Your business relies on catching people’s attention and turning their interest in your company’s products or services into sales. This is called lead generation, where every interested party is an individual lead.
Your company’s marketing and lead generation strategies help create awareness to attract more leads. Then, it’s up to your sales team to help build the lead’s interest and handle any objections they may have—guiding your lead through the sales cycle in hopes of them becoming a customer. But, this process is easier said than done, especially if you’re not using a lead management system.
The Challenges of Managing Leads Without a System
Without a lead management system in place, businesses can easily lose track of leads or mislabel them, costing them potential sales. It’s also harder to track where your leads are within the sales cycle without a management solution, making outreach less productive. Plus, without a lead management system to easily track sales performance, you don’t have an easy way to evaluate your team to see who is performing well and who might be struggling.
Definition of Lead Management
Everything your business does from attracting visitors to your website and capturing their information to the actions involved to convert them into customers are part of the lead management process. Lead management software and tools help companies grow their customer base by making these steps easier.
What is lead management?
Lead management is a foundational element of your business that includes all the steps taken to transform leads to customers, such as: It involves every step of the lead-to-customer process, including:
- Attracting and capturing lead information
- Qualifying (or scoring) leads to learn which are best to pursue
- Nurturing leads through outreach strategies that engage your leads (also called prospects), guiding them through your sales funnel, and eventually converting them into customers
Lead management isn’t just a numbers game, and more leads don’t automatically mean more sales. Instead, you need to focus on finding high-quality leads that reflect your target audience. These leads will be a better fit for your company’s products or services and you’ll have better luck building a relationship and converting them. These steps increase the likelihood of leads eventually becoming your customers now and, in best-case scenarios, returning as loyal customers in the future.
What are the 3 different types of sales leads?
Leads aren’t all the same, and you can’t approach them all using the same strategies. That’s why it’s important for your business to identify the types of leads you have, which will inform their level of interest in your company and the type of engagement strategies you’ll want to use.
Cold Leads
Cold leads represent anyone who’s shown an initial interest in your business. This type of lead includes people who clicked links from your digital strategies, like social media posts. Website visitors who exchange their personal information for a valuable item in return (like a discount code or free ebook) also comprise cold leads.
Marketing Qualified Leads
This type of lead includes anyone who’s taken more than the first step or has interacted with your marketing efforts. Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) have taken some action to show their interest in your company or products, but they usually aren’t ready to make a purchase and are still in the upper stages of your sales funnel—awareness and interest. MQLs need more engagement and nurturing to convert them into customers.
Sales Qualified Leads
Sales qualified leads (SQLs) are considered the highest quality of leads, as shown by their level of engagement or interest in your business. To get the SQL designation, your sales team believes the lead is ready for more personal interaction and has a higher chance of converting into a customer.
What is the lead management process?
The lead management process includes the entire lead lifecycle and consists of these five distinct stages.
Lead Generation
This first step uses marketing strategies—including SEO, email marketing, social media, content marketing, and so on—to attract the attention of potential customers (leads or prospects) to your company. Essentially, you want to bring interested visitors to your website or your social media channel so you can gather information about them.
Lead Capture
This stage captures personal information, such as names and email addresses, from leads once they visit your business online (or at your physical location). Placing lead capture forms on pages or content with high customer interest, such as product demos, company newsletters, or coupons for a percentage off their purchase, increases your leads.
Lead Qualification
Your job isn’t over once you’ve captured lead information. You then need to figure out the probability of your lead turning into a customer. Some leads may have little interest in your products or not fit into your target audience. Lead qualification (also called lead scoring) segments leads, so your sales team will spend their time engaging with higher-quality leads that are more likely to make a purchase.
Lead Nurturing
Since most leads won’t be ready to buy immediately, it’s important to stay in communication and build a strong relationship with them. By doing this, leads can learn more about your company and why your products or services will fit their needs. You’ll want to nurture leads through personalized email campaigns and by sharing relevant, informative content that helps move them through the sales funnel.
Lead Conversion
Closing the deal is the last step. At this point, your SQLs are ready to make a purchase but might need that final push from your sales team. And, even once you convert a lead into a customer, the process doesn’t stop. You’ll want to return to the nurturing stage to help convert them into a repeat customer.
How To Manage Leads: 5 Best Practices
While your exact lead management strategy will depend on your specific industry and sales goals, following best practices ensures the effectiveness of the process. Here are some practical lead management tips to follow.
Set Clear Lead Qualification Criteria
You don’t want to spend time engaging with the wrong leads. Ensure your lead qualification and scoring criteria help you identify high-quality leads and assess your process regularly.
Segment Leads Based on Interests and Needs
Your business needs to understand your leads’ level of interest and engagement with your business. Do they need the services or products you’re offering? You’ll also want to access demographic data to see if leads align with your target audience.
Use Clean Sales Leads Data
First-party customer data that you collect through your website or lead management tools will be more accurate and clean than data you get from buying email lists and other third-party vendors. Collecting your own data also ensures you’re compliant with data privacy laws, which are especially important for industries like healthcare.
Leverage Market Automation for Communication
Capturing and connecting with leads is necessary to nurture them into customers—but it’s also a very time-consuming job. AI-powered lead automation tools offer lead capture solutions like chatbots and can even send automated, personalized emails to nurture your leads. These tools save your team time, so they can focus on lead conversion.
Track and Analyze Lead Data for Optimization
Monitoring and testing the elements of your lead capture forms, lead scoring criteria, and lead interactions can help you improve the overall process. Consider A/B testing form fields and email subject lines to identify your conversion rates and overall return on investment (ROI).
What are the different types of sales lead management software?
Managing leads from attraction to conversion is easier when using lead management software. These systems are often integrated into:
CRM Systems
This tool uses customer data for lead management purposes, and most offer email integration and AI automation to help with sales workflows and personalized outreach to leads. CRMs let you manage leads, marketing, sales, and other data in one place.
Lead Capturing Software
Lead capture tools simplify the process of capturing leads by gathering and consolidating leads from all your platforms—including your website, social media channels, and third-party sites. With this software, you can create custom lead-capture forms, so your business knows it will collect the exact customer information it needs.
Marketing Automation Platforms
Save time and effort on your lead generation steps with marketing automation platforms. These tools automate your mundane and repetitive marketing tasks and help you manage everything from landing pages to social media accounts. They often come with analytics tools to help measure marketing campaign performance.
Lead Scoring Software
If you want to speed up the lead scoring process and have it produce more high-quality leads, check out lead scoring tools. This software scores leads by their level of engagement with your business and their demographics and behaviors so your sales team can focus their efforts on nurturing leads and increasing conversions.
Drip Email Software
Make lead nurturing easier by automating emails through a drip campaign. The tool sends specific emails on a certain schedule or when a trigger occurs, like a lead watching a free demo.
Lead Nurturing Software
This software simplifies the nurturing stage of lead management, delivering personalized content that’s relevant to your lead’s interests and needs to build and maintain strong relationships.
SMS Applications
Over 75% of consumers are using their phones to shop and make purchases, so sending promotional messages to customers through text is key to your lead management process. SMS apps help you stay in touch with leads by sending reminders and marketing campaigns via text.
VoIP Software
With Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) tools, your business can connect with leads through voice and video calls and send texts, giving you more engagement opportunities that are more cost-effective than traditional phone systems.
8 Lead Management System Tools You Need To Know
The right lead management system for your business offers capabilities that match your needs. That’s why we’re exploring eight popular lead management tools and their top features below.
Podium
Podium’s AI Employee is an all-in-one tool that can autonomously capture, manage, and communicate with leads. Its omnichannel capabilities capture leads from across your sources, consolidating them into one easy-to-manage inbox. The AI Employee also engages with your leads around the clock, guiding them to take specific actions and helping you make more sales—even when your business is closed. The tool is part of a powerful platform designed to attract, capture, and manage leads to increase your sales.
Brevo
This marketing automation tool helps with outreach and lead nurturing, sending automated messages to leads through SMS, email, web chat, social media messaging, and WhatsApp. Brevo also offers A/B testing and analytics reporting.
HubSpot CRM
HubSpot’s platform connects customer and sales data in one place, simplifying your entire lead management process. Its features include lead generation, email marketing, live chat, and a universal inbox to manage lead interactions.
Mailchimp
This drip email tool offers automation templates to make lead engagement and nurturing easier. You can quickly set up email campaigns based on lead stage, and it even has AI to help ensure you’re creating effective emails.
Marketo Engage
Adobe’s B2B marketing automation tool, Marketo Engage, helps you acquire, nurture, and convert leads through marketing automation, AI-powered custom lead scoring, automated nurture streams, and more. However, it is complex and some users will find it difficult to use.
Salesforce
This CRM software combines your lead generation and marketing and sales efforts into one platform. While not a true lead generation tool, it does manage leads and customer relationships across their entire lifecycle, using AI and data to make the process smoother and more effective.
Zapier
Zapier offers lead management, marketing, and sales solutions for your business. It pairs AI automation and advanced routing with app integrations to help you streamline lead generation, nurturing, and conversion.
Zoho CRM
This CRM helps you build relationships with your leads by delivering personalized messaging at the right time. It offers features like automated sales and marketing workflows, audience segmentation, data for lead management performance, and predictive analytics to name a few.
Podium for Lead Management
Improve your lead management system with Podium. Our AI Employee helps you capture leads across your website, social media channels, and third-party sites like Angi. It starts engaging with your leads instantly, asking questions, and directing conversations to your targeted goals (like sharing relevant product information or making more sales).
See how Podium’s AI Employee can help improve your lead management.
