Effective Lead Management Process for Your Business

Lead generation is always given overwhelming focus by organizations as it helps them drive their business and stay afloat in this competitive market. Companies spend millions of dollars on their marketing campaigns and only 80% of the leads get converted into sales which means all that money spent on the marketing campaign went down the drain. Experts have pointed out that poor lead management process is to be blamed for this dismal return on investment.

What Is Lead Management?

The activities, practices, and process carried out for converting a prospect from a lead and transforming it into a source of revenue are known as lead management but many times businesses do not pay attention to this segment of marketing strategy and pay a heavy price for the same.

Nurturing the leads is necessary and without an effective lead management process, your business will keep losing precious amount of money on marketing campaigns and the leads too.

What Is The Importance Of Lead Management Process For Your Business?

• A well-structured lead management strategy helps you understand the origin of your valuable leads.
• It helps you in guiding the energy of your sales team in the correct direction.
• It helps in funneling out the weak leads with the help of apt qualifying verticals and helps you focus your skills on retaining the good ones.
• It helps you in optimizing your marketing strategies so that it can derive better leads and acquire the required sales figures.

How to Implement an Effective Lead Management Process?

Marketing automation has helped many organizations in handling the poor lead management performance but you need to have your strategies in place for implementing an effective lead management process.

Identifying and Understanding Leads

Determine who your potential buyers are; this will enable you to distribute them in the correct part of your sales process.

Identification of your buyers’ persona and type is the foremost area to be covered by your marketing team. You can carve out this persona from:

• Demographics: Location of your buyer, size of the company he owns, which industry he belongs to, what problems he is facing and what is the need of his business?
• Behavior: Do they read online? Like blogs, whitepapers or just surfs through Google to gain knowledge?
• Source: How do the leads land on your page? Does direct traffic drive them to your website, or they found you via some backlink, or did they find you via one of your tweets?

The best way of implementing an apt lead management process is by reading and mapping out your customer’s mindset. What is their designation? Is the lead a VP, CEO or a support personal?

Generating and Collecting Lead Information

The first step is to create attractive content and track the progress and this work is carried out by your marketing team. They are tasked to figure out the point of contact of the potential leads.

• Put your best and most revered content such as whitepapers in a lead-capture form. This will help in generating potential leads and gather crucial lead information.
• Adding a tracking token within all your online content or blog or emails will help the marketing team in identifying the leads behavior and the point of interaction with your marketing content.
• Your marketing team can use the analytics of the people visiting the website or blogs and where they are clicking on your website.

Having all this information helps in understanding the requirements of your leads and helps with the lead nurturing process.

Rank Thy Leads

To determine your lead’s potential interests, you need to rank them. The several factors that can help you in determining that rank include the demographic data and lead communication activity. This information is vital and beneficial to the effectiveness of filtering out the qualified leads:

• Higher the score, higher is the chance of lead conversion.
• Time is vital, as the ranking depends on the actions taken by the lead.
• Depending on the activity of your leads, the sales team can prioritize the sales pitches.

Depending on how your business functions, you must take some time on researching the various factors that can help you in this tricky task of ranking your leads.

Nurture Thy Leads

The next step is the segmentation of your leads based on the first three steps and position them in your sales cycle. The top leads are the ones that get turned via your first marketing initiatives such as the blogs and eBooks. The next level of leads is the one that gets converted after the free trial or while using the free trial.

The leads that do not make the sales list, place them in a suitable lead nurturing campaign. Why? Because these leads are still trying to understand how your products or services can help them in solving their business solution.

This is the best and the most suitable part as you can reach out to them with the agenda of familiarizing them with your product through more valued content, promotional offers, etc. telling them why your product and service is suited for them.

Some guidelines for an effective lead nurturing campaign:

• Draw out a content map that will help you understand which type of content must be shot for each type of lead.
• Having a personal approach while sending emails or promotions also helps in building a better relationship with leads.
• Having relevant call-to-action on every content marketed by you is crucial.

Transitioning Your Leads to Sales

Before passing off your leads to the sales team, you must make sure that they have been well nurtured and they do not have any doubt regarding your product and service.

The bifurcation of the leads based on their ranks comes in handy in this phase as it ensures that you deliver sales-ready leads to your sales team.

• Rank the leads carefully based on the activity done by them and pass them on after ensuring that they do not require any further nurturing.
• Make sure that the marketing team has carefully analyzed the lead’s activity and background.
• Advice your sales team to do their own research and gather proper lead information before making the contact.
• Decide on how the follow up will take place as under and over communication may hamper your lead.

Evaluate Your Leads

You must evaluate your leads after they are handed off and ensure that the marketing and sales team refine and evaluate them regularly. Move your leads through the proper sales cycle for the success of your lead nurturing process.

• Evaluate you leads throughout sales cycle.
• Measure the sales performance.
• Keep a track on your marketing and sales ROI as it is the ultimate goal of your perfect lead nurturing strategy.

Conclusion

A successful and effective lead management process depends on numerous factors present in your business and you must ensure that all these factors work unitedly towards nurturing the hard-earned leads.

Salesmate understands the importance of lead management and that is why this feature is an integral part of our system. You can visit us if you want to know more on how Salesmate can help you in nurturing your leads and our team will be much obliged to help you out.