Want More Successful Leads? Treat Your Lead Database as a Valued Asset

Of the many assets in your business, your marketing database is perhaps the most valuable. Your lead database is the pool of prospects you are working to convert into paying customers. Treat your lead database as a valued asset and it will pay you back again and again.

• Respect and protect every inquiry: It may be a long journey from an inquiry to a sale, but the relationship has to start with someone taking interest in what you have to offer. Protect all data and consider it vital and useful until you have undeniable reasons to know otherwise. Every inquiry recorded in your database could turn into a future sale.
• Consolidate your database: Centralize and consolidate tracking and management of both inquiries and leads into one database. When you have this important information available in one source, make sure you’ve exhausted the potential of every lead. Unusable leads can be removed and active leads can be easily tracked and assigned an action status for moving the lead to the next stage in the sales process.
• Continually verify your database: Prospect lead data changes constantly, whether it’s something as simple as a new cell phone number or a cross-country move that makes the data you have obsolete. Stay on the alert for new information and make changes in your database promptly.
• Determine who maintains your database and how maintenance will be performed: Establish procedures for updating and maintaining your lead database and make it clear who should be making changes and updates. For example, a database manager could be assigned who will take responsibility for gathering new information from sales, marketing and other relevant departments.
• Know what you want the database to contain: Decide what essential information must be included in the database and what optional information can be captured if possible. Names, addresses, phone numbers, website and email addresses, and sales/interest descriptions are vital. Other data may be good to have if possible, but not critical to marketing and sales development.

How can you make better use of your lead database to track lead data and turn prospects into customers?