Generating leads often tops the yearly and monthly to-do lists for organizations today.
However, what to do with the generated leads remains a different debate. Often organizations have a well-oiled channel for lead generation, but once the sales pipeline starts filling, they have no idea what to do about it.
In this blog, I will discuss the basics of lead generation and management, the stages and the best practices, and automation.
What is lead management?
Lead management, by definition, is acquiring and organizing lead information and managing interactions. Also, it refers to all the processes catering to attracting leads, qualifying them, and using personalized strategies and tools for conversions.
The key components involve lead generation, tracking, qualification, nurturing, distribution, and conversion: each with its own set of processes, attributes, and objectives.
Consider the example of Salesforce’s CRM tools which provide lead management solutions. Their system can effectively manage and convert leads, seeing that no potential customer is overseen and that sales pipelines are appropriately optimized.
Why lead management?
Lead management is more than simply collecting qualified leads, it’s about driving them through the lead lifecycle as effectively and efficiently as possible.
It’s an active and continuous process serving as the backbone of every sales team in a tech company. The lead generation team needs to follow up with the leads quickly, allocate them, and forward them to the right sales reps.
Lead management is important if you aim to build trust in your customer base. According to McKinsey, data shows that when people feel heard and understood, the chances they’ll purchase from you increase by 40%.
Another major benefit is the sped-up sales cycle. When you acquire the right leads and invest the right amount of effort in nurturing, you’ll quickly move them through the sales pipeline, wasting less time and resources.
Stages of the lead management process
Lead generation
Every journey of an eventual sale starts with a lead, and helping customers navigate the journey is the real deal. Apparently, the reason for all the fuss business leaders and executives create is to have a healthy sales pipeline.
Lead management starts by creating the right doors for your potential customers to enter. Obviously, the easiest places that make the most sense to collect leads are your website, i.e., newsletters, signup forms, product demo pages, and intent-based downloadable resources.
Use social media and email marketing to extract information about your leads; their name and company name, designation, company size, industry, contact number, and email address.
Plan how you’ll use some or all this data in your CRM and how it blends with your digital marketing strategy.
Lead qualification
First understand that the lead qualification process opens up the possibilities to two different outputs: qualified leads and unqualified leads. Not every lead you’ll come across will be worth pursuing.
Some leads might enter your list just out of curiosity or may fit the buyer persona you have made for your business.
Encourage your sales team to stop wasting their time running after unqualified leads.
Ensure that you invest your time and effort into the right leads, mainly prospects who closely fit your persona and are willing to purchase from you.
For example, if you generate a lead whose role or job description in an organization doesn’t fit your target audience, put them into the unqualified leads group, or a more niche group that you may revert to again in the future.
Lead nurturing
Most leads won’t buy from you after the first interaction, especially when it comes to mid-sized companies targeting mid-sized businesses. Hence, nurturing is the slow, patient buttering you need to do with your potential buyers until they are ready to make a purchase.
The idea is to help leads better understand your business and how you can help them through relevant intent-driven content. Remember, it’s all about building trust; you’d stay at the top of their mind when they’re ready to do business with you.
You can use a variety of content assets, including blog posts, client success stories, downloadable content like whitepapers, eBooks, and email campaigns for lead generation and nurturing.
Ask your sales team to provide feedback on the relevance of the content pieces, for instance, if they address the target audience’s pain points. In short, helping the content marketing team identify the content gaps will enable them to create the right content pieces, eventually helping the buyers in the decision-making process.
Moreover, lead nurturing begins the moment a prospect starts interacting with your business; and doesn’t end after they’ve reached the bottom of the sales funnel, even after completing the purchase.
The sales team will continue to nurture leads because customers’ needs change with time, and you might be repeating the same cycle from the start or a particular touchpoint in the buyer’s journey with different messages and products.
Lead scoring
Score leads based on sales-ready leads; hence, you’ll know when a lead is ready to pass on to the sales team.
Lead scoring involves using all the collected information and giving them scores against the numbers you’ve allotted for sales-ready leads, and from a descriptive standpoint, how much they match your target audience.
I am not asking you to put stickers in front of the names of your leads list, any CRM tool will do the legwork for you. Also, importantly the tool will add the timing aspect; something that can be the difference between converting or missing out on a lead.
Lead distribution
Once you’re done with the lead scoring, put the right sales reps on them based on seniority, geographic location, relevant experience (ideally in the same industry as the client), performance, and availability.
Obviously, not all the aspects above apply as a one-size-fits-all philosophy. Every industry has its parameters for lead generation and management based on what you’re selling and other factors.
Most of the legwork happens online when we talk about the tech industry.
Some sales leaders also forward the leads list to their team and allow the reps to select from the pool.
However, involving the leadership’s experience and perspective is important, especially when you’re working in competitive spaces like retail, digital transformation, etc.
Like the lead scoring automation, define the criteria in your CRM system and it’ll do the distribution work for you.
Lead conversion
Converting leads is the real deal; the whole purpose of the lead conversion and management process.
However, a closed deal doesn’t necessarily indicate that the lead management process is complete.
Let’s suppose you converted a customer for mobile app development and after conversion, the customer is interested in further services, for instance, post-launch and upgrades. Or simply want to create a new application.
In either case, you’ll repeat the process from the nurturing phase to cater to their request.
Monitoring and adjustment
You never leave the lead management process alone. Sales leaders need to track which leads convert, what had the potential to convert, what didn’t work, and what improvements could be made.
You’ll be interested in specific metrics like the sales cycle length after the lead is handed over and the percentage of conversions for each sales rep.
Furthermore, consider the feedback from the sales team and the prospects to make necessary adjustments in your lead management process with time.
Again, a good CRM is your go-to channel for tracking. Most CRMs offer comprehensive reports featuring associated performance metrics, or you can also set up customized reports to highlight metrics most important for your team and business.
Best practices for lead management?
If you’ve uncovered the secret of what’s stopping your prospects from moving forward, that’s great! But how do we remove those bottlenecks and push them through the sales pipelines?
Optimize your lead sources
The first step in the lead management process, generating the right kinds of leads is important. Some major lead sources include social media, website, SEO, blog, industry events, press releases, partnerships, email marketing, and paid search.
Recognize the lead channels that are most probably going to give you high-quality, relevant leads.
Don’t adopt the one-size-fits-all philosophy and dive into every channel if you can’t justify putting in the right effort. Also, if the channel isn’t where your customers mostly hang around.
Refine your communication strategy
Do you have a strategy to communicate with your prospective customers at different stages in the buying funnel? Following the old-school tactic of bombarding every contact in your email list once a month with typical messages isn’t going to convert them into customers.
Start by asking yourself what your leads need at every stage. Second, categorize those leads into different lists.
Your communication should answer your leads’ concerns, needs, and pain points. For instance, are your prospects randomly exploring your products or services or do they require an urgent solution?
Moreover, if your leads are stuck at any touchpoint, they might not need your offering after all, or maybe they’re not convinced that investing in your product will address their problems.
Segment your leads
Lead segmentation done the right way helps marketing, sales, and customer service teams.
For example, marketers use persona segmentation to craft effective messaging for campaigns for different personas. Support teams segment customers to improve their support activities for different groups of customers. And sales personnel segment leads for personalizing the buying process for various prospects.
The point is to organize and allocate your leads into groups to improve your messaging across different stages in the buyer’s journey.
Ensure data and format correction
If you haven’t been using an organized method for lead collection, it’s time you do. The purpose is to ensure every lead’s data flows through a standard format.
Having a predefined format might not increase your sales numbers directly, but it can help you save time and avoid confusion as more leads start pouring in and your business grows with time.
You can set up your forms’ fields for accurate data format, remove duplicates, and sort and remove inconsistent formatting.
Make a secure repository of lead data
Use more than a Google Spreadsheet to ensure your lead data is accurate and up to date. A CRM can help your team manage lead nurturing and create drip campaigns to conduct follow-up activities.
Moreover, email marketers and project managers can avoid sending duplicate emails and oversee all the recent transactions and correspondences.
Identify stalled pages
Often, many leads get stuck at a single touchpoint in your pipeline. Seemingly, that stage needs re-evaluation by considering these two elements: what’s happening and what should be happening.
Start by defining the specific goals for each stage in the funnel. How close are your leads to achieving those goals? What activities can you do to make it simpler for your leads to move to the next level in the sales process?
Use reporting dashboards
Reporting dashboards can tell how healthy your sales pipelines are and how well your team performs.
You can customize the CRM dashboards to break down performance for each stage, highlighting instances where your sales team struggles and where they are highly efficient.
Use automation for outreach
Automation does most of the lifting when it comes to lead management, for instance, lead scoring, assigning leads, and synchronizing lead data between applications.
Automation is also used for lead nurturing through the sales funnel without compromising a personalized experience.
In fact, the State of Personalization Report states that 80% of business owners believe that customers spend more when given a personalized experience.
Use segmentation, targeted advertising, email customization, and personalized product or service offerings depending on the lead behavior.
Create sales enablement content
Sales personnel prefer sales enablement content as they admit they are significant assets helping make sales.
HubSpot’s 2024 State of Sales Report states that product demos, market research, product one-pagers, social media posts, client testimonials and reviews, competitor analyses, call scripts, email templates, and case studies are the most popular content pieces worth investing in.
Making the most of your leads!
Effective lead management is important for converting potential customers into actual customers and sales. Businesses can optimize their sales processes and funnels and maximize ROI by handling everything from lead generation to conversion.
Our guide here provides insights on some of the best practices, including optimizing your lead sources, improving communication channels, segmenting your leads, ensuring the right data and format, creating secure repositories, identifying stalled pages, using reporting dashboards and automation for outreach and creating sales enablement content assets.
Select the right CRM tool for your team and use it to track performance and manage campaigns.
With the help of a CRM tool, besides creating and nurturing various lead management processes and cleaning your lead data, you should be in a great position to streamline your overall sales processes.
