What Is A Lead Portfolio and How Does This Help You Manage Leads?

Many of you probably have a stock portfolio or some type of investment plan. Leads need to be looked at in the same way. Not all leads have the same value, risk, or rates of return. To run a sustainable revenue growth operation, you need to have a balanced lead portfolio of varying quality and rate of return. Start by scoring your leads with explicit and implicit criteria. Explicit criteria includes budget, authority, need, timeline and other relevant hard data. Implicit criteria is behavioral - it looks at website visits, content viewed, webinars attended, etc. Together with Explicit criteria, you get a much better picture of your leads. Once you have developed a scoring system, you can assign percentages - 80% and above are A's, 70-80% are B's, etc. Then, using your CRM system you can set up closed loop reports to look at how long A leads have taken before they convert into sales, how long it takes for a B lead to convert to an A, etc. In this way, you start developing a much more multi-faceted approach to evaluating lead performance. Your CFO will be very open to discussing this with you, and you will be on your way from talking about Marketing as an expense to Marketing as an investment.