Lead Management: Most Effective Lead Management Strategies
Do you have a dedicated sales department to manage your leads? Still, you find your sales professionals managing the leads in unstructured and unorganized ways. But, lead management is the most important activity to grow your revenues significantly.
You can generate leads in several ways. It is vital for every company to focus on the lead generation process with innovative tools. However, without a proper strategy, you will not be able to manage inbound leads. Your sales team should be efficient in moving these leads through the funnel to reach the ultimate goal.
Lead management strategies
Converting a prospect into a lead
How do you define a lead? Does it refer to contact details? Signups? Is it a prospect showing interest in your products? Leads can be defined in multiple ways, and your sales professionals must understand them. You can notice inconsistency in different departments of your company.
Suppose ‘A’ is a lead for your sales department. But, another department of your company thinks ‘B’ is the lead. Professionals employed in the lead generation process find it challenging to identify the right person as leads. Moreover, salespersons may not be in the best position to pass your leads through the funnel. They have to make attempts to increase the number of closed sales.
To make the lead management process more effective, every staff of your organization should know the definition of your sales leads. It will enable them to obtain the desired outcome.
Be serious while nurturing your leads
Marketing and sales are complementary activities, and they have to be accomplished together. In some cases, sales professionals make complaints about the quantity and quality of leads obtained from marketing teams. It is a very common problem found in several organizations. In fact, there may be 2 reasons behind the issue.
- You do not have a good number of leads.
- Leads you have generated are not of good quality.
It is challenging for organizations to find their prospects from the data on sales-ready leads. However, lead nurturing is the solution to this problem. Your team should nurture leads to fill your pipeline. There is no need to consider a lead as a bad lead during the initial part of the process. Some leads can give the opportunity of closed sales. Implementation of the right lead nurturing strategy prevents churn-out problems.
While nurturing and persuading leads, your team will be able to find potential in your bad leads. Most importantly, it is not good to call the lead directly to close a sale instantly. It is not the right way to act as a sales manager.
To move your leads through the sales funnel, you need to show them the value of your products and services. It is the major aspect of every lead nurturing process. The most important things in this process are constant connection, service, and content. An efficient sales team is capable of closing the gap between sales and marketing departments. With your marketing collaterals and other promotional items, your sales department can provide you with the best result.
Identify the source of your leads
After running a long-term inbound marketing campaign, you have started winning leads. In this situation, you should track lead sources. Which type of content have your leads encountered? Have you found those contacts through paid advertisements, social media, referral traffic, and organic search?
Lead source tracking is highly important, as your sales specialists can easily understand the things which draw the attention of leads. Based on their understanding, they can adjust the sales pitches.
It is essential to know about the lead source so that your professionals can scale up the overall process and achieve success. These leads need a number of touches for the final conversion. These details will help your team to anticipate future sales.
Score your leads
The scoring process reduces the guesswork in your lead management process. You can implement a lead scoring system to rank the sales readiness of every lead according to the preset criteria.
With the proper lead scoring process, you can ensure the best quality of your leads. Timely follow-up is another good step for managing your leads.
Start distributing your leads
Which salesperson will manage the lead? You have to make the right decision to ensure a smoother process. When the process is not managed properly, there is a chance of losing sales. Some hot leads can become cold within a short time, and thus, you must avoid this risk.
According to marketing analysts, the salesperson should respond to their leads within 1 to 2 days. It will increase the chance of closing sales successfully.
Keep your lead database clean
When the lead management process does not work, you have a risk of finding terrible results. The most important thing, often overlooked, is data hygiene. So, your first step is to detect duplicate records from your database. Your need to sort through the database regularly, though it is a time-consuming process. It is better to use software that helps with the automatic deduplication of data in your records.
Another significant step is the verification of your leads. In some cases, leads submit outdated and fake contact details to stay anonymous. That is why verification is vital to your lead nurturing and management process.
Every successful organization knows the importance of ongoing maintenance of data hygiene. Dirty data has a chance of contaminating the database. Avoid data decay by auditing the database automatically. It will enable you to get the best response from your team.
You can now train your team for effective lead management. Managing the leads is always important. But, how do you get back the lost leads? This is where you need a retargeting and remarketing campaign. A patented software, Capture, can be the perfect solution for remarketing programs. You can automate your campaign with this tool.