The Life of a Lead

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.