Marketing & Sales Process Operations

Once the lead information is collected and distributed, it is then transferred to a marketing and/or sales management department, who will continue to implement lead management practices in pursuit of completion of a sale. Established lead management practices should provide the needed connectivity and accountability between those two operational units, and when managed properly, enhances the effectiveness of both operations.

The architectural relationship is much akin to the order carousel in a short order diner. This carousel is the communication and accountability between the waiter and the cook. Without this simple coordination orders would be lost, prepared incorrectly, or prepared in random order missing the expectations of the customer.

For management teams with a solid foundation in lead management principles, the process should create increased efficiency and accountability between marketing and sales activities. As stated previously, the increasing technological foundation of lead and sales management practices provides a number of "closed loop" data circuits, tracking the overall effectiveness of everything from lead generation, to prioritization, to distribution, to final disposition, and then back again to re-calibrate the process.

For marketing, this portion of the architecture primarily manages the analytics of the lead generation, distribution, and disposition. For sales, the architecture provides a fast, accurate
method of distribution, in addition to improved management and accountability processes for sales activity.

Ref: Wikipedia

Lead Acquisition and Distribution

Lead acquisition is the first, and possibly the most critical potential disconnect in the lead management process. With billions being spent on advertising expenditures, in many cases the value of those expenditures is reduced because relevant information from responses is not collected or distributed. The value of this process is tightly linked to a variety of consumer response theories that highlight the relevance and responsiveness of the customer experience as being key ingredients in turning potential customers into actual customers. Once acquired, the speed, accuracy, and relevance of response can greatly influence a potential consumer's decision to buy, or not buy a product or service. I talked with the owner of blinds company who are selling vertical blinds, roman shades and faux wood blinds online. He says that lead management and lead management tools are most important part of their marketing budget.

One extremely relevant example of this process is the use of the Internet, online marketing, and Web analytics for high-level lead generation. A consumer generally uses the Internet and makes Internet inquiries for products and services out of a desire for convenience and efficiency of their time. Consequently, they expect a timely, relevant response to inquiries made. An alternative to the time consuming research involved in cultivating a good lead, unique resources such as Sales-Fax News have taken this burden upon themselves to find and report on leads for advertising sales.

Ref: wikipedia

Optimizing Lead Management

As larger vendors work with partner organizations such as distributors (see distribution (business)), resellers, brokers and other channel partners, those vendors often distribute leads to their respective partners to provide a local contact to those prospects and also 'feed' partners with new business opportunities. Today there are two major methods for distributing sales leads to partners: Push or Pull.

PUSH The push method sends leads to specific partners assuming that those partners will follow up and work on those leads. The challenge with 'push' is the fact that often the local sales people may not be able to react immediately for various reasons: not available, busy, on vacation... Many large vendors report disappointment when asked about their lead follow-up rate through partners after the leads where pushed out to those partners.

Pull The pull method was invented and patented by a German Engineer, Axel Schultze, who was frustrated with the lead follow up results of the push method and decided to let the available and motivated sales people 'pull' leads from an online available system. Patent was granted by the US Patent Office in May 2006. The pull method became widely accepted in the high tech industry where thousands of resellers from companies including Avaya, Nortel, Juniper and others distributed leads that way. The PULL Method became superior over the PUSH method, and lead closure rates grew on average by 300% as white papers from BlueRoads indicate.

Ref: Wikipedia

House Renovation

I was planning to have my house renovated. And I want that all my things there are new. I hired and interior designer to design my house. I told him that I already have a curtain because my sister from the America gave me sets of that. But my interior designer told me that curtains is an old one; the popular now is the wood blinds. Since he knew about the designing, I followed him.

There are several window treatments that are available in the market right now and among them, the blind is probably the most popular of them all. In the past, choices of material, color, and sizes had been limited for blinds. This is no longer the case now. My designer goes along with me to a mall to help me choose the best one.

When we are in the mall, we saw different kinds of wood blinds. They are all beautiful. What we did is we called one representative to give us information of all the blinds which was displayed there. He started showing us the “Holland blinds” and it is also known as roller shades. It can be pulled down to roll the window blinds. Then he showed us the “vertical blinds”, have slats made of plastic, metal or stiffened fabric hanging from a track on its one end.

The horizontal slats have a 90 degrees rotation for allowing light to pass or can be fold up to either side of the window or doors. They also called as track blinds. Then he showed us the last which is the “venetian blinds” this are slatted blind having either a plastic or metal composition. There are also available slats made of wood pertaining to wood or bamboo blinds. The slat width ranges from 50 to 120mm but the most common width is 50mm.

We decided to stop from there because my designer would like to see if which one of there is perfect for my house.

Advantages of Email Marketing

E-mail marketing (on the Internet) is popular with companies for several reasons:

• A mailing list provides the ability to distribute information to a wide range of specific, potential customers at a relatively low cost.
• Compared to other media investments such as direct mail or printed newsletters, e-mail is less expensive.
• An exact return on investment can be tracked ("track to basket") and has proven to be high when done properly. E-mail marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.
• The delivery time for an e-mail message is short (i.e., seconds or minutes) as compared to a mailed advertisement (i.e., one or more days).
• An advertiser is able to "push" the message to its audience, as opposed to website-based advertising, which relies on a customer to visit that website.
• E-mail messages are easy to track. An advertiser can track users via autoresponders, web bugs, bounce messages, unsubscribe requests, read receipts, click-throughs, etc. These mechanisms can be used to measure open rates, positive or negative responses, and to correlate sales with marketing.
• Advertisers can generate repeat business affordably and automatically.
  Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of e-mail subscribers who have opted in (i.e., consented) to receive e-mail communications on subjects of interest to them.
• Over half of Internet users check or send e-mail on a typical day.
  Specific types of interaction with messages can trigger (1) other messages to be delivered automatically, or (2) other events, such as updating the profile of the recipient to indicate a specific interest category.
• E-mail marketing is paper-free (i.e., "green").

ref: wikipedia, insurance software,