Commercial banks need a large client base and healthy advances portfolio. In an effort to diversify the lending profile, the banks have been trying leverage on huge scope present in financing small and medium enterprises. The need for an efficient lead management is imperative, given the circumstances. Lead management is a set of actions that enables an enterprise to have readily available information on prospective clients for selling and cross selling its products and services to an individual or other business entity.
The role of lead management can hardly be overstated in retail loan management. The most critial part of loan is encapsulated in the saying “delayed credit is denied credit”. Retail loan is a win-win proposal for the customer and the organization. They are interdependent. The exposure is spread and life cycle is considerably shorter in comparison to big borrower accounts.
A good lead management solution can enable qualified approach than a random effort. Take a case of festive season where the spending spree is very high. An informed decision can be made while addressing the prospects Likewise, farm sector borrowers can be targeted based on rabi or Kharif by mapping the produce of the prospect.
There are multitude of software products in lead management. It may be custom built, acquired or even opt for hosted models. Salesforce, ZOHO, Microsoft Dynamics are few popular products. Most of the lead management application address the following:
Lead generation: Lead is a prospect or potential customer. The first foot print, in the road to lead management. A lead is created or manifest through various channels. Raw data for a lead is collected through road shows, exhibitions, on line campaigns.
Lead data capture: The data collected through various sources is captured, stratified, pooled for further process. It is quite cliched to say in this era of digitization that data is the most valuable asset. It is desirable to bestow best attention and care while capturing the lead data. Preferable data attributes like contact details, demographic information, gender are essentials of a robust lead management practice. Quality lead data is the backbone for down the line set of actions.
Lead pool: A data set of prospective customers: cleansed, de duped, and qualified for allotment to sales force in the organization. The data attributes help in assigning leads or auto assign leads to the field staff on the basis of area, gender, products desired. An intelligent application can prioritize the lead at the time of pooling. A lead data having an attribute that he or she last purchased car before 5 years may well be in the top of the list of lead pool for timely sourcing of the prospect.
Activity Management: Assigned leads are followed up by Email and Telephone. Most applications enable fixing a meeting with the prospective client. Actions and responses are good indicators as to whether a lead is active or dormant or becomes a client. Events can be monitored by the superiors in the hierarchy and performance can be quantified. An informed decision can be taken on the life cycle of the lead.
User Data Management: Apart from the quality of data, user management is a milestone activity in lead management. The user creation data set must address role, designation, skill set, role mapping, and hierarchy mapping for efficient and effective lead management. A crystalized lead becomes an entity in transaction processing system of the bank. Cross referencing transaction data can add value to lead management. Credit history, spending patterns, delinquency shall become valuable inputs for cross selling.
Money bequeaths money. Institutional finance was a privilege of the rich and wealthy. Egalitarian society would like to ensure access to funds for small and medium enterprises. Financial inclusion and micro lending is attracting global focus. Microfinance industry has a huge market potential from the demand side. The exposure as of March 2017 is approximately 60,000 crores. The client base is around 4 crores. A good lead management software sitting under the canopy of a good CRM can augur too well for retail lending.
Nelito 