Thursday, September 25, 2008

Lead Analytics: Understanding the Different Types of Potential Customers

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Face the reality: not everyone who is going to belong to your lead list is going to be your regular customers. Some of them may approach you on a per-need basis, others would just make an inquiry, while there are those who don’t share interest at all (makes you wonder why they are there in the first place). Nevertheless, part of the lead analytics strategy of your business is identifying their characteristics. This will then help you determine which of them will become your priority all throughout your lead marketing campaign.

Let’s get the ball rolling:

1. Loyalists and Devouts. Let’s call the first one the loyalists or devouts. These are the people who have been patronizing your business for so long, and they have never failed to shower you with praises for your job. They only comprise a very small group, even less than 20 percent of your total customer base, but their contribution is very huge. In fact, they can make up half of your company’s sales.

They make excellent sales leads because they are easier to convince and would likely purchase your new products or avail of your new services with just a simple marketing ad or call.

2. Per-need Leads. These are the types of sales lads that would only purchase certain types of items from you. They would also not become part of your customer base unless you have something that they need. For example, if you’re running a consumer electronics business, and your pre-need leads are looking for cameras, unless you have them, you will not be able to convert them.

These sales leads should become priorities only when you can provide them with what they’re looking for. When you do, you will almost have the same amount of success in your conversion rate with the Loyalists and Devouts.

3. Roamers. There are also people that we can call the roamers. These are the kinds of leads that should belong to the bottom list or better yet completely removed as part of your leads. They really don’t have the intention to buy your products or avail of your services for some reason. Perhaps they have accidentally added their name to the mailing list, or someone else did. Believe it or not, some may even do it just for plain fun. They also don’t fit the characteristics of your target market.

Is there any way that you can convert these Roamers into Per-need Leads? Yes, you do, but only when you can also give in to their demands or what they need. Usually, however, if they believe that the business cannot do something for them, they are uncooperative.

4. Compulsives. There are also leads that we can label as compulsives. They don’t really have anything that they particularly need at that time. They cannot also be labelled as Loyalists or Devouts since they are not repeat customers. They are, however, those individuals that would purchase products that seem good at the moment. They are also not on your top-priority lists, but make sure that you can obtain a wishlist from them, so whenever you’re ready to sell such products, you already have existing leads.

Measuring Lead Performance

The performance of your sales leads will depend on their characteristics. But it will surely help you out if you can make use of a lead analytics program. You can rank or score these leads according to their priorities, and those that emerged with high values should be the first ones to be handled. A lot of these software are already web based, so you can expect up-to-date information.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Lead Analytics: Making Lead Performance Analysis Work for You

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When you are looking for positive results for your business, chances are you will want to figure out what needs to be done to make things work better. This is where analytics comes in. You will need to analyze the many angles of your business and what avenues need to be improved upon, removed or changed. With lead analytics, you are essentially analyzing the performance of the leads you have and how these leads are being handled by your sales force or team. Knowing how these leads act and how these leads are being taken care of by certain members of your staff will show you where you may need to change things up or what kind of client usually works best with your kind of business.

Lead analytics and lead performance evaluations will get you the kind of data you need for creating the kind of marketing strategy your company can work well with. You can find out how your people handle the leads that they get and what they did to produce positive results with these leads. You can also see where members of your team may have lost certain leads. This is where you can remedy the problem, with new marketing strategies or retraining. You can also use this information to restructure your teams. This means that you can put one strong mover in a team that needs guidance so that they will learn how this strong team member handles such leads and produces positive results for the company. This kind of a strategy is ideal for those who have numerous agents who do not know yet how to effectively handle the leads that they are given.

How you determine where your team may have succeeded or gone astray with the use of lead analytics is through the monitoring of the track that the lead took from acquisition to billing. When a lead is lost somewhere in between, you will see with analytics where it was lost and then you can determine why such a lead was lost and who lost it. This can be done with the use of lead management software that tracks the movement of your leads and helps you analyze the effectiveness of your marketing strategies and plans.

Aside from using your lead analytics and lead performance trackers to ascertain agent performance and marketing performance, you can also use lead analytics to help you assess how well your products and services are doing. Customer satisfaction often translates to customer retention and returns, so if your leads come back to your company for more of your products or more of your services, this means that you are meeting their needs. You can also use lead analytics to test out new services and new products, although you may need to be careful that you analyze the data correctly. You might be getting positive results from the lead analysis you are getting simply because your marketing team and strategy is working real well. You may need to analyze a few months worth of data to come up with a conclusive result for your new product analysis.

Lead analytics is indeed a very useful tool not only to find out where your team needs to improve or whether your products and services are working well for customers, but this analysis can also help with discerning the overall standing of your business. You can create new strategies, figure out where you need to improve and what you need to do to keep customers satisfied. All of these actions translate to a better business that keeps clients from going to other companies for the services and products you offer and with lead analytics and lead performance analysis, you can do just that.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com