What are the important stages in lead management process?

What Is the Lead Management Process?

If your company is expanding, you will receive many customer inquiries and leads from various sources. But what happens if the volume of questions and leads exceeds the capacity of your company to handle them? Due to a lack of proper lead management, the same leads seep out of the pipeline.

So, how are successful businesses able to overcome this issue? It’s Simple! An efficient lead management process is vital for your sales staff to effectively handle and respond to inbound leads. Learn more about this process here!

Importance Of Lead Management Process

The Lead management process is all about finding and managing potential customers and turning them into paying customers. Simply put, recruit new leads, manage them, and then convert them into customers to generate income. So, organizations need to have a lead management process in place to handle their leads more effectively.

Key Lead Management Stages

The process of lead management occurs across 5 stages. These stages are Lead Capturing, Lead Tracking, Lead Distribution, Lead Qualification, and Lead Nurturing.

Step 1 – Lead Capturing

Lead management begins with lead capturing, i.e., when a lead enters into your database for the first time. Leads are often generated in large numbers these days, with the proliferation of lead sources (websites, PPC, email newsletters, forms, LinkedIn, webinars, offline events etc.). Automating your lead capturing process is advisable rather than keeping them in an Excel sheet.

Having a built-in lead capture feature in your lead management system allows you to save time by automating the lead capture process. This will collect leads from the sources mentioned above and pass them along to the sales team for follow-up. Additionally, the sales representative will be more efficient and ensure that no prospects are lost in the process.

Step 2 – Lead Tracking

In this step, you try to figure out where the lead came from when it was captured and if it was an inbound or outbound lead. You can use this information to plan and improve your next steps in the process of converting leads. 

In order to ensure that your sales process runs smoothly and that you have a good understanding of your leads, you need to make sure that all of the tools and technology you use are integrated.

Step 3 – Lead Distribution

Once it is captured, a lead is ready for distribution, and its website engagements, activities, and behaviours have been tracked. Leads are then distributed to the company’s sales representatives. Manually assigning leads to sales reps is time-consuming and risky when there are a lot of leads, and automating this process is also a good idea.

Sales can be boosted by strategically distributing leads. For example, you could distribute leads based on their origin country, the size of an account, or their interest in a particular product or service. However, if several sales representatives are assigned to the same region, a rotation method should be used to distribute the leads fairly. Leads are automatically assigned to the next sales representative using the rotation method.

Related: Lead Distribution Software System

Step 4 – Lead Qualification

In this step, sales representatives communicate with their managers’ leads assigned to them. In the initial call to the prospect, the sales rep should get a good sense of whether or not the lead is worth following up with. The sales managers provide their sales representatives with a list of features that need to be checked when qualifying a lead for a sales opportunity.

Lead scoring is the name given to this process. On a scale of one to ten, each lead is assigned a number based on some characteristics such as demographic information, website engagement, company information, and behaviour, fit vs interest toward your company and product, etc. Leads with a high lead quality score are considered sales-ready and should be handled with the utmost urgency.

Step 5 – Lead Nurturing

Your lead generation efforts won’t bring in all the high-quality leads. The vast majority of your leads will not make a purchase right away and will not score well on your lead scoring. Although the lead may have stopped showing interest in your product, this does not rule them out as future customers.

As a result, it is critical to keep these leads in your pipeline and regularly send information and updates about your product and services. The idea is to keep them interested and involved until they become a regular customer.

Challenges With The Lack Of Lead Management Process

If you’re looking to grow your business, you’ll have to put in a lot of time and effort to find new leads, update your database, type out emails, and follow up. Lead leakage can be difficult to detect without a well-organized system for managing lead. Some of the challenges associated with the lack of effective lead management process are:

1. Absence of visibility into leads:

Poor customer experiences occur when sales and marketing teams fail to see customers as a whole.

2. Manual lead qualification:

Your team’s productivity can decrease because it lacks a system for classifying and disqualifying leads, such as ranks and scores.

3. No knowledge of the lead’s activities:

Prospects aren’t being tracked across your website, product, and email; you will be losing potential customers.

4. Converting leads is a challenge:

Your sales and marketing teams miss follow-ups and send delayed responses to inquiries, which frustrates your customers.

5. Lack of follow-up on leads:

Your team cannot send timely emails and build long-term relationships because they don’t understand the prospects’ needs.

6. Duplicate leads:

Duplicate lead entries in your CRM or spreadsheet could result in important leads being overlooked.

Read Also: Importance of Lead Management in sales

Conclusion

Leads are the lifeblood of your company. You can’t get new customers or expand your business if you don’t have them. You’ll have a better chance of increasing sales and improving your bottom line if you can get high-quality leads that are worth your time. 

The faster you can produce qualified leads and the easier it is for them to move through your sales pipeline, the more likely you are to have long-term clients. That’s where an effective lead management process comes in!