On the Importance of Response Management

At Full Circle Insights we don't speak of "lead management" or "contact management," we talk about "response management." You may be asking, why is this so? After over 50 years of group experience with salesforce.com, we've come to realize the system we know and love has some areas which need addressing to make measuring marketing activities much, much easier. Let me lay out the issues and then follow up with how we address them with Full Circle.Three Reasons Why We Created Full Circle Insights Response ManagementFirst, a lead converted into a contact goes into a black hole. On average, 25-50% of the time companies using Salesforce will convert their leads into contacts. If a lead is not converted into an opportunity, Salesforce can’t connect or track revenue credit to a marketing campaign. This is a big problem for revenue attribution to marketing campaigns as you never know the final outcome of many leads in the system.Second, Salesforce.com doesn't keep a historical record of each response and the final outcome. Have you ever tried to understand the performance of a past campaign in salesforce.com? Were the responses followed up on? What was the outcome of the follow up? In salesforce.com you can only see the current status of a lead and lose visibility in to what the status of the lead was post campaign follow up. What happened to all those responses (leads and contacts)? Were they all disqualified for the same reason? Or were the considered qualified but never made it to opportunity?Third, Salesforce.com can't track whether a response is a brand new one or one from the house list. This is a really important metric. If you're like most marketing execs, you'll want to know if you're just talking to the same people in your house list or are expanding your list by reaching any new prospects.Response Management Delivers Rock-Solid Marketing MetricsAt Full Circle Insights, we have addressed these issues by adding some new data structures to saleforce.com to create a Response Management System. The system also synchronizes information between leads and contacts so no status and campaign information is lost. With our Response Management solution, you can track the outcome of every response, even the revenue attributed to it as it goes through the sales cycle. Campaigns can accurately be measured on revenue impact. And you can get visibility into brand new responses or responses from members of your house list. With over 30 pre-created dashboard components and reports, we wanted to arm you for your next meeting with the rock-solid information to show marketing's impact on your company's revenue.I wish I had this system in all my VP of marketing jobs. It would have saved me and my team a lot of high quality time in excel and I could have focused more on creating the next fantastic campaign.