Its evident that, organisations are under pressure from all angles, like, top management , Domestic Competitors , Global competitors.   The pressure is zeroing in to one point – “Deliver more with Less cost”.    Its seen that, IT department has to be more pro-active in innovating different mechanisms to reduce business cost through different mechanism.    Sales and Marketing department has to be more clear on their goals and projected figures, which is imperative to be in the competitive loop.

The challenge is to derive an effective strategy to balance between the organisational priorities and expenditure.     By increasing the efficiency of the information sharing points,  the organisations can increase the productivity and thereby increase the profitability.   Some of the areas to be observed are as follows.

1.   Traditional requirement gathering , planning and approval results in delay.  It also affects by way of broken processes,  manual reworking.

2.    Poor visibility of the business prospect pipeline, will reduce the efficiency of generating new business.

3.    Traditional method of long planning cycle delays the ability to take quick decisions which are critical to business generation.  This will impact by way of loosing millions of opportunities.

4.    If the information tabulated and shared by the customer facing representatives are not accurate, (most of the time it happens like this ) the decision taken with those wrong data may become fatal to the organisation.

5.    Outdated information are another aspect to be considered while improving the efficiency.

6.    De centralised data storage in different departments in an organisation will affect decision making process and its proven to be an in-effective way of handling information.

Business Process Automation – Ensures positive response.

Sales Executives , Managers , Marketing people and Top Executives can all benefit form Automation.  Automation of information gathering and sharing.

Information gathered in a systematic way that it can be used by any persons who has got the right to view.

All your important data will be available on your finger tip.

By automating the business process, we become ECO-Friendly organisation to a certain extend.  Because you reduce the usage of paper.  All documents become digital document.

It brings a systematic process culture in the organisation, which will bring in clarity and visibility to the entire business.

It save lots of time by eliminating repeated work.

Would like to conclude that, irrespective of the size of the organisation,  if you automate your business process,  you can be benefited with reduced business cost and  increased profitability.

Business leads are always the lifeline of any growing organisations.  Lead lifeline graphs will show you how your organisation is going to perform over the next few months or years, depending on your type of business.

Opportunity is the next step of a lead process, where the organisations can quantify the lead.  Means, when the value of the product or services can be associated with a lead, we can know the potential value of that lead.  In this stage, a lead can be qualified as opportunity.

Lead management seems to be easy task, on the first look, but in actual scenario, it’s the most complex task, especially, if its not managed properly through out the entire organisation.    Leads can be generated from different mediums.  It can be Direct marketing / From news paper advertisements / Trade shows / Existing customers / Website / Email campaign etc.,    If you have a team of sales  / marketing executives working for your organisation, the number of leads generated will be of huge size.    All Growing organisations has to find out a better mechanism to mange those lead effectively.

If you look at the conventional marketing style, leads are generated by individual representatives, and keep all those information with them all through the lead life time.  or they will send the details through email, which is very hard to analyse.    Managing or organising those lead details are a cumbersome tasks for the tope management because of its scattered nature of placement.

A real time perspective of a conventional lead generation process

      a.       Frontline executive will generate a lead

b.      He / she will work on the lead and define it as HOT / WARM / COLD according to the nature of the lead.

c.       He / she will keep the whole lead list in a black and white form or in emails with hem.

d.      Management is usually worried about conversion of lead to sales.

e.      Executives starts to feel the pressure of the targets, and start working only on the HOT leads

f.        Say, only 50% of the hot leads are getting converted in to sale.

g.       Once the monitoring period is over, usually front line executives will start acquiring new leads, and work on  those….

h.      The process repeats  on converting majority of the Hot leads.

      Where is the issue? …… Is it in the process ?  just imagine a few scenarios

1.       What happens,  when the person who has generated leads and leave the company?

a.       The whole data will vanish from the organisation with the person whom left.

2.       What happens to the Warm and cold leads which are not converted in a short period?

3.       Can you know,  product pipeline of  those neglected leads in long run ?

4.       How do you know, if there is any leads, which can be converted in the next 6 months?

5.       Can you know how many quality leads to be generate to achieve your target?

6.        Can you know from where maximum leads are getting generated?

How to effectively manage Leads and opportunities ?

a.      Define the best practice on the lead generation and conversion process

b.      Define an objective for managing those leads , which can be increase the conversion ratio,  increase the number of quality leads etc.,

c.       Implement an effective Lead management tool for the entire organisation

d.      Analyse and manage the entire lead process effectively.

By implimenting a proper mechanism to manage leads, you can have more visiblity in to the entire LEAD life time, and increase the Lead conversion ratio.