sales funnel completely so thatyou know where the problems are.

In your opinion, the best book on marketing is:

Your reasons for choosing this book are:

What would you say to someone who asks what to do first in managing sales leads?

They should understand their sales process, and their funnel. Then they should understand how their sales force operates. They should also see how marketing (and sales) are generating the leads, and determine if they are worthwhile.

Before managing leads a person should know:

1. Are they any good?
2. Can the sale close?
3. Are there any operational issues that can be corrected that are keeping the leads from reaching the end of the sales cycle?

If someone wants to nurture sales inquiries what process would you recommend?

I'm biased, but a lead management automation system should be put into place (along with a CRM) to ensure sales and marketing alignment. With this in place, nurturing becomes automatic, and the payoff can be tied to the nurturing.

What steps would you suggest to measure the ROI for sales inquiries?

Again, the use of a lead management automation solution (LMA). A good LMA should be able to help determine the cost per lead, ROI on leads etc. And then use the KISS principle. Keep it simple stupid. The objective is know the approximate ROI, so that you know what works, and what doesn't. It's not necessary to measure it to the penny.