An Interview with one of the "50 Most Influential Sales Lead Management Professionals":
Lisa Cramer, LeadLife Solutions

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?

1. Care about your customers. Don't just say it, but really put resources and measurement behind it.
2. Change/evolve your business to reflect the changes in the market (i.e. the Internet and the changing sales process).

How do you give back to the professional community?

What is your favorite business book?

What's your recommendation of the 4 steps?

Which 4 basic skills or process steps do you recommend?

1. Make sure marketing and sales agree on what the common definition of a lead is within your organization.
2. Understand what your prospects are looking to buy and realize that they are going to do extensive research online before interacting with your company. So, you will need to target your audience based on their specific needs, wants, and demographics.
3. Nurture your prospects with relevant content that is of particular interest to them.

4. Once the prospect has hit a certain threshold within your company and has become"sales-ready", get your sales team involved.

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?

The first step in managing your sales leads is to define what a sales-ready lead is within your organization. The essential element here is having marketing and sales mutually decide what truly comprises a sales-ready lead. Is this someone who downloaded three items from your Website and has the right title? Is it someone who downloaded something from the Website, is in the right industry and then was further qualified by telemarketing? Or, maybe it's someone who attended a Webinar? Whatever the definition, it is something that must be agreed upon by both sales and marketing. And crucially, it has to be a definition that can be accomplished through the marketing organization alone (this could include telemarketing and inside sales for some organizations).

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

• Timing of touches: How often you send out emails or direct mail, or how often you make calls, is very dependent on where your target leads are in the process and the complexity of your sales cycle. For example, we have some customers whose sales cycle is fairly short (two to three months) and in that case, it's not unusual for them to send out drip emails to their prospects every seven to ten days. Others with more complex cycles will have a much slower drip, not touching the prospect more than one a month.
• Content relevance: Nurturing success really comes down to how relevant the material you send to the prospect is. In other words, does the prospect care about the message you are delivering to them at that point in the buy cycle? If the prospect is at the research/education stage and you provide relevant (based on what they're interested in) materials to help educate them further, then they'll be interested. However, if at that same stage of the cycle, you start selling the prospect on the features of your solution – it's too early and they are likely to be turned off.
• Relevance to any demographic information you've captured: This can be as simple as inserting your office location that is closest to the lead's location in the email, or including relevant images based on their industry. Another item to think through is using the behavioral information you have tracked about the lead in order to follow up with related information. For instance, with marketing automation, it is now possible to track the lead's behavior so that you can better understand what they are interested in and where they spend time on your Web site or at a trade show booth. Take advantage of such knowledge by delivering follow-on materials that appeal to their interests and suggesting something that would be of further value to them.

Whatever lead nurturing you implement, keep it simple at first, evaluate how well it's working and grow it accordingly.

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

You need to assess and understand what's working and what's not. Also, make sure you have visibility into what people are clicking on, as well as what they are not clicking on, and make sure the metrics go all the way through the pipeline from initial interest to deals closed.