Marketing and sales can’t function without each other, and lead management is the glue that holds them together. It’s a method of client acquisition in which leads are identified, nurtured via education and interaction, and ultimately handed on to sales.
Does your organization have a systematic approach to managing leads? By doing so, you may find that your lead generation efforts provide better results, which may result in more sales.
Below are the seven steps that will assist you in developing and implementing an effective lead management process from start to end.
7 steps to effective lead management
1. Know your leads
To build a method that will allow you to identify where these prospects are in the sales process, you must first understand who your potential buyers are.
To begin, your marketing team should create buyer types and personas. This will assist you in determining the perfect lead image for your product or service.
This persona may be created by determining demographics, behavior, and the lead source.
You should also delve further by figuring out your potential customer’s mindset. Is he/she the company’s CEO, the VP, or the techie? Determine his or her location, what he or she reads, and how he or she arrived at your website.
2. Create and gather data about your leads
The sales process begins in marketing, where the marketing team identifies the initial contact point of the potential lead, which in turn extends the sales cycle.
Creating and tracking the content is crucial for lead generation and knowing its source.
- Put valuable content, such as courses and webinars, behind a lead capture form. These contents can be utilized to create leads and acquire lead intelligence for lead management.
- Add a tracking code to social media and email links to track leads’ activity and content involvement.
- Use marketing analytics to see how users find your site and where they click. This will assist you in grasping the leads’ interests, requirements, and goals.
Capturing this information about your leads is vital for lead nurturing.
3. Rank your leads
The lead ranking is an essential aspect of the lead management process since it determines the possible interest of the lead in your products. Demographic information and behavioral activity are potential elements for evaluating a lead’s rank.
This information is vital and beneficial for passing forward qualifying leads efficiently because:
- A higher rank means a higher probability of lead conversion.
- Rankings are usually decided by when the lead acts. Inactivity lowers rank, for example, not clicking on blog CTAs or email links.
- Lead nurturing can be used on unqualified or cold leads.
- The sales team can organize calls in priority order.
Different criteria may be used to decide how leads are ranked. Take the time to determine the criteria for a lead’s rank in your business.
4. Nurture your leads
The nurturing of leads results in 50 percent more qualified leads. It is important to include a lead in a lead nurturing campaign if it is not yet qualified enough to be forwarded to the sales department. Many of these potential customers are still gathering more information about your business and determining whether or not your solution can address the issues they are facing.
At this stage of the sales process, you are responsible for educating these leads and convincing them (by providing them with additional helpful content, promotional offers, etc.) that they have a need for your products and services and will benefit from using them.
5. Pass leads to sales.
Make sure your lead is not in early stages of nurturing and that it is ready to be passed on to sales. Sales team members are typically lead-hungry, therefore, their productivity will suffer if they are given leads that aren’t quite ready to be converted into sales.
It may be helpful to rank leads in order to guarantee that every lead is qualified. You could also make use of an automated lead-assigning tool to ensure that the appropriate person is contacted as soon as a lead is received.
6. Monitor and evaluate your leads
It is imperative that the quality of the leads be continuously monitored and assessed. Because of this, it is essential to keep refining, ranking, and evaluating leads even after you have given them to the sales staff and handed them off to them.
The objective here is to prevent the lead from getting hung up at any stage of the sales cycle or from being sent back to marketing for additional nurturing.
Last but not least, you should regularly evaluate your lead management strategy to determine what aspects of it are successful and which ones are not. Even though it takes some time to develop, a streamlined strategy for lead management will, in the end, produce better results for the business.
7. Analyze Your Leads to Identify Patterns and Trends
A process that is used to identify patterns and trends in the behavior of a lead is referred to as a lead analysis. It is possible to use it to recognize patterns in the actions that a lead takes, such as the number of times that a lead visits your website or the number of times that a lead responds to your emails.
It is possible to determine which of your leads are worth pursuing further by conducting an analysis of all of them. It provides you with a means of measuring the efficiency of your sales process. You are also able to determine which opportunities are the most beneficial. The insights that you can derive from this data can assist you in developing a plan for the future that is as foolproof as possible.
Summary
Lead management binds marketing and sales. After being identified, leads are then nurtured through education and engagement before being passed on to sales. In order to improve lead management, follow the methods described above. Although developing the strategies necessary for effective lead management might take some time, the investment will be well worth it for the success of the company.
