Are you implementing a lead management process? Here is how to do it right

Generating leads is challenging but it is a top priority for any business, regardless of type or size. It can make the difference between the success or failure of your business. It is not only important to generate a lot of traffic, but also to generate quality leads that will most likely become loyal customers and therefore increase sales.

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Nowadays, most customers are acquired through the Internet, especially social media, rather than through personal contacts. Even so, people are bombarded with huge amounts of data, emails, and ads. As a result, it is very important to develop an effective lead management process.

In order to generate leads, a company spends a lot of resources on many marketing activities. As a result, lead generation is an integral part of a sales company's daily operations. Lead generation is key to sales since, without leads, there are no potential customers or revenue. From lead acquisition to lead nurturing and qualification to lead conversion, everything must flow smoothly and efficiently.

By improving lead management, companies can achieve a higher lead conversion rate, which will result in higher sales. Follow the lead management stages below for a better understanding of the lead management process flow.

What is the lead management process?

From the first step of lead generation to the conversion of the lead into a paying customer, lead management processes enable companies to align marketing and sales activities. As a whole, lead management includes the processes of generating leads, qualifying leads, and nurturing leads. It is a systematic method for building and nurturing relationships with potential buyers, and it is the process by which a lead becomes a customer.  

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Follow these steps to understand better how lead management work:

Step 1: Create Buyer Personas

To effectively manage leads, you must first identify the characteristics that make a potential customer a good fit for your products and services. By understanding your customers, you can qualify, nurture, and refer them to sales. Identifying buyer types and personas will help you identify ideal leads.

Step 2: Lead Capturing

Lead capture is the marketing process of generating and sustaining interest in a product or service in order to build a sales pipeline and acquire new customers. Emails, social media, paid ads, webinars, and other means can be used to capture the attention of potential buyers during this phase.

Step 3: Lead tracking

The lead tracking process involves tracking potential customers' activities from their initial contact to their closing and recording them for marketing purposes and analytics. Inbound and outbound leads can be tracked using lead tracking. Inbound leads are those who have proactively engaged with your business through channels such as organic search. An outbound lead is one that has been contacted by your company, such as through an email campaign.

Lead tracking also enables marketers to measure how close a lead is to a purchase, which helps you make timely decisions that turn that lead into a viable prospect.

Step 4: Lead qualification

In this phase, the sales department works with the leads to determine which of them are more likely to become customers. Many leads are in the sales pipeline, but only some of them convert.

A contact scoring model can help you qualify leads based on their interest in your product or service, their demographics, their buying journey, and their engagement with your brand.

Your team can then invest their time in making sales by identifying the right leads.

Step 5: Lead distribution

Lead distribution is a process of routing incoming leads to your sales reps. Each lead coming through your marketing funnel has different needs, problems, and goals. Your sales reps are equally unique - with different skills, product knowledge, and experience. It is about identifying what makes your leads unique and routing them to the right sales rep to begin the sales cycle.

It wouldn't be a good idea for one of your newest sales reps with less than a year of experience to handle leads from a large sales opportunity. They may not be able to communicate the value of your business effectively because they don't have much experience dealing with large prospects.

Your best option would be to pass this lead to a sales rep with more experience, who has been selling your product for some time, and who has closed large deals before.

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Step 6: Lead Nurturing

A lead nurturing strategy is used by businesses to maintain and grow relationships with potential customers.

Lead nurturing can help you gain the trust of your target audience and increase sales.

You can use various lead nurturing strategies, including content marketing, email marketing, and surveys, to learn more about your audience.

It is important to provide prospects with the information and answers they need to build trust, increase brand awareness, and maintain the connection until the prospect is ready for a personalized lead nurturing can help you build relationships with your customers and prospects at every stage of the sales funnel.

What makes leads sales-ready?

Making a lead "sales-ready" dramatically increases close rates and revenue, and improves engagement and responsiveness on your end. Determining when a lead is ready to buy can be a tricky business for small businesses and large companies alike - whether they have marketing and sales teams or they do everything themselves.

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If you do it too early, you risk wasting your sales reps' time with unqualified leads. But if you wait too long, your prospects will have already chosen a competitor or moved on to another solution.

Collaboration between sales and marketing is the only way to define a "sales-ready" lead.

The following signs indicate a lead is ready for sales: customers are familiar with competitors, customers feel an urgency, customers are willing to meet or talk on the phone, customers have visited your website multiple times or interacted with you on social media.

Should you use a CRM for your lead management?

YES!

Lead management is made easy with CRM.

Using CRM will allow to manage leads effectively, it will help you capture, distribute, enrich, and qualify leads.  

The following are some of the key benefits of CRM for lead management:

At the lead capture stage - your CRM captures all the data from each lead form and automatically saves it as a new record. Contacting can be done from within the system, so you can easily track the history of all contacts.

CRMs with lead management functionality fill out a lead's profile automatically with public information like their job title, location, time zone, and social media profiles when creating a buyer persona. Using it, you can track a lead's activity on your website - pages visited, links clicked, resources downloaded - as well as their email engagement.

Through these insights, sales reps can better understand customer intent and personalize their approach. Your marketing team gets much-needed context for creating email campaigns.

In the lead tracking phase, a CRM offers a great advantage by allowing you to track all the interactions leads have with your company. By doing so, you can learn more about the needs and wants of your leads.

With a CRM for lead sales, the most qualified employees are connected with new leads, enabling them to close sales more quickly. A sales team leader also saves time and reduces the risk of manual errors and lost leads by not assigning each new lead to a rep.

Finally, in the lead nurturing process

Lead nurturing activities include creating targeted content, communicating consistently across many platforms, and other tasks that CRMs are well equipped to handle.

In conclusion, all communications can be personalized and coordinated with CRM lead management. You can also track all lead interactions with your communications and content to understand where the prospect is in the sales pipeline. Without a CRM to automate and streamline your lead management, you'll only get an incomplete picture of your leads - and that's not exactly conducive to revenue growth. CRM lead management gives you everything you need to create a strong lead management strategy, maximize your conversion opportunities and make the most of your sales approach.

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