Aug 16 | 5 minutes read

How to perfect your lead management

In the rush to increase sales, lead management can be forgotten. When the boss pushes you to get clients over the line, it can be easy to forget about the process and focus on the outcome.

Time can be spent trying to perfect the close or become a better negotiator, but that’s not the only thing that can bring in the bucks.

Those final steps are incredibly important, but increasing the base of interested parties from which you progress to full customers is vital. One of the most important parts in the sales process is finding, qualifying and nurturing leads.

This is where lead nurturing, and lead management automation come into play.

What does lead management mean?

Before we get into the nitty gritty of things, it would be helpful to create some definitions. Lead management is the process of finding, tracking, qualifying and nurturing sales leads until they’re ready to be pursued by your sales team.

What is lead management in CRM?

CRM means customer relationship management. Having this software helps businesses to manage relationships with customers by keeping a record of the interactions they have with your company. These interactions could take the form of browsing behaviour, email conversations, web forms and filled out chats.

Why is it important?

Lead management in CRM means that every lead will be automatically put into your CRM system. It’s important to have this integration because this process ensures that none of the efforts you make from your lead generation activities go to waste, and it allows businesses to track the prospects from lead to customers. SeoPaslaugos.com seo paslaugos - pardavimų skatinimas, tinklapių optimizacija ir kita reklama internete konkurencinga kaina visoje Lietuvoje: Panevėžyje, Kaune, Vilniuje, Klaipėdoje, Šiauliuose, Mažeikiuose

It can serve two main functions:

Help close a deal.
Provide after-sales support.

Lead management can also help businesses understand the best way to bring in new leads, which will give them the data to make informed decisions on the more effective way to optimise sales and marketing efforts.

It can also provide businesses with deeper insight into the customer journey, any pain points leads may have to deal with and inefficiencies in the process. In short, it’s pretty important!

Lead management should be based on data

Leads can be managed across a number of different fields:

Lead generation
Inquiry capture
Filtering leads
Qualifying leads
Lead distribution
Lead nurturing

So we’ve seen how important lead management can be. This whole process can be streamlined thanks to lead management automation, which is a part of marketing automation.

Businesses that use CRM systems can find it tricky to convert the data they acquire into valuable insights that sales and marketing teams need to nurture new leads and retain customers.

CRM systems alone can be limited when you want to create smart Segments, generate insights about customer behaviour or automate communications. This can lead to a few problems. For example, your valuable data can sit in silos, which is no good to anybody as your digital marketing team will find it so much harder to convert the information you’ve gathered into successful results.

Integrate with marketing automation platforms

To avoid these problems, you need smart platform integrations that put your business back in charge of customers’ data in one unified way. Lead management can be refined and based on real-time data because integrations give holistic access to behaviour data, events and all the tools you need to create fantastic personalised, targeted campaigns.

An example of using customer data and behaviour patterns to refine lead management could be something like this. You can track how leads interact with your website based on what content they read, which buttons they click on, and the pages they visit. From here, you can build a profile for each person that visits the site.

Next, you can use lead capture forms to really go deeper on who your visitors are so you can attribute actions to individuals - turning anonymous people into leads.

This is how you can use real-time data, that a lead management platform will streamline so you avoid silos, to create actionable insights.

Don’t forget about lead nurturing

This flows into the next section of this piece, because knowing who to target is one thing, getting the right message to the right person at the right time is another thing entirely.

Personalised email marketing is really important, especially so when it comes to lead nurturing. Intelligent platforms give you all you need to get to know your subscribers, which is half the battle!

At its very core, lead nurturing is all about keeping prospects and customers engaged. As you’re a B2B business, keeping up a strong but steady communication with leads that proves your insight and specialist knowledge is important.

You can also get fancy with Profile data. Downloads, frequent visits and products browsed are all really insightful indicators that prospects and customers have a real interest in your product and services. Listening to interest and responding to them is the key to sending the right message to the right person at the right time.

Marketing Automation flows can be created with optimal reactions for key touch-points:

Frequent website visits of blog posts, news articles, products and services shows you that prospects are interested or curious about your service.
Downloading content like reports or handbooks shows that a prospect trusts or has serious interest in the knowledge you can provide.
Participation in webinars or free trials shows that you’ve got a really valuable prospect on your hands.

Once you’re aware of a person’s browsing habits and what they’re interested in, especially if they’re a prospective, you can tailor your message to hit their specific demands. This will increase your chances of conversion, and also position your business as one that can problem-solve for this customer.

Get your lead management right

Lead management can be done without marketing automation, but why would you want it to be? There’s too much riding on the success of generating new clients to leave this to old-world strategies!

CRM systems need to be integrated with marketing automation platforms so they can work harder and smarter for you. Without that, there’ll be pain points all over the business thanks to data silos that restrict one hand communicating with the other.