Ultimate Guide: What Is Lead Management?

An important part of any business’s long-term growth strategy is generating new leads. For that reason, it is important to have a clear picture of all of your sales and marketing plans to capture qualified leads.

 

Developing customer acquisition and retention strategies is easier once you are familiar with lead management principles. In this article, we will cover everything in the lead management process and share the best practices to do it. 

 

What Is Lead Management?

Whether an individual or a business, any potential customer is considered a lead. A potential lead can be indicated through their interaction with your business’ website, products, or services. For example, when they visit a product page, provide contact information, register for an event, or watch a product video.

 

The lead management process starts with businesses obtaining information about potential customers. Then, the sales team can use the gathered data to analyze, qualify, and nurture incoming leads so that they become paying customers. 

 

First impressions are crucial to capturing leads. For example, if you run an online store, it is important to have a well-designed website that functions at all times. If your website experiences downtime or errors, it’s likely to drive away potential new leads. That’s why we recommend finding the best hosting for smooth performance and a fast loading speed. 

Lead Management Process

The lead management process helps your sales team formulate effective strategies to pursue, generate, and manage leads. Let’s dive deeper into the details – including lead capturing, tracking, qualifying, distributing, and nurturing. 

1. Lead Capturing

The initial step in lead management is lead capturing or lead generation, which is when a potential customer or lead enters your database for the first time. In this step, your team should employ effective marketing strategies to drive visitors to your website, where they will find valuable content. 

 

Perform keyword research to discover insights that will help determine the right type of content to produce for your targeted audience. If visitors find value in your content, they are more likely to trust your business and make a purchase. 

 

To further drive these leads to make conversions, include calls-to-action (CTAs) on your website’s pages inviting visitors to view your products or join a mailing list. Once you have their names and contact information, they become your leads. 

2. Lead Tracking

The next step is lead tracking, where you will monitor the leads’ interactions with your business and activities on your website. Take note of any clicked pages or links, downloaded materials, or email newsletter view counts. 

 

The amount of time that your leads spend on your website is another critical measure worth tracking. This helps identify their level of interest in your content and also indicates the likelihood of them returning to your site. 

All of these valuable insights help you better understand customers’ needs so you can avoid strategies that won’t deliver the expected results. Moreover, lead tracking helps your business’ sales and marketing team identify more qualified leads, close more deals, and ultimately increase the business revenue. 

3. Lead Qualification

The next step in lead management is lead qualification. It is essential to qualify leads based on characteristics such as purchasing intent and capability, and whether a product or service meets their needs. 

 

An excellent way to qualify leads is through a contact scoring model. It ranks your contact database based on factors like their interest in your product or service, user demographics, buying journey, and engagement with your business. 

 

Using this scoring method, your sales team can focus on selecting and following up on the most promising leads and closing sales quickly.

4. Lead Distribution

The fourth step in the lead management process is matching leads with sales reps who can best turn them into customers. Since each lead has unique circumstances and goals, they should be paired with individuals on your sales team who can identify and address their needs.

 

As your business grows, automating the lead evaluation and allocation process in lead distribution should be the goal. Consider the previous experiences of your sales reps and get to know their strategies to nurture leads. Then, work with them to find the best lead distribution approach to maximize conversions. 

5. Lead Nurturing

Most leads do not have a strong purchase intent the first time they come across your business. They could still be in the research phase – trying to determine if your product or service is the best solution for their needs. So, it is essential to nurture leads to move them through all the steps in the customer journey. 

 

The objective of this last step in lead management is educating or demonstrating the value of your product until leads are ready to purchase. Providing value through relevant content helps leads learn more about your brand and understand that your product can solve their pain points. This establishes business credibility and puts your brand as a top priority. 

 

For example, drip campaigns can be an excellent strategy for lead nurturing. This is where you send regular, automated emails to leads after they complete an action, such as completing a purchase or abandoning their shopping cart. Using this method, businesses can re-engage passive leads and build a relationship with their audience. 

Lead Management Best Practices

Implementing some best practices helps ensure that your lead management process is effective throughout. Here are six steps to follow. 

1. Define Your Goals

Remember that an effective lead management strategy results from the joint effort between your marketing and sales teams, so make sure they are on the same page when it comes to your goals. Identify the different lead phases and determine which team is accountable for each step in the lead management process.

 

Examples of goals include raising sales, expanding your customer base, reducing customer churn, or generating more traffic. Use the SMART framework to define your target outcome: 

 

• Specific. It must be evident what you want to accomplish, who the target audience is, what potential obstacles may arise, and who will be in charge of each aspect of the project.
• Measurable. A goal should have a numerical value to be measurable – for example, a percentage or monetary value. Determine the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will enable you to monitor the progress of your marketing campaign. 
• Achievable. Ensure that the goals are realistic and fall within your current business capabilities. 
• Relevant. Your lead generation strategy should align with the current business goals – for example, to grow sales by X percent.
• Timely. Goals should have due dates for completion. Set daily or weekly deadlines for all your lead management projects. 

2. Map Your Sales Process

A sales process is a detailed, step-by-step instruction that guides your team on how to generate leads and close a deal. To ensure a smooth lead management strategy, the mapping process should cover all the stages of your sales pipeline – from lead capturing to lead nurturing. It should also align with your overall business goals and key objectives.

 

Use a customer journey map to guide your sales process planning. Take note of past cases where your business has either closed a deal or lost a lead. If there were some roadblocks along the way, identifying them helps pinpoint how to resolve such issues in the future. The map should also capture the characteristics of a good lead to help guide your team. 

 

Having a clear map also helps your sales team eliminate uncertainty in the lead generation process. In addition, make sure to communicate your finalized sales map with all parties involved, including stakeholders. 

3. Target Your Ideal Leads

Understanding your brand essence is an excellent starting point to attract your ideal customers and formulate the right marketing efforts. Essentially, your brand essence covers your business’s characteristics and values – establishing a brand image. When it comes to lead management, consider the pain points you hope to address with your product or service.  

 

For example, if your brand essence is all about youth, your ideal leads would be young people with active lifestyles. From here, you can use targeted approaches such as advertising on social media platforms relevant to your audience, optimizing content to have better visibility on search engines, and refining your content quality. 

 

Another excellent way to target leads is by formulating an ideal customer profile. Consider your audience’s demographics, preferred marketing channels, and buying motivations. These insights can help you adapt to the ever-changing needs of your leads.

 

Targeting specific leads also helps narrow down your research – allowing you to focus on qualified ones. Ultimately, ideal leads offer a higher probability of successful conversions. 

4. Use the Right Lead Management Software

Using a reliable lead management system software is crucial to boost productivity and increase the number of generated leads. Such applications can help B2C and B2B companies automate sales-related tasks, such as email marketing and lead tracking.

 

Tools like SalesBlink can help automate and streamline the lead generation process. It also functions as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, facilitating interactions between businesses and their customers. With it, you can track all crucial customer information and sales data to help manage leads. 

 

Streamline all your sales activities using the right lead management tools to effectively capture, track, qualify, distribute, and nurture leads. Good CRM software should also address several common business needs, such as:

 

• Lead-tracking activities. A good lead management system enables you to store and manage all relevant lead information within a single platform.
• Manual lead-qualifying. Lead management software should easily identify and segment your database into qualified and unqualified leads.
• Marketing automation. The chosen CRM lead management tool should automatically send emails to leads. Utilizing email marketing helps bring leads closer to a purchasing decision.
• Clear data. Your chosen lead management tools should process and send detailed reports to help your team have a clearer picture of which leads they should concentrate their efforts on. 

5. Collaborate with the Sales Team

While the marketing team helps with lead generation, the sales team’s responsibility is to follow up and convert leads into paying customers. Lead generation efforts work best when all team members are aware of the best ways to collaborate.

 

As vital as it is to measure personal performance and growth, it is also crucial to work towards team-based goals. This will give the whole team a sense of shared purpose, which in turn encourages more productive work. Consider setting a shared goal for your sales team every quarter, such as converting a certain number of leads. 

 

Finally, it’s important to involve your sales team in the negotiation and closing phase of the sales pipeline. Gather their ideas and insights on the best strategies to follow up with customers, and discuss the most effective ways to close deals with qualified leads.

6. Track Your Lead Management Efforts

The final step in the lead management process is assessing, evaluating, and refining your efforts. Tracking your progress helps identify what you should stop or keep doing. It is also helpful to schedule regular assessments like monthly or quarterly evaluations to keep track of your business’ KPI. 

 

Tracking the performance of your lead management efforts helps your sales team understand the most effective ways to close deals in the future. Conducting regular evaluations also helps your sales and marketing teams identify what can improve in the customer journey.

Conclusion

Managing leads is essential for all businesses, regardless of size. The main objective of lead management is to identify, nurture, and convert prospects so they will become paying customers. 

Businesses can find practical solutions and make more informed decisions throughout the lead management process by having a deeper understanding of customers’ concerns, preferences, and purchasing behaviors. 

 

To recap, here are six actionable practices for lead management:

 

1. Define your goals
2. Map your sales process
3. Target your ideal leads 
4. Use the right lead management software 
5. Collaborate with the sales team
6. Track your lead management efforts

 

We hope this ultimate guide to lead management has given you meaningful insights into how to grow your business. Once you’ve implemented all the best practices, you are well on your way to creating a lead management program that will expand your customer base and boost revenue. Good luck!