Not capitalizing on the first interaction with your potential customer, is like missing a school day, and then finding out that Ed Sheeran made a surprise visit in your absence. 😋 

So that you don’t miss out on business opportunities, lead management becomes pivotal, as it takes care of your interaction with your prospects from the first touchpoint to the last. 🤝

What is the lead management process?

Lead management is taking care of your potential customers' entire journey until they make a purchase. 

Its key components are lead generation, qualification, nurturing, tracking, and analytics to drive leads through your sales and marketing funnels.

Why lead management is important?

Lead management is crucial for the following reasons:

✅ It not only helps you hit sales targets but also builds strong relationships with your customers, who often make repetitive purchases. 

✅ With a good Lead Management System, you can handle a large volume of leads generated. Thus scalability becomes feasible. 

✅ Similarly, a lead management system helps you with data-driven insights for targeted marketing and sales efforts.

✅ Facilitates interdepartmental alignment between your sales and marketing teams, breaking down silos.

✅ Prioritizes hot leads to improve conversion rates, cost, and time efficiencies. 

✅ Enhances your sales teams’ productivity by clarifying what more needs to be done and where they’re lacking.

✅ Helps you trace the origin point of your leads.

Stages of lead management 

Lead management is a detailed process that comprises several stages your customer goes through. Each of these holds significance for achieving the overarching goal of lead management: improving conversion rates.

The stages of lead management are as follows:

Lead generation

It all begins with finding leads and then gradually building on them. Your marketing channels like social media, content building, podcasts, emails, SEO, paid advertising, etc., boost your B2B lead generation process.

Lead capture

To be able to capture leads, you need to collect their data to understand their requirements and gain insights. 

Make use of forms, chatbots, pop-ups, ads, lead magnets, CRM tools, etc. for this purpose. And then keeping them interested in your products and services will be easy.

Lead tracking

A continuous assessment of your leads is essential to monitor their progress through the sales funnel. This can include the use of CRM, marketing automation tools, and lead-tracking software which helps with better segmentation and targeting of leads.

This goes beyond monitoring current data, as it also involves leveraging predictive analytics to forecast future behavior patterns. This enhances the strategy-making process by keeping you ahead of the curve.

Lead qualification

If you’re wondering how to identify who your potential customers are, lead qualification has got you covered.

This involves assessing your prospects’ potential to convert. It can be done by matching them with your buyer's persona, making discovery calls, and segmenting them based on their demographics, age, engagement levels, etc.

Lead nurturing

When you plant a seed, it takes a while before blossoming into a crop to yield grains. Similarly, through lead nurturing you strengthen your customer relationship to win over the prospects not ready to buy yet.

This is achieved through targeted marketing, effective lead nurturing campaigns, email nurturing campaigns, etc.

Best practices of lead management

Effective lead management is a balancing act using your CRM, automation, and personal touch to ensure that prospects feel welcomed and get converted.

Some of the best practices of lead management are as follows:

Lead generation optimization

Your lead generation sources like blogs, SEO, high-converting landing pages, social media channels, podcasts, webinars, marketing campaigns, etc. must be robust.

You can start with the lead gen sources your company is efficient with, and then expand on the other options. 

After all, without leads at your disposal, the consequent steps won’t make much difference.

Prompt lead qualification

With the level of competition on the rise, the earlier you get in touch with the leads, the higher the chances of closing a deal. Prioritizing hot leads is the secret mantra.

As per Marketo, a five-minute lead response means:

✅ You’re 4 times more likely to qualify that lead than a 10-minute response.

✅ You’re 21 times more likely to convert than contact after a 30-minute wait

But this cannot happen with mere speculation. You need to analyze, visualize, and make use of your prospects’ data, key touch points, feedback, etc.

Lead scoring is one of the most rewarding methods for lead qualification as it helps you prioritize the hot leads and allows time to nurture those needing more time before they convert. This optimizes your sales and marketing processes, which is one of the major goals of lead management.

Regular data analysis

Quality data helps you paint a better picture of what your leads want, and how far they’ve progressed, so you can devise your nurture activities based on that.

Rather than focusing on third-party data, prioritize collecting it directly from your leads as it would be the most relevant and up-to-date.

Sales-marketing collaboration

We earlier saw that one of the benefits of lead management is that, it brings marketing and sales on the same page. This fosters a culture of collaboration across the organization.

This becomes possible through shared goals and KPIs, regular communication, training and onboarding, content collaboration, integrated technologies, performance analysis, and ultimately, sharing success.

Precise funnel strategy

In the early stages, you simply have to understand the interests, and requirements and focus on educating your prospects. Gradually, you get into the specifics and deliver tailored solutions. This helps you close deals swiftly as you are hitting the sweet spots.

You should have a precise strategy ready beforehand for sales and marketing funnels.

Source: Salesforce

Personalized communication

Along with customizing your content based on lead preferences and stages in the buying journey, you should also make use of dynamic content to make it even more relevant.

Personalized communication involves behavioral targeting, personalized recommendations, data collection, segmentation, tailored communication channels, and feedback loops.

This helps facilitate better customer experience, engagement, and loyalty.

Continuous assessment

You should consistently monitor key metrics like cost per acquisition (CPA), customer lifetime value (CLTV), cost per lead (CPL), response time, conversion rate, etc.

A periodic review of your lead management process must be done to identify the areas for improvement through audit and feedback loops.

Popular lead management software and technologies

Lead management software and technologies help you enhance your lead management process by streamlining sales & marketing, lead nurturing, and lead conversion processes. These tools enable you to make data-driven decisions enhancing your probability to close deals.

Some important lead management software and technologies are as follows:

Customer relationship management (CRM)

This is the main control center of your customer-related data. It involves:

✅ Data management
✅ Marketing automation
✅ Analytics and reporting
✅ Customer support
✅ Integration with other systems

CRM is important to build strong relationships with your potential leads, address their pain areas, and drive sales and business growth.

Some popular CRM tools are Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, Zoho CRM, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Oracle CX Cloud, etc.

Lead nurturing tools 

These tools help you guide your leads through your sales funnel with continuous engagement and building relationships. There is a wide range of tools used for this purpose as lead nurturing in itself is a broad topic.

For instance, a tool like Mailchimp is popular for email nurture campaigns. Once you understand the anatomy of a successful email nurture campaign, you enhance click-through rate and land more emails in inboxes rather than spam folders.

Similarly, HubSpot Chat as part of HubSpot’s suite allows you to engage with your leads through live chat to collect key information for future interactions.

Data Analytics

They are essential to help you with informed decision-making and sales process optimization. The tools enable you to track sales performance, KPIs, growth rate, etc.

While choosing a tool, you should take its interface, cost, integration capabilities, and alignment with your requirements into consideration.

Some popular tools for this purpose are Salesforce, HubSpot Sales, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, QuickBooks, etc.

AI and machine learning can be utilized to further improve your data-driven business capabilities. For example, you can leverage predictive analytics with Pardot for improved conversions through forecasting.

Sales enablement

It encompasses all the aspects that empower your sales team to engage effectively with buyers throughout their purchasing journey. It involves enablement tools, information, training, lead 
tracking, etc.

For this purpose, Outreach is one platform that helps you build a sales process that is structured, aligned, and repeatable.

Source: outreach.io

Some other tools widely used for sales enablement are Highspot, Salesforce, Mindtickle, etc.

Engagement tools

They help you maintain consistent communication with your prospects. This includes enhancement of participation level, real-time feedback, learning experience, adaptability, and customer satisfaction. 

ActiveCampaign helps with engagement improving customer experiences, cost and time efficiency, and automating tasks. One of its core features is creating highly personalized and engaging email campaigns.

Hootsuite is an effective social media marketing tool. You can schedule posts, monitor social media interactions, and draw analytics to improve engagement levels further.

Slido is a Q&A and polling platform that can be used during live and virtual sessions. As their tagline says, “The easiest way to make your meetings interactive”, it helps you to engage with your participants and understand their viewpoints in an organized manner.

It’s a wrap

Lead management has overarching benefits across your organization as it facilitates cross-functional synergy, strategy building, customer loyalty, and better conversion rates. As we saw throughout this blog, it is an assimilation of numerous processes, thus can challenging to leverage without expert guidance.

At RevX, we have helped 250+ clients achieve their business goals with optimized lead generation, scoring, nurturing, qualification, and conversions.

We would love to hear your story, pain areas, and business requirements to deliver innovative solutions curated exclusively for you.