Lead management: What Is It?

Companies still use antiquated techniques like spreadsheets to manage and track leads. However, this is a terribly ineffective approach that, according to Zoho, can prevent the conversion of almost 70% of leads. a specific lead management platform

Applying strategic strategies is necessary to generate new leads and make sure that the greatest number of leads make it to the ultimate conversion stage.

Any person or business that might be interested in your goods is referred to as a lead. This interest can be shown by exchanging contact information, selecting the “register now” link, going to your website, watching a product video, or taking any other action. Lead management leverages the information offered by a lead to methodically classify them and schedule the action items.

Depending on where each lead is on the marketing funnel, you can either follow up with them directly or retarget them with content. Using your website’s contact form, a C-level representative in the B2B industry might make contact. This is an example of a bottom-funnel lead because your sales team can get in touch with the person and start the process of acquiring the account. A top-of-the-funnel lead, on the other hand, is someone who has been to your website more than three times. To spark additional interest, you can run advertisements that are specifically intended for this audience. Lead management encompasses each and every one of these actions.

As a result, lead management is a vast topic that encompasses almost all sales techniques used to generate and convert leads. Although it is possible to do this manually, it is best to use a digital platform that connects to both your website and your CRM to establish a continuous lifetime of data. The customer can then be led through this lifecycle in a straightforward manner, from first interest to final conversion.

How can you determine if you’re prepared for a next-generation lead management system, though?

You should keep an eye out for the following red flags:

There isn’t just one place to get knowledge. To follow up on leads, your sales and marketing executives must frequently hop between platforms.

Sales has been given unqualified leads. This implies that identifying good and bad leads is taking up too much of your time.

The actions of leads are invisible. Because of this, you are unable to run tailored content campaigns and must rely on customers making contact with you directly.

You frequently miss out on opportunities. It is normal to miss out on a few leads in any lead management system, but this shouldn’t go beyond a certain point.

Poor conversion rates exist. When nurturing actions are lacking, promising leads frequently fail to develop into qualified prospects.

If any of these situations ring a bell, it’s obvious that your company needs a stronger lead management strategy supported by technology. Once installed, it’s crucial to determine who will be responsible for lead management.

Lead management belongs to who?

This is a crucial factor to take into mind because the ROI of the lead management system won’t increase until a particular stakeholder takes ownership and responsibility for it. Interestingly, depending on where the consumer is in the buying process, lead management sits in between sales and marketing. For instance, there are marketing qualified leads (MQL), which are inquiries from customers who want further details on a product. Marketers can now distribute presentations and pitches in an effort to win over customers.

Conversely, sales executives deal directly with sales qualified leads (SQL). These are additionally referred to as “hot/warm leads,” which suggests that they are eager for conversion. Sales can step in at this point and rapidly complete the transaction.

Collaboration between sales and marketing on lead management is always a recommended practice, regardless of the prospects’ intent or level of interest. Marketing is in a position to gather leads, follow up on them, and transfer them to sales when the customer is prepared to buy. To assure upselling and cross-selling, sales is better positioned to qualify the leads and nurture them in collaboration with the marketing team.

This leads us to the actual lead management procedure.

Opens a new window for more information: Top 5 Retail Lead Management Tools for 2020

4 Stages to Lead Management Process Understanding

This entire process can be automated and enhanced if you decide to employ a digital platform by utilizing analytics and artificial intelligence. Generally speaking, a lead must be: 1. Tracked

Since there are numerous ways to generate leads, including through social media, email marketing, paid advertisements, and website visits, we start with automated lead creation. In the B2B industry, leads can even be obtained from phone calls; however, all of these facts must be automatically entered into the tracking system.

Now that lead behavior can be monitored, your product will receive even more intense interest. If a lead consistently visits the product landing page in the same week, for instance, you may start a targeted email campaign and use content to convert the lead.

2. Dispersed

This step in the lead management process is rather straightforward. You can send the information to the appropriate sales team once the leads have been gathered and tracked. For instance, you could have distinct executives for your small-to-midsize business clients, another for a different industry, and regional sales teams.

Keep in mind that your possibility of conversion increases the sooner sales contacts a lead.

3. Adequate

This process was carried out manually for a very long time, relying on the knowledge and experience of sales and marketing executives. Now, AI technology can monitor the traits and parameters defining the lead and can auto-qualify them with the right label.

In fact, a powerful lead management tool will assign a quality score to every lead, based on your ideal customer persona and data collected from lead behavior tracking. Lead qualification significantly cuts down the time spent on follow-ups.

4. Nurtured

In an ideal environment, a qualified lead will certainly result into a successful sale – however, it isn’t always the case.

Your leads may start losing interest, could change their mind about the product demand, or be attracted by a rival. These “warm” leads (promising, yet not displaying instant interest) must be properly cultivated in order to achieve conversion.

5 Best Practices for Lead Management

You can adhere to a number of best practices to ensure efficient lead handling. These assist in achieving two long-term goals: capturing and converting the greatest number of leads possible, and reducing the proportion of “poor leads” in your sales and marketing funnel.

When handling leads, you should adhere to the following five best practices

1. Use targeted content to capture leads

A key component of your lead management approach is targeted content. It develops your brand as a thought leader, a product specialist, and a seller in addition to the B2B market. How-to tips and product reviews, even in a B2C example for lifestyle and cosmetics, can greatly increase client confidence and maintain interest.

2. Consistently employ cleaned lead data

Your sales and marketing system’s data is what determines how successful your campaigns are. The “Garbage-in-Garbage-out” approach applies in this situation since your team will be expending unnecessary effort on fruitless follow-ups and irrelevant campaigns if your sales and CRM funnel is filled with bad leads.

3. Evaluate the results of lead management initiatives

It goes without saying that keeping track of which lead generation efforts are producing the best outcomes is a crucial best practice. To increase profitability, investments in these directions can be strengthened.

4. At the top of the funnel, spread a big net.

Starting the lead management process with hot leads is not advised. It’s likely that your initial lead database may include a range of prospects who are at various phases of the buying process. If you simply look for hot leads, you can lose out on possible “warm” leads that could be encouraged to convert.

You can use strategies like social media presence, pay-per-click display advertising, and properly displayed contact forms to reach a wide audience at the top of the funnel.

5. Work with the sales staff

We cannot emphasize enough how important it is for marketing and sales to work together to develop an effective lead management strategy. While marketers are responsible for producing leads, it is the sales representative’s responsibility to follow up with, assist, and convert the prospect. These two tasks can improve conversion rates and rethink the client experience by cooperating.

5 Top Platforms for Lead Management System Selection

Salesforce, Marketo, and many more digital solutions are available to help automate and enhance the lead creation process. They serve in many respects as platforms for customer relationship management (CRM), mediating communications between your business and potential clients. Therefore, if you’re certain that you need lead management, here are five platforms to take into account:

The company’s sales cloud platform also features an effective lead management capability. Salesforce Opens a new window- Salesforce is a market leader in CRM and associated activities. You can keep track of your active leads using Salesforce lead management Opens a new window, automatically score and route them to the right team, and even integrate your marketing efforts to track their effects on lead creation.

Marketo is another well-known name in the martech industry, and it is supported by Adobe’s capabilities for CEM. Salesforce’s lead management solution from Marketo is a perfect substitute because it integrates your inbound and outbound marketing initiatives and has almost all of Salesforce’s features. A clever analytics feature that connects marketing activities to the ROI produced is also available.

Another alternative to Salesforce is Freshsales. It provides a 360-degree customer dashboard that groups and lists leads that have been won, are open, and have been closed. Similar to Salesforce, it has lead scoring built in so that your sales staff only follow up with the most potential prospects. With an integrated calendar, file manager, and note-taking feature, the platform facilitates communication between sales and marketing.

HubSpot, a provider of marketing solutions, has a CRM automation tool of its own called HubSpot Lead Management.

leads to the opening of a new window that can be used for lead management. To streamline the lead capture and follow-up process, you may automatically send emails, record calls, and exchange notes. HubSpot distinguishes itself from Salesforce in this area thanks to its interesting set of lead generating solutions. You may increase your lead outreach with live bots, social media ads, website forms, and other tools.

The AI-powered lead management package from Zoho, Zoho CRM, is very well-liked by both big corporations and small organizations. It can be integrated with your marketing campaigns to give end-to-end analytics, it is compatible with multi-source lead generation, and it automates distribution and scoring. Gartner Peer Insights recognized Zoho CRM the Best CRM Lead Management Software of 2018.

Introduction to Lead Management: The Future for Marketers

You are now prepared to launch a lead management program as you are armed with these lead management best practices and a deeper comprehension of what it means for your business. Be sure to:

Set a benchmark using your current metrics (customer base, content repository size, martech infrastructure, etc.)

Analyze your customers’ requirements and expectations thoroughly to ensure that your lead generation strategies are effective.

Create a content calendar that is easy to use in attracting and nurturing leads.

Do extensive research and choose a lead management platform that is compatible with your goals and company size.

You now know the basics of lead management, and it’s time to open channels of communication between sales and marketing. The success of your strategic goal ultimately depends on this, which is assisted by modest regular actions made by your sales and marketing professionals.