Automatic "lead-recognition" in Salesgenie CRM++: the sales and marketing collaboration platform

A lead is a pointer that there is "something cooking" at a customer site. That "something cooking" is something that can lead to business.

A lead can come to you from many sources. It can be a customer herself who proactively shares her organization's plans. Or, it can be a result of field sales work on the part of the sales executive who unearths some plan. Or, it could be as a result of marketing activities performed by the marketing department (sending mailers, organizing seminars, etc).

It is interesting that the most numerous are the leads obtained from the "marketing" activities but, they are also the ones that are most derided. Instead of discussing whether it is right to dismiss all "marketing leads" as poor quality, Salesgenie CRM++ makes that discussion irrelevant.

Should a sales person be concerned more about the quality of the lead (how accurately it describes the situation at customer site and chances of closing as business) or where it originated (sales/ marketing)? We think the answer is pretty obvious.

We found a simple solution; based on our belief that actions speak louder than words and a lead is a culmination of multiple signals, verbal or non-verbal that the customer is sending us all the time. We need to be smart to catch it.

So, we asked seasoned sales managers about the activities that they felt, coming from a customer, signal a future intent to purchase. Not all of the signals had the same "weight"; a request to send a quotation is almost always more "valuable" than attending a seminar or a tradeshow.

Salesgenie CRM++ captures all such "signals", automatically from a customer location, based on such verbal and non-verbal cues and when the cumulative value of all such signals from an account (customer location) exceeds a certain threshold for a certain class of products, it flags a "lead".

The benefits of such an approach are that, almost always, you are likely to get a trigger even before the customer has thought of approaching you, formally and since now, marketing and sales know that all leads are produced as a result of activities that any or all of them have done, they focus more on closing than on wondering whether they should focus on it at all.