5 Lead Generation Best Practices For Field Sales & Marketing Teams


For your business, what is the lifetime value of a typical customer?
 
Depending on your product mix, this can be thousands, tens, or hundreds of thousands in direct and indirect revenue. Given these unit economics there is real value in (1) every incremental customer and (2) improving conversion on your existing lead flow. Now imagine multiplying that impact across your team over time to create much more substantial value.

Surprisingly, many field sales & marketing teams leave value on the table with a traditional lead collection process. In 2015, there is an easy way to unlock value across your entire team.
Tip #1: Use An iPhone & iPad Survey App To Collect Leads

When your team visits customer sites, trade shows, or industry events, the most prevalent form of lead capture today is paper or exchanging business cards. This approach has many problems:

* Errors in transcribing from paper
* Collecting incomplete prospect information
* Long delay between initial contact and follow up

With LoopSurvey your field team can collect leads using mobile devices, be it their own or the company’s. Some of the benefits:

* Standardize the lead capture form
* Require questions
* Reduce or eliminate errors
* Save time & money compared to paper and manual data entry
* Easy export to Excel or MailChimp
Tip #2: Make It Easy For The Entire Team

Software designed especially for teams empowers the whole group to quickly be productive. Managers who setup the surveys, rules, and analyze results can:

* Create the survey once and deploy to multiple devices
* Generate unique codes for each team member
* Easily switch surveys across some or all devices
* Invite colleagues to the Dashboard to view results

The field sales & marketing team out collecting leads can also be up and running quickly. To get started, they just (1) install the app, (2) input their code, (3) start collecting data. The field team can:

* Run the survey app on their own iPad and iPhone (BYOD), or company owned mobile devices

* Access the survey link via browser from any other device like Android tablets, smartphones, laptops, and desktops

* Go anywhere and not worry about connectivity, as all data collected offline automatically syncs to the Dashboard once internet is re-established
Tip #3: Automate Lead Routing

Your organization may have a process to convert leads, such as qualify and then hand off to another team for follow up. From the Dashboard you can setup easy rules to automatically route leads collected via the iPhone or iPad survey app to the right place. 

Leads can be sent via email or text. This routing can be within the team, to another group, or even outside the company to enable partner or dealer network success. For example, you may want to email leads gathered from the field to inside sales so they can follow up with prospects by phone right away.

Tip #4: Realtime Lead Scoring & Alerts

All leads are not created equal. The best sales & marketing organizations continuously improve lead qualification so company resources focus on the target audience, not wasting cycles.

You can trigger alerts if there are particularly interesting leads that meet certain criteria. For instance, if a prospect is looking to make a decision soon you may want to text or email the appropriate territory rep so those leads get immediate attention.
Tip #5: Measure & Manage Team Performance In Realtime

Results flow into the Dashboard in real time so you always have the latest data. You can view individual results in a table and graphical breakdowns by question.

Since each device is setup with a unique code, you can drill down to a very granular level. So instead of just getting a list of leads at the end of an event, you can see how many leads each of your team members collects in real time. Through active management and coaching you can push the team to maximize lead collection:

* Establish a baseline
* See who is leading
* Encourage those lagging
* Attribute results to specific people or devices

In the Dashboard this Advanced Report can be found via the Surveys tab > select your survey > Segment Analysis at the top.