Lead Management is the methodology that combines the efforts of both marketing and sales teams with the main objective of growing leads and converting them into customers. If you are a marketer, you must have heard the terms Lead Generation and Lead Nurture. They are both part of a holistic Lead Management approach where generation takes place before Nurture.
As Lead Management involves many moving parts, and involves both marketing and sales teams, it’s essential to have a clearly defined process using a CRM or Lead Management system. If you don’t have the right lead management process set up, your team might be disorganized, and your sales cycle might be too slow; meaning you’re losing money.
We’ve put together some snippets from the web to help you get a better understanding of Lead Management:
- “Lead management bridges the gap between marketing and sales. It’s a customer acquisition process, which identifies potential buyers (leads), educates them, engages with them, and when the leads are considered qualified, get passed from marketing to sales.” HubSpot.
- According to Technology Advice, Lead Management covers the following processes:
- Lead generation: Businesses create consumer interest and inquiry into products or services through a range of marketing tactics.
- Customer inquiry and capture: Consumers of marketing respond with interest and their data is recorded. This creates a sales lead.
- Filtering, grading, distribution, and contact: Leads are sorted by the validity of the request, scored and distribute to sales reps to action.
- Lead nurturing: Leads are sorted by contacted or uncontacted, and scheduled for follow-up actions.
- How can a lead management strategy help your business? “The process of managing leads helps you to identify tactics that are drawing the best results. This enables you to review what is and isn’t working, empowering you to create the most efficient and effective processes. Lead management also tracks interactions prospects have with your business, allowing you to see exactly how they converted along each of the buying stages.” Lupo Digital.
- Efficient lead management is essential to growing your customer base, which in turn increases profitability. Here are some interesting statistics to consider: 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales, lead conversion is determined 57% by lead quality and 43% by lead response time, and nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. Sales Mate.
- The five best practices for lead management according to Martech Advisor are:
- Leverage targeted content for lead capturing
- Always use cleaned lead data
- Measure the impact of lead management efforts
- Cast a wide net at the top of the funnel
- Collaborate with the sales team.
- The benefits of using a lead management system are summarized as: Talking to quality leads, engaging with context, improving productivity, quick response times, higher ROI, and measurable results. Freshworks.
Choosing the right lead management solution is key to growing your business. Our recommended platforms for lead management are: HubSpot Lead Management and Oracle Eloqua as they are both great platforms that can help you capitalize on your leads and convert them into customers. Lead management systems will equip you with features like automatically sending emails, recording calls, and sharing notes to optimize the lead capture and follow-up process. Additionally, using live bots, social media ads, and website forms will help you maximize your lead outreach.
If you are interested in learning more about lead management, check out “4 Principles for Effective Lead Management” written by our CTO, Mike Geller.
Happy Reading!