I've read many articles about how to do this or that to get more out of your marketing or sales efforts. There are a host of sources available if you want to pay someone to learn how to do either of those. In my searches I've found that services offered in this realm are fairly segmented. In other words, there is no one place I've found that will outline the entire lead lifecycle, and how to get more value out of each step.

All leads start with some sort of impression. These days impressions are all over. By the time you get to work in the morning you may not have realized you have already been exposed to hundreds of impressions. Billboards, logos on shirts, clothing brands, computer brands, drink labels, and so on. The point is a person is exposed to thousands upon thousands of impressions per day. In the business world, how does one stand out and take advantage? The best place to start, depending on your industry, is to do some sort of web marketing. SEO, PPC, etc... Google is a good place to look for driving both SEO and PPC tools.

In terms of web marketing an impression, hopefully, becomes a click. Clicks aren't free. Everyone listed on the first search page in Google has paid some price to be there. All of the time or money spent to get there is simply in an effort to drive traffic to their web site. As a business owner I would want as much traffic as possible. I would seek ways to drive my site listing to the top of search listings as fast as I can.

Once people are visiting my website, I will somehow want to get information from that visitor. When a website visitor fills our a form on my website to get more information, it's called a conversion. Driving conversions is one of the most misunderstood sciences in web marketing. Just like other areas of web marketing, there are rules to the game. Probably the biggest mistake by most web marketers is not properly aligning offers with requiring visitors to fill out their information, or convert. This is a transaction of value. The website visitor wants something of value, and you want your information to try and sell to them. These two aspects must be properly aligned. Companies like Omniture can help drive more conversions.

Once you have converted leads is when the sales process really begins. It is the role of the sales team to then qualify and close the lead. Again, there are many sources of information on how to do this better. InsideSales.com provides tools for automating this process and making sales people more efficient.

With all the information on the web about marketing and selling I've found this outline to be the simplist way to understand the true life of a lead. Hopefully it helps you.

In the business of helping people get through their leads faster we commonly run into this question. We've created a gatlin gun for calling through leads. Most companies are used to using a musket, with manual reloading and all. Handing someone these tools, especiall to someone who is unprepared to grow, can be shocking.

What typically happens is companies turn on the high powered gatlin gun to go through their leads and soon find thier lead database is running low. They are used to getting through their leads rather slowly. I inevtibly hear the question "how do I get more leads?"

I offer three simple ways:
1. Go to current customers for refferals. This is your always warm list.
2. Charge up your Web PPC & SEO efforts. There are hosts of outsource companies and sites devoted to helping companies get more from both PPC & SEO.
3. Create lists. The best list is one nobody else has. Don't always settle for buying lists. That's what everyone else is doing. Get creative and find your group of buyers and market directly to them. Who has a need for your product. Don't stop until you get that list of leads. It's more work, but will always pay off. That's the exact reason nobody else has that list, it's work. If you're having trouble creating custom lists lookup a company called Incoho. They specalize in custom list building.

This is the most important part of setting up a dialer initiative. The dialer queries decide who you are going to call, and in what order. Pay special attention to these steps.

Second Video in the Series.

The most common concern administrators have with the InsideSales.com system is understanding how to set up a dynamic dialer initiative. I try to make it as simple as possible. You are creating a live updating list to decide who to call, and in what order. Set it up once and forget about it.

Here's a simple video to walk through the first few steps of setting up a dialer initiative. This also happens to be the most watched video on our community site.

With all the complexeties offered through the InsideSales.com system it is easy to get caught up in every little detail. Setting up dialer initiatives, ResponseLoop Campaigns, User Restrictions, ResponsePop Campaigns, IVR's, ACD's, Webform Posts, HTTP Posts, and on and on. There are so many options available to users of InsideSales.com.

Time and time again I see the most successful companies using our system are the ones who use a wide variety of features, but keep it simple. All the complexeties just seem to muck things up and confuse everyone involved. There's more overhead spent in managing a system with many details. Reps have a more difficult time understanding and adopting it. Making changes are more difficult.

It's understandable there are those out there with a complicated process out of necessity. While these situations exist, there are many who unnecessarialy complicate things.

A word to the wise. Keep it simple.

One area for confustion with many of our clients is the way our telephony platform works.
The most common application of the dialer is doing outbound calling. Regardless of the interface being used, the typical process goes something like this:

1. User initiates an outbound call by clicking a button on the computer.
2. The user’s telephone rings to connect them to the call first.
3. The outbound call is placed as a second leg.
4. The user dispositions the call.

This basic process is in essence actually creating two separate phone calls—one to the agent sitting at their station, another to the person receiving the call, with the dialer platform acting as a bridge between both calls.



As the user continues to move through their dialer list, the call connected to the user, called the agent leg, never disconnects from the platform as long as the user leaves their phone connected. Each time the user places the next call, the dialer drops the second leg, called the client leg, and then reconnects the next call with a new client leg, and once again bridges the agent and client legs together.



For inbound calling, the process is almost the same with one difference—typically it is the client leg that is connected first, which is then bridged to the agent leg when the agent is notified of the inbound call.

We are developing a new way of training here at InsideSales.com. In the near future you will be seeing a larger amount of online help options, training videos organized by your progress through implementation, and more best practices to help you be successful.

The start of it was last week with our weekly newsletter. If you haven't had a chance to do so, check it out. Very informative.

Also, check out insider.insidesales.com. It's a best practices site run by our President, Ken. He's a genius when it comes to selling remotely.

I recently have taken the reigns as the Corporate Trainer here at InsideSales.com. I've found that many people I work with have similar questions and would like some place to go to find answers to these questions. There's always the community site at community.insidesales.com, but it does not always have the best answer. So I am creating this site to allow people to come and find answers to common questions, best practices, and maybe just see what's new.


Stay posted for some updates.