What is Lead Status?
It's important to track whether or not a lead has otherwise been sold. Your business must decide which leads are retained and which are officially closed opportunities (the revenue line becomes particularly complex here).
Keep in mind that the sales cycle is often separate from the demand generation cycle so there may be no revenue associated with upsells until they've entered sales territory.
If you use existing accounts as a basis for tracking, you can enter each one into your system as either an active account or an inactive one - manually shifting them back and forth periodically is enough.
If you do it by code, make sure you track upsells appropriately.
The format for detailing new leads is simple:
If you're using an Excel sheet, simply use a separate column to mark the "onboarding status" of each lead – whether it's new or inactive (for example). If your system allows that sort of customization, great! But most do not. In this case, entering a newly generated entry into the relevant field will trigger an appropriate automated code in Salesforce.
When to Use Lead Statuses?
As an organization grows and shifts from its internal marketing department to sales, to service centres, your lead generation status should be the same so that prospects who are shopping around can easily use your company's playbooks.
First, it used to be common in B2B for companies to gauge how many leads they had versus opportunities or customers because things like user onboarding work with "lead" as opposed to "opportunity," although we still have people using both terms interchangeably.
However, now more than ever the lines between leads and opportunities have been blurred.
Why do you need to care about Lead Status?
Lead Status is a critical piece of information that companies need to know when hiring you. You should always be checking your Lead generation Status in Axway to make sure it matches exactly the one provided by the company. It can sometimes change overnight, so you will want to be checking every day.
All Salesforce CRM users must have a lead status! It is the first field that goes into every new contact once you start syncing data from Salesforce, so your application can make upsell offers when appropriate.
It does not matter if it's in your own system or an off-the-shelf product such as Axway; all of them are required to provide this information. Sales representatives cannot get paid for a client if they track a lead as an opportunity but their compensation plan doesn't take that in.
All core sales teams are stuck with this by design because it's impossible to assign multiple lead statuses so you need one for every tracked contact.
For an analogy maybe consider the tabs at your local book store; The publisher needs all of these same fields, or in another example perhaps different fields will be used on Kindle and iPad devices (" Kindle" determines what can be displayed on the page and "iPad" for example is configured to dictate that it's a Tablet).
Why Should You Use Lead Status in Your Sales Process?
To quote HubSpot:"Lead generation status is the category of your leads that defines how you want to interact with them and what information you need at each stage."
The Lead generation status property allows sales reps to use two different types of lead statuses, Closed and Pool, which helps identify who you contact and where they fall in their customer journey.
Closed Leads - this is a new type of lead, an interest-emergent phone call or referral from another brand's customers.
You know that someone out there sold this person on your product or service-maybe the customer even talked to your sales representatives about it.
Pool Leads - the leads that are coming from a third party, like an editorial article or SEO blog post; so you don't need to contact this person unless there's some action needing to be taken by your company that is related to meeting their needs as stated in the source material.
Conclusion
Lead generation status is important to any lead generation campaign.
While there are many different types of leads, each with its own characteristics and challenges, they all share one thing in common:
They need to be converted into sales.
If you want to increase your conversions, here are a few things you can do to help your campaigns go from good to great.
How many times have you wanted to use a certain product or service but it wasn't available? There's nothing worse than having the perfect solution for your customers but not being able to sell it because there was no way for them to know about it!
If this sounds like something that happens often, here are some ideas on how you can create more leads and improve your conversion rates.
That's all for now! See you later with a different topic!
