Overview

This document describes Lead Liaison’s automated lead flow management process. Two lead flows are described, a qualified lead flow (QFL) and unqualified lead flow (UQLF). Qualified leads are defined by people who are ready to speak with sales, people who raise their hand wanting to learn more. In this implementation, these are prospects that submit one of Lead Liaison’s key web forms (demo, contact us, etc.), submit an email in an explainer video, or download a key document. All other downloads and interactions  are considered unqualified leads.

In reality, only a small percentage (2% to 3%) of all inbound leads are sales qualified. The rest of the leads are unqualified or eventually ignored, discarded, or lost by sales. It’s imperative that companies take the appropriate steps to properly nurture prospects with relevant communication. Using Lead Liaison’s software, companies can implement a similar process to ensure no lead is left behind.

Developing Buyer Personas

The first thing we did before creating any content was define who our buyers are and what their primary interests were. For this exercise, we considered the roles of our buyers and what problems they were typically trying to solve. We have three buyer roles, salespeople, marketers, and executive leaders. On some of our key web forms we added a “Role” drop down to begin tracking this information.

Next, we knew our prospects were contacting us for one of the following reasons:

1. Website visitor tracking

2. Marketing automation

3. CRM

4. Agency partnerships

5. General partnerships

Mapping Out Our Plan

After defining our personas, it was important to create a visual map for how we wanted our leads to get distributed to sales, nurtured, and flow through the system. This is probably the hardest part of the process. It’s important to take this step before implementing anything in the software. If you don’t, it will be hard to get organized and things will get messy - fast. Your map of a good lead management process is also an excellent tool to share with your salespeople and marketers to gather feedback before configuring the software.

In the details below, we break down each phase of the lead management process.

Setting Up the System

Configuring Fields

From our earlier exercise to develop buyer personas, we understood our buyer’s roles and interests. As a result, we created a field inside Lead Liaison called “Role” and another field that can hold multiple values, and called it “Special Interests”.

Configuring Web Forms

On web forms that were designed for general inquiries, like a contact us or demo form, we added a drop down field to ask the prospect what their primary interest was. When the form is submitted that value is saved into the prospect’s record in the Special Interests field.

Our forms were all created in Lead Liaison using a drag and drop designer, making it easy to style and update the form without touching any website code.

In the diagram below, we see the four key web forms in yellow along with a placeholder in orange for campaign specific forms. These are specialized forms reserved for advertising campaigns such as through Capterra, Google AdWords, etc. For each advertising campaign we’ll build a unique form, dedicated to the campaign, and assign the Special Interest based on the campaign. For example, if it’s an ad for marketing automation we’ll add “Marketing Automation” into the Special Interests field. Similarly, if it’s an ad for visitor tracking, we’ll add visitor tracking into the Special Interests field.

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Setting up Fulfillment Actions

When we had forms, explainer videos, or key documents that were very specific to our buyer’s interests we assigned the Special Interest using what Lead Liaison calls Fulfillment Actions. A Fulfillment Action was created for each key form, video, and document to serve two purposes:

1. insert the appropriate value into the Special Interests field and

2. Feed the “controller”, which is discussed in more detail below

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Creating Automations

Automations were created in three general areas

1. Controller: handles lead distribution, notification, and sends prospect to relevant communication stream.

2. Relevant Nurture: highly relevant content that caters to the buyer’s interests

3. Mainline Nurture: where every prospect is eventually fed into

Each of these areas are depicted by the grey boxes in the diagram below.

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Controller