What makes a good Lead Status?

How do I define my Lead Statuses, Deal Stages, Case Statuses?

It is important when selecting statuses or stages that you think of them as place holders for your leads (not descriptions of) as they progress through your linear sales, processing and/or support processes. For example; a lead status of attempting contact makes sense because it is in a place holder where activities are taking place to establish contact. On the flip side; busy number is not a good status unless you treat busy phone numbers differently than you do any other un-contacted lead.

A simple example: New (never been dialed); Attempting Contact (receiving active contact attempts); Nurture (failed to contact and is now receiving passive contact attempts); Not Interested (spoke with the person and there is no interest); Bad Lead; Investigating (contacted and in the sales process); Closed Won; and Closed Lost.

If you want to track reasons why a lead was not interested, those should be tracked in a sub drop down list which can be accessed for reporting purposes.

These statuses or stages should also have detailed plans on how to progress them into the next status. If in “Attempting Contact”, we will use a power dialer to call 3X per day, send an email every 3 days, a fax every 10 days and leave a recorded voice message every 3 days. If we get a hold of the person, move it into either “Not Interested”, “Investigating” or “Nurture”. If we do not get a hold of it, move it into “Nurture” after 3 weeks.

So we can see Statuses do not describe the lead itself but the stage in which it is residing and the activities that are associated with it.