Complete Guide to Lead Management

Hey there, Welcome back to our blog.

In this blog, we wanted to share a complete guide to Lead Management for Startups founders and newbies who are new to Sales. Let's get started with some basics:

Who is a Lead?

Lead is a person who you think might be interested in buying your products or would be interested in what you offer such as information related to the products or services you sell. It is also alternatively called Business Enquiries in some organizations.

What is Lead Management?

Lead management refers to the process of capturing sales leads, qualifying them and nurturing them in order to make them sales ready to handover to sales executives to take it forward for deal opportunity closure.

Steps in Lead Management process:

Identify your Lead profile/persona.
Get the list of leads as per your expected lead profile (Marketing Qualified Leads)
Establish Lead assignment rules.
Assign Leads to Sales reps based on assignment rules.
Prioritize Lead follow-up and activities based on Lead scores.
Nurture your leads based on their engagement status as Cold, Warm or Hot.
Update the engagement status periodically based on lead nurturing and follow up discussions.
Track and Analyze sales progress, incorporate feedbacks and iteratively improve process.

Challenges faced by Sales reps while managing Leads

With increase in the number of leads, manual or spreadsheet based tracking often leads to missed follow-ups and delayed sales activities leading to lost opportunities.
When the sources of capturing leads increases, manual tracking leads to missed lead capture leading to lead leakage and missed opportunity.
Many important data points get missed in manual tracking such as contact information or any specific point discussed with the lead around his requirement.
Without using a streamlined Lead Management system, sales reps find it difficult to decide which lead to prioritize for improving lead qualification.

What is a Lead Management System?

A Lead Management system is a software application which helps you manage your end to end Lead Management process. It helps you capture leads from multiple sources into the CRM, view and update their stage in your lead funnel, nurture leads with contextual campaigns, educate them to make them sales ready. Once a lead successfully traverses through a lead lifecycle, the next step is to create a deal or opportunity out of the lead, which is taken forward by the Sales Executives.

Benefits of using a Lead Management System in CRM:

Consolidated 360 degree view of a Lead to help the reps for better Lead Nurturing.
Lead Scoring to help Sales reps to decide the lead priority.
Clean and Validated data points in the CRM to avoid unnecessary clutter to help focus better.
Sales workflow automation of multiple operational tasks such as scheduling a meeting, follow-up reminders and alerts on planned activities, lead assignment, etc.
Complete history of past interaction of Sales rep and the Lead on multiple mediums such as Email, Messages, Chat, Phone calls, Social Media, Digital Document interactions, etc.
Consolidated data points in a single CRM platform helps you get meaningful insights on your Lead management data and provides you with recommendations for improvement.
Increase in Lead Conversion rate and sales revenue.
Reduction in sales cycle duration.
Increased ROI on Marketing investment for capturing leads

Ways to perform Lead Management:

1. Ways to Capture Leads in CRM

Manual Entry: If the Lead addition frequency is less, then you can add the Lead’s record manually in the CRM
Import from External List: If there are lot of leads to be added from an external list, Import it into the CRM via Bulk Import function.
Lead Capture Forms on Website: If you have a landing page from your digital marketing advertisements or website contact forms, then you can embed the Lead Capture form from the CRM into the Website which will automatically capture your leads into the CRM.
Lead Capture Integration with Social Media: If you get leads from Social Media, then there are lot of social media plugins or integrations available in CRM systems to help automatically capture the leads into your CRM.

2. Ways to Manage Leads in CRM

Data Validation: Use field Validation rules to capture data uniformly to keep database clean
Lead Scoring: Define the criteria for lead scoring in the CRM to automatically give Lead scores in order to prioritize leads.
Lead Assignment: Assign the active leads to respective sales reps either manually or through assignment rules.
Labelling: Label or categorize the leads correctly based on their engagement level such as Cold, Warm or Hot.

3. Ways to Nurture Leads

Personalized Email Marketing: Run contextual and personalized email marketing campaigns for the leads. You may want to run different type of campaigns for leads in different stage of the funnel say Cold, Warm or Hot leads.
Free Educational Content: Periodically, try sending free educational contents to the leads without asking them for any favors. Based on the interaction to view or download the content, you may gauge their updated stage in the lead funnel. If you are helping the lead in educating them in their buying journey, surely they may show some interest in your products at a later stage.
Webinars: Invite them for online webinars and conferences on some topic of generic interest. This shall help you improve your brand imagery in the minds of the leads. The leads would be more interested in associating themselves with brands which try newer ways of marketing compared to conventional ways. This shows that the Organization is serious about their business and leads.
Social Media Groups and Updates: Create a group of interested leads in social media. Regularly answer their day to queries by commenting on their posts. This is one of most effective way get more visibility since social media comments are viral in nature. Keep posting regular updates on your social media fan pages so that your fans know that you are alive.

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