Lead Management

Lead management is tracking and recording a company’s touchpoints with its leads. By analyzing your customer acquisition strategy and refining your lead qualification and nurturing processes, you can create a lead funnel that drives conversions.

In this article, we’ll uncover the importance and benefits of lead management, find out how it works, unveil 8 steps to implementing an effective lead management process, and review software and best practices.

Why is lead management important?

Every startup needs to think about the quality of its lead generation strategy when its prospects start to drop off. Marketers often attribute this to issues like ineffective communication channels, targeting the wrong audience, or insufficient warm-up. If adjustments to the strategy yield little or no improvement, it's time to focus on lead management.

Lead management lets business owners have a 360-view of their customers’ position in the sales funnel. Using a CRM system for managing leads gives companies a holistic picture of their sales funnel effectiveness.

Lead management helps marketers cope with the following tasks:

• reveal top-performing marketing channels that are worth the investment;
• single out the most effective lead acquisition tools;
• identify the most qualified leads and sort them later based on their demographics, buyer journey stage, level of interest, and engagement;
• nurture leads individually based on their qualification;
• assign leads to sales representatives;
• keep the history of interaction with every lead in one place and access it on demand;
• build and maintain long-lasting relationships with clients;
• automate sales and communication with leads;
• streamline sales.

Lead management is a must for every company, which can be supported by its benefits. Below, we will review several core advantages that highlight its importance.

Benefits of Lead Management

With an effective lead management strategy, businesses can reap numerous pros that contribute to efficiency and success in generating new prospects.

• Better conversion rates. When you manage your potential customers effectively by using personalized campaigns, special offers, and excellent customer service, you increase the likelihood of conversion. Lead management platforms allow you to scale prospects based on their likelihood of conversion and focus on those who are most likely to purchase.
• Higher sales efficiency. By utilizing special lead management solutions for lead tracking, scoring, and distribution, you can automate your daily repetitive tasks and reduce your team’s workload. This leads to increased efficiency and productivity and improves communication across departments. A centralized system fosters better alignment among teams.
• Detailed data insights. With special lead management platforms, you can access comprehensive insights into lead behavior. This enables you to identify effective sales and marketing strategies for your target audience while avoiding those that bring no results. You can monitor the performance of each campaign and make valuable adjustments.
• Seamless customer experience. Effective lead management implies using personalization and ensuring relevant interactions with prospects. You can pay attention to customers’ preferences, needs, and problems to share the content they search for. With automated reminders, you’ll be 100% sure that prospects remember about abandoned items and their availability. This improves the overall customer experience and makes customers favor your company.
• Better alignment between sales and marketing teams. By using lead management services, you can align sales and marketing efforts toward successful lead nurturing. All departments will have access to prospects’ statuses and progress, facilitating communication between sales and marketing teams. This shared information about lead quality helps refine lead generation techniques and approaches.
• Wise resource allocation. When effectively managing your prospects, you can avoid spending additional costs on customer acquisition, lead generation, and nurturing. With the help of special platforms, you’ll be able to prevent leads’ churn and generate good ROI. Effective lead management enables you to concentrate on high-quality prospects who are more likely to convert, allowing you to allocate your budget wisely.
• Improved ROI. Effective lead tracking and nurturing increase your return on investment from sales and marketing efforts. By reducing costs associated with lead generation and sales, you enhance the overall profitability of your business.

Now that you know the benefits of developing an effective lead management strategy, it’s time to reveal how it works.

How does lead management work?

With a structured lead management process, companies can successfully monitor, nurture, and convert prospects into clients. To manage it effectively, you need to understand how it works, and we’ll cover this topic below.

Lead management is a complex process consisting of several essential steps, including lead generation, lead tracking, lead qualification, lead nurturing, lead distribution, and lead conversion. The process starts with marketers capturing prospects using various channels and strategies, such as subscription forms, landing pages, websites, special offers, relevant content, paid advertising on Google, or sponsored content on social media networks.

After capturing leads’ attention, businesses often encourage them to share their contact information in exchange for special offers, deals, useful materials, and other content that serves as a lead magnet. Using lead magnets increases the likelihood of obtaining contact details, such as email addresses, names, and phone numbers. Once marketers have this data, they can continue engaging with potential clients and guide them further down the sales funnel.

Then, marketers track prospects’ interactions with their content, website, and other channels to understand what leads are interested in to provide personalized offers and deliver relevant campaigns. The next step implies qualifying prospects and identifying those who are likely to convert. After that, marketers send timely campaigns that resonate with prospects’ needs and challenges.

Once leads are close to the purchase, they are assigned to sales representatives who work with each potential customer to encourage conversion. After receiving all the necessary information from salespeople about products, prospective customers convert into clients.

Now that you know how lead management works after reviewing each step, let’s discover the 8 steps to implementing an effective lead management process.

The main goal of this process is to deliver the right information to leads at the right time, ensuring a smooth progression down your sales funnel. It’s essential to offer valuable content when leads are ready to advance to the next level. Avoid being too pushy, and try not to slow down the process at the same time. Now, let’s consider each step of the lead management process in more detail.

1. Begin with lead generation

Lead management starts with an effective lead-generation process across different communication channels, including social media networks, subscription forms, emails, online and offline events, etc. You can also capture leads using organic search, PPC ads, referrals, social media ads, and many more. Later, their contact data will be added to your lead management platform for further interaction and analysis.

2. Utilize effective lead tracking

After capturing prospects' contact information, it will go into your CRM system. It stores detailed data about each of your potential customers, including contact details, interaction history, and source of the prospect. With the platform, marketing, and sales teams can keep an eye on prospects’ behavior, including site visits, email opens and clicks, content viewed, etc. This functionality allows teams to track and analyze lead preferences, helping to develop more effective and engaging campaigns.

3. Qualify leads

It involves lead scoring, which helps divide prospects into groups based on specific criteria, including demographics, behavior, and level of engagement. According to this information, businesses can give different scores to leads. Prospects who are more interested in the product receive higher scores and are considered high quality. Marketers prioritize these high-quality leads, as they are more likely to convert. Lead scores also help businesses classify potential customers into groups such as 'hot,' 'warm,' or 'cold.'

4. Nurture leads with relevant campaigns and content

This step implies using personalized communication across various channels. Targeted content, email campaigns, personalized offers, and retargeting ads help move prospects down the sales funnel. In addition, many businesses utilize marketing automation to deliver relevant messages at the right time triggered by their specific actions and behavior. For example, if prospects abandon items in their shopping carts, they receive reminders to complete their purchase. You can also set up automated email campaigns to inform potential customers about the products they added to the shopping cart and are likely to be sold out soon.

5. Assign potential customers to salespeople

Once prospects achieve a specific score or demonstrate a clear intent to purchase, they are assigned to sales representatives. This process is often automated based on the availability of the sales team. When leads are assigned, sales representatives receive a notification through the system, allowing them to promptly reach out to potential customers while their interest is still high.

6. Encourage conversion

Sales representatives interact with qualified prospects through their preferred channels, whether that’s meetings, demos, phone calls, or messengers. The main goal of this step is to convert potential customers into paying clients. Once leads successfully convert, they are handed over to the account management team for further onboarding.

7. Analyze your strategy to receive customer insights

When businesses have a special platform, it’s easy for them to monitor the performance of a lead generation strategy and lead nurturing processes. It provides marketers with insights into the success of their marketing campaigns, conversion rates, and ROI. Besides performance, this service allows businesses to pay attention to drawbacks and find space for improvement.

8. Strive to retain customers

Communication with customers continues even after conversion. Businesses maintain engagement to foster loyalty and encourage customers to remain with their brand. This ongoing relationship is crucial, as it significantly impacts profitability. As every business owner knows, a company's revenue heavily depends on retaining and nurturing returning customers.

Now that you know the 8 steps to implementing an effective lead management process, it’s time to find out how to bring these steps to life efficiently by using a platform. In the next section, you’ll find the 5 best lead management software to help you do it.

Since managing leads without a special tool can be challenging for your team, it’s appropriate to identify the best solution for your business. Here’s a list of the best lead management software for you to consider. Take a look.

SendPulse

SendPulse is a multipurpose solution that enables you to store prospects’ data in one place, manage it effectively, and maintain seamless communication with leads, ultimately driving high conversion rates. The platform is a great fit for businesses of all sizes and industries, allowing them to reach business goals consistently and efficiently.

With Automation 360, you can generate and nurture your prospects using various marketing channels, including email, live chat, SMS, web push, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp chatbots. It enables leads to move down the sales pipeline with little or no human involvement. Your team needs to set conditions once to deliver the right message when a new contact is added to your mailing list, or when a new user registers or abandons items in the shopping cart. With SendPulse, your lead nurturing process will be worry-free. You can automatically create deals, recover abandoned carts, update prospects’ statuses, and encourage purchases.

The service’s CRM helps you collect prospects’ contact information, run marketing campaigns, and align marketing and sales efforts. Your sales representatives can easily access the customer management system to find the necessary data for further engagement. With a CRM, you gain valuable insights into open deals, facilitating the proper allocation of sales leads to the right representatives.

Below, you will find how to add new contact data to the SendPulse CRM.

Pricing: The platform has a free plan covering 5 team members, 2 sales pipelines, 5 flows, 1 event, 50 elements in Automation 360, and 2 boards. The price for the cheapest paid plan starts at $9.60 monthly, paid annually for 1 user, 2 sales pipelines, 8 flows, 5 events, and 50 elements in Automation 360, 2 boards, and more.

ClickUp

ClickUp is a multichannel platform that offers tools and features for various tasks, including project management, product development, workflows, collaboration, automation, and others. The platform enables team members to collaborate seamlessly while effectively engaging with prospects. Its dashboard allows you to bring together all important data regarding leads and use it efficiently.

The service’s automation feature enables you to streamline workflows, manage routine tasks, and automatically assign sales reps to prospects. With the platform’s AI automation builder, you can describe the tasks you want to automate, and the sequence will be created in seconds. You can then customize actions and triggers to fit your needs. In addition, you can use a library of 100+ automation templates, email automation, and dynamic assignees.

Below, you can see how to create a subscription form with ClickUp.

Pricing: The platform offers a free plan with unlimited tasks, two-factor authentication, collaborative docs, whiteboards, real-time chat, and Kanban boards. The cheapest paid plan starts at $7 monthly, billed annually for one user, with unlimited storage, integrations, dashboards, custom fields, guests with permissions, column calculations, email in ClickUp, and more.

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is a sales and marketing solution that allows businesses to establish good relationships with prospects and convert them into customers with the help of its CRM, AI, and sales force automation. With its help, you can effectively generate and nurture leads using technology.

The platform’s CRM enables you to engage with prospects at the right time using targeted messaging. It allows you to manage prospects by assigning them to different sales agents, handling tasks, scheduling appointments, and automating other business operations. Additionally, the service lets you create customizable subscription forms to capture prospect data, which is then automatically transferred to Zoho CRM, ensuring that all information is secure. These lead capture forms are easy to customize, allowing you to create them with minimal effort.

Below, you can see Zoho CRM’s deals with corresponding statuses.

Pricing: The platform offers a free 15-day trial, with paid plans starting at €14 per month when billed annually. The paid plans include features such as workflows, scoring rules, mass email capabilities, custom dashboards, and multiple pipelines.

Freshworks

Freshworks offers a range of products for lead management, including marketing automation, CRM, AI-powered chatbots, live chat, and more. The platform is versatile and suitable for businesses of all sizes across various industries.

Freshworks’ marketing automation contributes to successful lead nurturing through its features. It lets you quickly create multi-channel journeys to welcome new subscribers, nurture leads, remind prospects about abandoned carts, and much more.

With its CRM, you can personalize interaction with prospects, shorten the sales cycle, and focus on leads most likely to convert. Using Freddy AI, you can run effective campaigns to attract new prospects, capture their contact data, qualify, route, and monitor their progress on a single platform.

Below, you can see how to manage deals in Freshworks’ CRM.

Pricing: The service offers a free 21-day trial for new users. Then, you need to upgrade to a paid plan to continue using the service. The most affordable plan starts at $9 per user per month when billed annually. It includes features such as Kanban view for contacts, accounts, and deals; contact lifecycle stages; built-in chat, email, and phone; email templates; custom fields; basic workflows; and more.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a comprehensive platform that offers a range of products and features for lead management, including CRM, email software, sales tools, and AI-powered solutions. These tools help reduce the workload on your team and streamline the lead management process.

With its CRM, you can easily monitor your sales pipeline, handle deals with AI, and run your entire sales process on autopilot. With automated sales conversations and AI-powered prompts, you’ll be able to effectively nurture your prospects and never miss the opportunity of a conversion. Its CRM allows you to visualize your sales funnel using the Kanban board and adjust it based on leads moving down the funnel.

The platform also handles communication with prospects by allowing you to build chatbots and live chat. With their help, you can capture contact data of leads and improve the overall lead generation strategy. Additionally, you can collect leads' contact details using highly customizable web forms, which can be added to your website or shared via social media links.

Below, you can see the CRM dashboard in Pipedrive.

Pricing: The platform has a 14-day free trial. After it expires, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan starting at €12 monthly if billed annually. It includes lead, calendar, and pipeline management, seamless data import, activity, deal and contact reports, and personalized onboarding.

Now that you know the best software for managing leads regarding pricing, features, and usability, it’s time to find out how to achieve the best results in converting prospects.

While there are many techniques available for managing leads, not all will be suitable for your business. Here are some of the most effective lead management best practices to consider.

1. Use lead magnets to capture more leads. When you add a subscription form to your website, consider using a lead magnet. It will encourage site visitors to share their contact details. It’s always a good idea to provide potential customers with useful content, including eBooks, promo codes, free first-purchase gifts, PDFs, case studies, and other materials in exchange for their email addresses and names. It will open the road to leads’ inboxes and further communication.
2. Create strategies for each stage. You should develop a tailored strategy for each stage of the lead management process, as leads have different needs at each stage of the sales funnel. Your content, channels, approach, and the narrative of your sales representatives should be adapted to these varying needs.
3. Establish consistency. You should ensure consistent communication across all the channels you use to interact with leads. Develop follow-up strategies to regularly reach your prospects with relevant email campaigns, messages in social media networks, and messengers. Consistency can be obtained easily by using special automation tools like SendPulse. The platform will help you build automated sequences to deliver relevant messages at the right time.
4. Utilize CRM. By using a centralized customer relationship management system, you can securely store all prospects’ contact information in one place. With its help, you’ll have all your leads visible and will be able to provide them with seamless experiences resulting in sales. With access to detailed lead data, all departments can align their strategies and collaborate effectively to convert prospects into customers.
5. Consider using automation. By automating lead scoring and lead nurturing, you’ll be able to increase efficiency and productivity. Segmenting your prospects, personalizing content, and tailoring email campaigns on autopilot enables you to reduce the workload on your team and ensure consistency across all channels. Automation helps you deliver messages after leads perform specific actions and ensure excellent experiences with your brand. You can send welcome emails after they subscribe to your newsletter, remind them about abandoned items in their shopping carts, and deliver offers they might be interested in.
6. Optimize your content to attract more prospects. Ensure that your content is relevant and useful for potential customers. You can use various channels and content formats to share your guides, how-tos, tips, best practices, videos, and others. Consider using social media platforms to create engaging reels if they are relevant to your industry, product, and audience. This approach can help establish brand awareness and generate interest among potential clients.
7. Review your lead capture forms. Check your subscription forms for clarity and simplicity. Even though you need to get as much information about potential customers as possible, it’s still essential to provide short forms. 3-5 fields would be perfect for better conversion rates. This is because a long lead capture form might scare away potential subscribers due to the time they’ll need to spend filling it in. To attract more prospects and encourage them to share their email addresses, you should provide them with valuable materials in exchange.
8. Use segmentation. By dividing prospects into groups based on their interest, problems, needs, and requirements, you can deliver more relevant and personalized messages, resulting in higher conversions. When you segment your leads, you can craft highly targeted campaigns that resonate with your potential customers and encourage them to explore your offer and take the desired action sooner.
9. Incorporate lead scoring. Effective lead management involves utilizing lead scoring to identify prospects most likely to convert. By assigning points to each lead, you can gauge their likelihood of conversion. This allows you to prioritize high-quality prospects who have had positive interactions with your brand. With lead scoring insights, you can then craft personalized approaches for each prospect, guiding them smoothly down the sales funnel toward a successful sale.
10. Avoid duplicates. For effective lead management, it's essential to avoid duplicates in your contact data. Implementing two-way synchronization among your apps helps ensure that contact information is consistently updated across all platforms, minimizing data overlap. While this approach doesn’t directly remove duplicates, it helps prevent them by keeping your contact information synchronized.
11. Clean lead data. Regularly review your prospects' contact data and remove any records that are no longer relevant. This practice helps avoid unnecessary expenses and optimizes your sales team's efforts. Additionally, check if you can still reach prospects using the contact information you have.

To sum up, lead management is an essential part of every business seeking for growth. It enables you to move leads down the sales funnel and manage them until they convert into paying customers. If you succeed in developing a structured lead management process, you’ll be able to attract potential customers, provide them with relevant offers, and resolve their problems seamlessly without any additional resources involved.

Last Updated: 17.10.2024