Disciplined Steps for Managing Leads

We’ve now let you know about four online contact managers here, here, and here (three are available now — FunClient, BigContacts, and Oprius Foundations, and one, Highrise, is coming soon).

Here’s a link to an online system called LeadsOnRails. At first glance, I believe it’s aimed more at companies that want to ensure sales and marketing professionals follow a disciplined process for following through on leads, rather than those looking for an online pipeline management tool such as Pipelinedeals or SalesinSync.

In short, you put every lead you receive via a Web site, trade show, or any other source, on a “track,” with a track being a series of steps taken in order to win the prospect’s business. Each step in a track can be assigned to any user you’ve added to your team, with a deadline for when it should be accomplished (for instance, 3 days after the previous step was completed).

This is an interesting concept. Of course, sales professionals have always had the notion of “steps in the sales process.” But this service will cause you to think both strategically and tactically about this in a more disciplined way.

A few other unique features include: the ability to generate a Web site form, where leads are automatically added to your database; the ability to create multiple tracks with different follow-through steps (for example, for leads found via different sources); and each track can be monitored in a pipeline.

However a few things I didn’t enjoy while bumping around in my trial account:

1. There are no dollars involved or displayed, so you can’t immediately see the value of your pipeline.

2. New terminology. If you’re looking for a system to implement with your sales team, you’ve got to re-educate them on the term “tracks,” for instance. Some people will get it, some won’t.

3. A bit pricey. LeadsOnRails is running at $35 per user per month ($350 per year if paid annually). Pipelinedeals, meanwhile, sells their increasingly useful and powerful service for only $15 per user per month. Of course, it’s an apples to oranges comparison in terms of features and benefits, but it’s unlikely you’d use both.

Despite my concerns, if you run a small business sales team, especially with a Web site that collects incoming contacts from potential prospects, you should consider looking into this.