Design Your Lead Management Process Before Redesigning Your Website
Redesigning your website isn’t cheap and the required time investment of a proper website redesign is a large one, which is why a proper lead management process should be in place before you commit to writing that check.
Mobilegeddon has come and it certainly is not gone.
In a recent article posted to the Google AdWords blog, Inside AdWords, they stated that “more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan.”
This statistic, is just one piece of evidence to suggest that “Mobilegeddon is Beginning, Not Ending” and as a result, compelling cases for website redesigns are being made everyday.
Whenever a business’s website is redesigned, there are certain metrics that are expected to improve once the facelift has been completed. Bounce rate, number of page views, organic website traffic, average time on page; these are all great metrics to strive to improve on, but there’s one that should be tops on everyone’s list:
Number of leads generated.
It doesn’t matter if you’re B2B or B2C, Non Profit or a University. The goal for everyone’s website is to convert unidentified website visitors into identified leads, so that you can turn those leads into customers, clients, patients, donors or whatever your organization is intending to acquire more of.
But before you decide that it is time to redesign your website, you should ask yourself, “Do we have a clearly defined lead management process in place?”
In other words:
- Have you defined the different qualities for those leads that go to sales vs. those that are to be nurtured by marketing?
- Have you defined the different opportunity management stages of your sales process?
- Have you defined how many phone calls or emails your sales team is required to do upon receipt of a qualified lead?
- Have you defined the process and criteria for returning a lead from sales back to marketing, and what happens next?
- Have you defined how fast someone from your organization should be responding to leads coming in through your website?
- Have you defined the marketing nurture paths for leads based on the different products or services you sell?
- Have you defined the different types of responses leads should be receiving, dependent upon the actions they’ve taken on your website?
- Have you defined who will need to document the information in your CRM and which pieces of information need to be captured so that your marketing and sales teams have a proper lead hand off in place and your data is clean?
- Have you defined the necessary reporting to capture conversion rates from stage to stage in your marketing and sales funnel for accurate forecasting and proper management of time and activities?
- Have you defined the roles and responsibilities for everyone in your organization that contributes to the processes of your marketing, sales, business development, account management and customer service efforts know, so they know exactly:
- What to do?
- When to do it?
- How they should be doing it?
These are just a few questions you should be asking your marketing and sales teams, to ensure that you have the proper departmental processes and integration in place before redesigning your website.
If you think about the cost of redesigning your website and the internal time investment it will require to go through every step of the process with the design agency, wouldn’t it be a shame if your new website started to generate leads and you didn’t have the processes in place to manage those leads as they were coming in?
