Apr
8

By CommenceCRM

Commence Lead Scoring Helps Shrink the Sales Cycle

Is your sales team working on the most qualified opportunities, or chasing tire kickers?  Do you even know?  Most companies rely on the expertise of their sales representatives to qualify opportunities, but this has proven over and over again to be inefficient and costly.  The problem with relying on your sales organization is a lack of consistency.  Most sales organizations have people with different levels of experience.   The senior people may be good at determining a qualified opportunity from an unqualified one, but even they make mistakes.  The people with limited experience are right only 50 percent of the time and the inexperienced ones may place an account on the forecast because the prospect asked for a brochure.  My point is this, the amount of time your sales team may be spending following up on poorly qualified opportunities may be costing your business much more than you think.

Commence Corporation has moved beyond traditional Customer Relationship Management software programs that are primarily focused on managing the sales cycle to delivering a solution that enables you to increase the effectiveness of your sales organization and focus on business with the greatest potential. Commence has introduced an automated business process that ranks and scores leads based a set of pre-defined criteria.  The criteria consist of a series of questions that are used to automatically score each lead based on the responses entered into the system.  The questions are completely customizable and users may create as many as required. (See sample below):

lead-scoring

Lead Scoring Questions

The lead qualification questions and rating criteria are determined by sales management and ensure that every new opportunity is ranked according to the criteria.  It’s an efficient process that results in a high level of consistency because every opportunity is scored using a standardized set of qualifiers and is no longer dependent on the experience level of the sales representative.

Each lead is then automatically color coded as highly qualified (red), requires additional follow-up (yellow), or not qualified (blue).  (See diagram below)

ranklead

Lead Qualification

The value here is two-fold:  First, there is no question with regard to where the sales team should be focusing their attention.  The leads coded red are the most qualified opportunities based on the company’s lead qualification criteria and need immediate attention.  Secondly, sales management can quickly view the most qualified opportunities and assist with the process of moving them toward closure.

Part of the Commence value proposition also comes from an integrated marketing application that is directly tied to the lead qualification system.  Yellow and blue coded leads may be placed in an automated drip-marketing program that nurtures each lead with periodic mailings while your team is focused on the most qualified opportunities.

The Commence lead scoring feature provides critical intelligence and has proven to deliver measurable results.  It will ensure that your sales team has a laser-sharp focus on the most qualified sales opportunities.  With the Commence CRM features, you’ll shrink the sales cycle and improve your bottom line results.   I guarantee it.

About the author: Larry Caretsky is the president of Commence Corporation, a leading provider of CRM software which can be deployed in a web-based, cloud-computing environment or on premise. Caretsky is considered an expert in Customer Relationship Management and has written numerous white papers on the subject, which may be accessed via the company’s web site at commenceaug202.wpengine.com.

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