What is lead management and why it is important in sales?

Engaging with your potential clients is crucial to ensure sales. While you can find such potential customers in your company’s social media pages, word-of-mouth, or even your blog posts, these leads should be captured and nurtured by you until they are finally ready to buy from you. Lead management is this very process of acquiring and managing leads throughout the buyer’s journey. Here, we will explore the basics of lead management and why it is important for businesses.

What Is Lead Management?

A lead is a person, company, or corporation that may or may not become a customer of yours. Tracking, managing, and nurturing leads is part of it and comprises the lead management meaning, also known as customer acquisition management. When it comes to lead management, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. If a company has a set of techniques and marketing strategies that work for them, they can use them to attract and convince leads.

You can use lead management to organize your company’s leads so you can see where they are in the sales funnel and tailor your interactions with them to encourage sales. Your investment in leads that will generate business and prevent opportunities from slipping through the cracks is aided by this tool.

Lead management in the modern-day encompasses much more than simply keeping track of potential customers. They have a direct impact on sales because they integrate sales and marketing. Capturing leads, tracking their activities and behaviour, and preparing them for quota-carrying sales executives are all part of the lead management process.

Related: Integrated sales lead management system

Lead vs Customer

A lead is the starting point in the sales process, and it is a person or organization with unconfirmed information and unconfirmed motive which has contacted your business. The term “lead” refers to a prospect interested in your product or service and capable of bringing you business.

An actual customer is a person or business that has contacted your company with verified and sufficient information. Someone who has done business with you or purchased your products/services. With customers, it is important to use subtlety, listen, and fulfil the unique give-and-take of a conversation to communicate effectively.

Why Lead Management Is Important

An effective lead management system helps sales reps to move leads through the sales funnel and lead to conversion. Having the ability to:

1. Filter out unqualified leads

Your sales team won’t have to waste time on unqualified leads with lead management. In this way, lead nurturing is done, and the sales process is streamlined for clients who are most likely to buy.

2. Organize leads

As leads are gathered, a lead management system organizes categorizing and scoring each one. Geography, media channel, behavioural traits, and engagement period are just a few ways they can be organized.

3. Fasten the response time

Today’s consumer expects a quick response to a question or issue they may have. Leads who wait for more than an hour or two for a response are more likely to move to other options. Companies can schedule an automated response to keep in touch with leads while the proper departments address their requests.

4. Lead Distribution

A lead management system is essential for companies with large sales territories, and it allows the sales team to receive leads in an organized manner, chronologically or by product line. This improves the efficiency of the sales force by distributing leads to the right people at the right time. 

5. Keeping track of leads

A lead’s position in the sales pipeline can be tracked in real-time. Influential exposures, such as webinar invitations or free white papers can be scheduled for more engaged leads. Accurate sales forecasting is often a result of lead management, which improves operations management.

6. Prevent lost leads

The lead management system can also help you avoid losing leads. It is no surprise that 80% of marketing leads are ignored or destroyed. According to a recent poll, 73% of organizations do not have a defined procedure for re-engaging, maintaining, or nurturing leads following a sales transaction? 75% of the leads generated by marketing are followed up on by companies with mature lead management procedures, resulting in valuable new business opportunities.

Using lead management, you can keep track of every step of the customer’s journey through the sales process, from the first contact to the end of their relationship.

7. Maintain relations with leads

After just one or two interactions, many buyers aren’t ready to make a purchase. A lead management system guides lead through a series of interactions, allowing buyers to become more acquainted with the company or products and more confident in their decision to purchase.

Read Also : Lead Generation

Steps To Implement An Effective Lead Management Process

A successful and efficient lead management process can be created and implemented by following these steps:

1. You must first identify your potential customers to design a process that will allow you to assess where these prospects are in the sales process.
2. Generate and collect data about your prospects. Creating and tracking content is the best way to generate leads and identify their source.
3. Lead scoring is an important element of the lead management process since it helps you decide whether or not a lead is interested in your product or service. It is possible to use demographic and behavioural data to determine a lead’s score.
4. Using the information you gathered in the first three phases, determine different lead segments based on their interests and potential sales cycle position. The leads in the research phase should be nurtured or educated with valuable content propelling them through the sales funnel. 
5. Pass off your leads to the sales team but ensure that the leads are ready and not premature. Make sure that all leads are qualified with support from lead scoring.
6. Even if your leads have been passed on, make sure to review them with the sales team and make any necessary refinements, scores, and evaluations as you go along. Prospects should not be lost or sent to marketing for further nurturing at any point in the sales cycle.

Conclusion

There are many ways to generate leads, including your current customers, referrals, vendor lists, event marketing, and general marketing campaigns. You qualify, match, score, and distribute leads, and when you close them, you enjoy the new business that comes with it. It’s possible to take a scientific and repeatable approach to this process with the help of a lead management program. It also helps you keep in touch with potential customers by implementing a lead nurturing program.