Lead management is a set of methodologies, systems, and practices designed to generate new potential business clientele, generally operated through a variety of marketing campaigns or programs.
With the advent of the Internet and other information systems technologies, this process has rapidly become technology-centric, as businesses practising lead management techniques have shifted much of the prior manual workload to automation systems, though personal interaction with lead inquiries is still vital to success.
Interactions and subsequent actions create a variety of potential outcomes, both productive and counter-productive to business development.
This ever-increasing number of scenarios creates functional disconnects, in other words, critical opportunities to mishandle an inquiry that reduces or destroys its potential value.
One relevant example of this process is the use of the Internet, online marketing, and Web analytics for high-level lead generation.
For this particular medium, the lead acquisition architecture generally consists of a Web form to collect consumer data, a database to temporarily or persistently store that information for subsequent distribution, and a software application to distribute the data at appropriate levels.
Generation for the purpose of selling the inquiry itself to another organization would typically include a methodology for selecting one or more buyers and then transmitting the lead via a variety of potential means, like: XML, name–value pairs, fax, email, telephone.
As stated previously, the increasing technological foundation of lead and sales management practices provides a number of "closed loop" data circuits, tracking the overall effectiveness of everything from lead generation, to prioritization, to distribution, to final disposition, and then back again to re-calibrate the process.
For marketing, this portion of the architecture primarily manages the analytics of the lead generation, distribution, and disposition.
The central hub of the lead management process once the prior architectures are in place is communication.
This portion of the architecture allows for the dynamic review and analysis of lead actions, marketing channels, and sales performance.
For many organizations, being a pipeline marketing organization that optimizes for post lead metrics such as revenue can be vital in decision making that improve production, return on investment, and the overall performance and cost benefits of their marketing and sales strategies.
The challenge with 'push' is the fact that often the local field sales staff may not be able to engage immediately for various reasons such as they are on vacation.