The Sales Cycle - Managing Leads and Knowing When to Convert to New Contacts

4 min read
Vlad Kovalskiy
August 1, 2013
Last updated: April 5, 2023
The Sales Cycle - Managing Leads and Knowing When to Convert to New Contacts

Generating Leads


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Leads form the start of your prospects journey through the CRM sales cycle and are usually generated in a number of different ways.

From traditional forms of lead generation such as reply coupons, person to person telemarketing and field sales, to web enquiry forms or outsourcing leads from data management companies.

Managing leads effectively can benefit your business in a number of ways:

• Reduce marketing costs
• Improved business forecasting
• More sales per customer
• Improved segmentation of clients
• Personalized promotional offers
• Up selling

Using Business Processes to Manage Leads


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Having the most experienced person in your organization respond to the lead quickly can give you a considerable advantage. Creating a Business Process in Bitrix24 allows you to place the enquiry on the desk or mobile of the most qualified team member at the exact moment the prospect is ready to hear why your products are the best solutions for their needs.

If you are allocating leads to field sales personnel, the appropriate person may be chosen based on the geographical area in which the prospect is located, or if you have specialist technical sales staff the best sales person may be determined by the type of product your prospects are enquiring about.

Bitrix24 Business Processes create substantial automation of your administration tasks and use simple drag and drop action blocks to build your process. This type of Business Processes can speed up your company’s response time to enquiries, free up admin resources and reduce mistakes.

Qualifying the Lead


The timing and decision to convert a lead will depend upon your company’s objectives. Do you want to keep the contact on an email list for future promotions? Do you have a target for converting leads to win deals? Does the contact have the authority to make a purchasing decision? What is the return on investment? Etc.

Sales pipeline stages are different in every business depending upon factors such as the sales approach, the products you sell and decision making process of your prospects. No one sales pipeline design fits everyone’s needs, but you should consider how you gain the information needed to make a decision on whether to convert the lead to a new contact or discard it and move on to the next one.

As Kipling said in ‘The Elephant’s Child’

I keep six honest serving men
(They taught me all I knew)
Their names are what and why and when
and how and wh ere and who.


So, in our world here is what we need to know:

What is likely to influence the decision making process?
What is the ROI pertaining to the order?
Why might they buy from you?
Why might they purchase from your competitors?
When is the prospect ready to place the order?
How is your business positioned and does the prospect fit into your target audience? 
Where are they located?
Who are they?
Who makes the final purchasing decision?

With these questions answered you can decide if the lead is a good prospect for what you have to offer and if you are ready to convert this lead to a new contact for further negotiations.

Converting and Diarizing Your Next Call


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Those leads which you have qualified and converted can be then diarized for future follow up activity.

The sales person managing the new account can work though their daily activity on the ‘My Activity’ screen accessed on a PC, tablet or mobile devise.

Decide upon the important pipeline stages and keep your deal stages updated as the negotiations progress. Use the Bitrix24 filter tabs to allow you to quickly view deals which are at critical stages in development. These might include New Deals, Deals to Follow Up Today, and Promised Deals.

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Consider recording personal information from your client such as hobbies, birthdays, anniversaries, children, holidays, etc. These can be useful in building rapport and establishing a long term relationship.

Learn how to overcome common objections and complaints. Develop questions which probe deeper into the customer’s real concerns and learn to listen to their responses carefully.

Gain competitor intelligence, yes, cheesy I know but knowledge is power (if used).

Creating an effective sales cycle in your Bitrix24 CRM allows you to focus on your best opportunities and highlight new openings, which, in turn, can increase your sales volume and profitability!

Good Luck!


This guest blog post has been published on behalf of a Bitrix24 Gold Partner Intreface.
For more information please contact our partner directly.

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Generating Leads Using Business Processes to Manage Leads Qualifying the Lead Converting and Diarizing Your Next Call
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