Every business, large or small, depends on leads. For businesses to grow, you have to convert leads into loyal customers. And to do that well, you must get complete visibility into sales and marketing leads in an organized way. On this page, learn everything you need to know about lead management and how lead management software can help convert leads into existing customers.
A successful and efficient lead management process includes the following five steps.
Step 1: Lead capture
During lead generation activities, there are various means of communicating with potential buyers, such as email, website, social media, webinars and paid advertisements. Good lead management software ensures that all leads are automatically entered into the CRM system from web forms, emails and chat, which prevents leads from going down the drain.
Step 2: Lead nurturing and follow-up
Whether it's sales or marketing operations, your teams shouldn't waste time searching for information about each lead or entering data manually.
Software with lead management functionality automatically populates a lead's profile with publicly available information such as job title, location, time zone, company name and social media profiles. You can track a lead's activities on your website (pages visited, links clicked, resources downloaded) and interact via email.
This valuable information gives marketers insight into their intent and allows them to personalize sales efforts. It gives your marketing team the much-needed context to create email campaigns.
Step 3: Lead qualification
One way to effectively qualify leads is through a lead scoring model: a model that ranks your leads based on their interest in your product or service, demographic information, buying history, and interaction with your company.
The predictive scoring model helps you prioritize the contacts you interact with by reviewing historical data and assigning a score to all contacts based on factors such as job title, website behavior and interaction with your company.
Your team can easily identify the right leads and invest their time in making a sale. A lead management software with AI-based lead scoring capabilities will be highly cost-effective and advantageous for your sales and marketing teams.
Step 4: Lead distribution
The sooner your sales reps contact leads, the more likely they are to win them over. Manually assigning a large volume of leads to the right sales reps can be time consuming and delay lead response time.
A robust lead management system automatically assigns leads to salespeople across territories in a circular fashion, assigns phone numbers to territories, and transfers calls to sales teams.
In this way, your sales team can prioritize assigned leads instead of manually searching for new leads in the CRM system. With lead management software, you can also generate reports to identify which territories are bringing in the most revenue, which sales reps are meeting goals, and potential sales areas for improvement.
Step 5: Lead Consolidation
Not all of your potential customers are ready to sell. Many of them may still be in the research or awareness phase, and trying to figure out if your service will solve their pain points. Lead nurturing seeks to educate and demonstrate the value of your product or service. With lead management software in place, you can send nurturing campaigns to these prospects who are not yet ready to make a purchase. That's where you educate and demonstrate value through content and promotional offers, thereby helping them in their decision-making process.
