Close More Business with Improved Lead Management

As most companies appreciate, understanding client data is tremendously important for identifying business opportunities. It’s also crucial for effective lead management which helps close more business, something that’s especially important as the year draws to an end and sales deadlines loom.

As a recent business graduate I’ve had to look at (and analyze) a lot of information over the last few years.

And I mean a lot!

Collecting and evaluating data, and appreciating its implications, is recognized as crucial for a successful business, and as an intern at InaPlex I was able to combine my college experience with a wide range of projects. For several months I had the chance to look first hand at operations in several different companies, evaluate their data flows, and provide advice on improvements to their business processes.

One project in particular stood out to me. It involved a client using HubSpot for lead generation and Salesforce for lead follow-up. The structure of the company’s sales team was pretty complex (although no more than you’d expect for a large, international company) and I was surprised to learn that there wasn’t a way to move leads quickly and surely to the right people with either the existing CRM or marketing automation tools.

InaPlex solved the company’s lead transfer problem by developing a lead router that incorporated lead validation and round robin allocation. An app was also developed to clean incoming leads and use business rules to determine the most productive follow-up action for each lead. Together, the router and app identified leads, flagged them for action, and distributed them to the appropriate team and person almost instantly.

The solution was developed using a combination of custom code and Inaport, our ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) engine, and could be managed easily by the user to accommodate changes such as illness, staff turnover, or modified business rules.

Removing the need for a full-time lead routing position was one of the key objectives of this project; however I was intrigued to learn how massive the benefits of efficient lead management also were. Many studies, such as the Harvard Business Review’s The Short Life of Online Sales Leads and Dr. James Oldroyd’s The Lead Response Management Study, clearly highlight the dramatic benefits from fast lead follow-up. The biggest gain by far from this project was that it led to qualifying more leads and winning more business.

This is just one example of many projects I worked on where close mapping of business processes and data flows identified the need for a custom app. InaPlex works alongside knowledgeable Partners to build apps quickly and economically, so there is still time to refine your lead management approach before the end of the year. This could help with current sales targets, and would certainly position your company more strongly for 2018.

Nicola Evans, a recent graduate of Berkeley’s Haas Business School, has worked with InaPlex during holidays while home in Newport Beach. She’s a big fan of hiking, reading, dogs, and having fun with friends. She now works with a Financial Consultancy in San Francisco.