Did you know that potentially 80% of new leads never turn into sales? WebFX also shared that according to 91% of marketers, lead generation was a top priority. But not all leads are equal with so few converting into sales in reality. So, how do you approach this issue?
This is where lead management comes in. It answers that common question among those who are new to marketing and sales, especially in our cutting-edge and AI-powered business world. It is a process that helps businesses acquire new customers and grow their operations, to say the least.
Here are the following main points we will discuss:
In lead management, you come up with different methods and strategies to convert potential customers into actual ones. Without lead management, it will be fairly difficult to optimize your sales process and more importantly, achieve better customer relationships. Here’s more!
We understand lead management as a strategic process that involves both tracking and managing leads (or “potential customers”). It helps with identifying good quality leads, nurturing them, and leading to their conversion by helping the sales team optimize marketing and sales strategies.
Take this example to understand lead management better: you acquire a list of leads through an email or any other marketing campaign. How do you know which leads are worth your time and effort, which ones will actually lead to potential sales?
That’s the first part of the issue that lead management helps with. Second is the question of how to convert those leads into actual sales. Or more specifically, how to create and optimize a journey that guides those leads to an actual purchase or any other action?
Lead management takes a look at this whole process, from the first interaction of the potential customers with the company to the final sale. The strategies and methods involved in this strategic process are effective for capturing and converting leads from multiple sources.
Lead management is a comprehensive process. Getting a lead, for a recruitment agency for example, isn’t enough. You also have to identify it and distribute it to the right sales reps on the team, which are just two of the main components you will have to consider. And, there’s more!
The first step is lead generation in the “lead management” process. During this step, the marketers identify leads from social media platforms, websites, and events. But the goal is always the same - getting high-quality leads who are really interested in your products and services. Though, sometimes professionals opt to buy high-quality leads rather than generate them organically. A great example is BookYourData which sells verified email lists.
Did you know that when marketers target leads based on their position in the sales funnel, they have a potentially 73% higher conversion rate?
Then, the next step is capturing leads by collecting the right information. This could be through forms on websites, like the ones you see on most landing pages. Or, it could be during events where potential customers interact directly with the business.
Did you know that nearly 76% of marketers use content as a way to generate more leads?
After that, the process becomes all about qualifying leads. Which ones are most likely to convert and which ones would take up resources but have a very low chance of converting? For example, what’s the percentage of all agency leads that show check over 50% of your criteria to be a high-quality lead?
You will typically determine the quality of leads based on their interest level, behavior, and targeted customer profile metrics. Did you know that improving the quality of leads is among the top challenges for marketers today?
After you have generated, captured, and qualified leads, you start distributing them. However, you will only give the highest quality leads to your best sales reps. That way, you can ensure a high probability of the lead converting and closing as a successful sale.
Did you know that HubSpot found nearly 68% of professionals using three or more channels to convert leads into sales?
Your best sales rep will most likely engage the leads through multiple touchpoints. Maybe, they’ll use engaging social media posts and polls to interact with the targeted leads. They may also use content marketing, cold calling, or cold emailing to get their attention and build a relationship with leads as well. The goal here is to keep the leads interested and move them toward a purchase.
Did you know that nurturing leads can lead to a potentially 47% boost in big sales compared to the leads that never go through nurturing?
A very important component of lead management is lead scoring. Here, you will look at the lead quality and start scoring the leads based on their engagement and demographic information. Again, your goal will be to evaluate the leads based on different factors and prioritize them for personalized engagement for final conversion.
Did you know that nearly 60% of customers in a survey claimed that they made at least one monthly purchase all because of receiving a marketing email from the respective brand?
Our final step is, converting the leads. This is where you move the leads to the bottom of the sales funnel and turn them into customers. Whether you’re converting the B2B leads you generate or others, the main focus of lead conversion strategies is on closing deals. Moreover, it involves a smooth transition to help prospects convert into buyers.
Did you know that adding a personalized call-to-action (CTA) to your email can convert 202% times better than basic ones?
You may already know that knowing a concept in the world of marketing and sales isn’t enough. You need to have in-depth knowledge to figure out how it can help you maximize growth and business success.
With lead management, there are multiple strategies and practices that can help you do that. We picked a few of the most important ones for you.
One of the best practices is to focus on the sources of your leads. Are you getting most of them through social media? If so, then you should assess what’s making your social media post effective. In case you’re getting most of this through content marketing, try to tailor the strategy further to enhance the lead generation rates.
When you know the most valuable source of leads, you can focus your efforts on the most relevant channels. For instance, you can find company email addresses from a verified source to tailor your strategies, for instance, turning to BookYourData for reliable assistance.
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Don’t ignore the importance of lead scoring. It’s quite common to perform lead qualification and call it a day. However, lead scoring is equally important because it highlights which leads are showing the most engagement rate and potential despite varying quality levels. This can help you save resources rather than spending them on leads that might not convert at all. As a result, you can also drive down the cost per lead.
You might already know the importance of data in a business environment. It is crucial for the success of any effective lead management process. So, perform data cleanup. It will help you remove outliers, duplicates, and other errors in your data sets to make sure you have high-quality and actionable lead information.
The most crucial aspect of the lead management process is guiding prospects to the final sale. It means engaging them through personalized communication and often, relevant content strategies to encourage action.
Many marketers make the mistake of optimizing the whole process once, at the beginning or when a major issue arises, and then ignore it until the next major issue arises. However, it is important to regularly assess your lead management process. It will not only show you which areas require improvement but also help you gather feedback from team members to refine strategies.
As a rule of thumb, always personalize the messages and content for your audience (i.e., your leads). This will help you demonstrate your expertise and show that you have the relevant industry knowledge to stand as a top competitor. What’s more interesting is that marketers can also use this opportunity to establish themselves as a thought leader in the industry.
One of the most effective ways to optimize your lead management process is to deploy a lead management system. These systems offer a range of features that can help you improve everything from lead tracking to scoring and nurturing to improve the final conversion rates.
So, we compiled a list containing the best choices to help you determine which aligns with your needs:
Salesforce’s CRM is a robust platform with a ton of lead management features. It offers extensive lead tracking and scoring tools. In fact, there are automation features that help you track and score leads based on their quality. Moreover, Salesforce has built a CRM that integrates with various marketing tools to streamline the whole process.
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Why should we select Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional as the best lead management system?
This system offers automated features that can ease the lead-generation process.
Another great system for lead management is the Zoho CRM which also brings a range of features for lead scoring, capturing, and nurturing. You can use the automation features on this platform to create customized workflows and integrate with numerous marketing and sales tools to create a holistic process of generating revenue.
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Why should we select Zoho CRM as the best lead management system?
This tool helps businesses generate high-quality leads and improve their lead nurturing process.
Freshsales CRM, one of the most popular CRMs for lead management, is specifically in demand for its user-friendly interface. It has powerful lead management capabilities as well, which include email tracking and automated follow-ups to help nurture leads without requiring additional manual intervention.
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Why should we select FreshSales CRM as the best lead management system?
This software plays a big part in lead capturing and data enrichment.
HubSpot is a free and scalable lead management system. Although the advanced features and tools are available through premium subscriptions, you can still improve your lead management process through HubSpot’s CRM. It integrates with multiple automation platforms to help you capture leads through automated forms and surveys, along with personalized emails.
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Why should we select Hubsport CRM as the best lead management system?
It helps businesses organize, score, and nurture leads.
Zendesk Sell brings numerous features for automated lead scoring and personalized communication for lead nurturing as well. For instance, it offers comprehensive pipeline visibility to see where different leads rank and how likely they are to close. It also brings capabilities like mobile access, workflow automation, and so on. However, it’s not available for free.
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Why should we select Zendesk Sell as the best lead management system?
It provides lead list accuracy and outreach personalization for more conversions.
The Pipedrive CRM is also a popular system that you can use for lead management. You can easily customize this CRM to match your existing processes and help you refine the process accordingly. Furthermore, it has smart contact data features and automated workflows to boost different key components of lead management. It also offers email integration and activity tracking.
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Why should we select Pipedrive CRM as the best lead management system?
This CRM offers many customization options and helps businesses qualify leads more easily.
WebFX claims that generating leads and traffic is the biggest challenge for 65% of businesses out there. However, those are not the only challenges associated with lead management. From lead scoring to conversion, there’s a wide range of complexities. Your marketing team will need to consider all of them before effectively deploying a lead management system.
Make sure the information you’re using for lead generation and nurturing is free of errors. Data duplication, redundancies, or missing fields in data sets can lead to inaccuracies.
If you are acquiring leads from different channels, make sure you’re addressing duplicate entries. It’s common for an interested lead or prospect to end up in the sales funnel through a brand’s website and social media posts.
Also, many marketers often underestimate the task of lead nurturing through various channels. This leads to complexities and confusion. However, you can either set up dedicated teams of professionals to address this issue or use automated workflows, which is a more flexible and cost-effective solution.
Finally, we want to acknowledge that integrating your lead management system with other business tools can be a challenge. Why does this have to happen? Because after the lead management process comes to the final stage, there are other processes like marketing automation and CRM operations that kick off. To solve this issue, you can use software solutions that facilitate seamless data flow and transition.
So, we understand that lead management is one of the most critical factors that determine the success of sales and marketing strategies. How efficiently and qualitatively you can generate and convert leads highlights the potential for growth for your business.
With lead management, you should start with understanding the key components to the strategic process. Once you have a good grasp over the core sub-processes of lead management, you can create effective strategies to resolve the common challenges early on, or if they arise later.
You can pick the most suitable lead management system from the list above, like Zendesk, PipeDrive, HubSpot, and more. Make sure you assess your business needs and marketing proficiency before investing in the right lead management software.
Moreover, to curate a high-quality lead management system, businesses can also turn to reliable vendors like BookYourData to build dedicated email list databases.
One of the best ways to nurture leads is through personalized communication through content marketing and timely-follow ups. However, if you seem to be short on time to do that, you can use a variety of automation tools to help you ensure consistent engagement.
Yes, and the difference is simple: a manager generally oversees a department but a lead manager specifically focuses on managing and optimizing the lead management process. The main responsibilities of a lead manager, for example, will include lead qualification, nurturing, and tracking.
Yes, it is possible to automate the lead management process. You can use different systems and software solutions to optimize lead capture, scoring, and nurturing. Make sure the lead management system you’re investing in has automation features.
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