Many of the popular CRM software vendors make great claims of a single system for sales, marketing and support.  Indeed many companies have invested huge amounts to enable them to achieve this dream.   However, when it comes to satisfying the needs of the marketing department most, if not all CRM systems fail to deliver.
Over the years we have worked with many CRM systems, that, out of the box, share the same design principles for sales and marketing processes. Common to all is the notion that a “Lead” is a prospective piece of business that requires qualification before it is passed to Sales and becomes an “Opportunity”. 

The Lead itself is kept in isolation from existing account and contact information, supposedly so it does not clutter up your customer data.  Furthermore, there is no concept of nurturing leads – they are either qualified out or passed to sales, their historic significance being lost in the process.  This is compounded by the fact that the core functionality of the CRM system focuses on the processes revolving around managing the Opportunity not the Lead. Great if you are in the sales department but not so great for the marketer.

So what do we mean by Lead Management? Well let’s first forget the notion of Leads – it is not a Lead that buys from you but a person.  In a B2B environment that person works for a business that hopefully has a requirement for your products or services. So in CRM parlance we are still talking about tracking Contacts and Accounts. A “Lead” should purely be a way of recording the fact that at a particular point in time this person/business showed a certain level of interest in a particular product/service offering by responding in a certain way to a particular marketing or sales effort. Simple eh? Well not quite.

In the real-world companies have all sorts of types of Leads ranging in temperature from “Cold Suspects” that may have been purchased from a third party list provider to Hot Leads from existing customers. Also these days most businesses can not afford to pass all these different types of Leads to Sales to qualify and therefore qualification remains the remit of marketing. We would also argue that Marketing has a pipeline, just like Sales.  The Marketing pipeline should be designed to nurture leads (through “joined-up” campaigns) to a point where they are sales ready and therefore truly become Opportunities. Automating this pipeline (for campaign execution and lead tracking/scoring) coupled with a liberal sprinkling of list management (to cope with the various sources and quality of data) and preference management (to handle opt-ins/outs and communication preferences) is the art of Lead Management.

The good news is that driven largely by the “On-demand” market we are starting to see Lead Management add-ons to the popular CRM systems.  These are tightly integrated to the CRM system so that for all intents and purposes they are seamless - something that the CRM vendors themselves must be keeping an eye on.

We are still waiting for an industry standard CRM system that caters for the need for Lead Management but given the recent momentum, maybe it is not too far away?