Complete Guide to Lead Management
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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:

  1. Identify your Lead profile/persona.
  2. Get the list of leads as per your expected lead profile (Marketing Qualified Leads)
  3. Establish Lead assignment rules.
  4. Assign Leads to Sales reps based on assignment rules.
  5. Prioritize Lead follow-up and activities based on Lead scores.
  6. Nurture your leads based on their engagement status as Cold, Warm or Hot.
  7. Update the engagement status periodically based on lead nurturing and follow up discussions.
  8. 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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Are you looking for a Lead Management System? Try ToolsOnCloud Sales CRM for free!
Complete guide to Social CRM

What is Social CRM?

Social CRM refers to approach of managing customer relationship by using Social media as the channel to listen and engage with Customers.

In CRM Software context, when a traditional CRM is integrated with your social media channels to help you manage your customer relationships from social media channels, it is termed as Social CRM.


Need for Social CRM:

Marketers tends to make mistake of thinking Social Media platforms as the place to only broadcast their social media posts and drive traffic. 

But there is more to it. Social Media should be used for more for listening to the customers or prospects and engaging with them. 

Social CRM Landscape


Some associated facts:

As per a 2017, Techwire Asia article 
  • 95% of customer complaints on social media don’t reach companies.
  • 1/3rd of all customer complaints on social media are ignored.
  • 80% of surveyed companies said they deliver exceptional customer service on social media but only 8% of their customers agreed on the same.
  • 63% customers expect companies to offer customer service on Social media channels.
  • 90% of social media users used social media to engage/communicate with a brand.
  • When people get responses on social media, they are 30% more likely to recommend a brand to others.
  • Implementing a good Social CRM could help improve annual revenue by 81% through referrals as well as reduce customer churn by helping you improve customer retention up to 92%.

Benefits of social crm for sales teams:

  • Increase in Lead Inflow: Sales teams get to generate more leads from Social Media.
  • Hot Leads: The Leads from social media are mostly comes from referrals via viral posts or comments from their friends thus they are far more likely to convert.
  • Reduced Sales Cycle: The leads from Social Media are informed prospects, hence the sales cycle duration reduces thus helping in faster sales conversion.
  • Multichannel Selling: Modern Social Media platforms are also equipped with sales store front. Thus Social CRM helps track the sales or leads getting generated from multiple social media channels and bring it together inside one single CRM, thus enabling the organization towards multi-channel sales.

Benefits of social crm for Marketing team:

  • Better Customer Segmentation: Social CRM contains a lot of customer demographic information from social media. It helps the Marketers in better customer segmentation and enables them to create more contextual and personalized marketing campaigns.
  • Instant Feedback & Sentiment Analysis: Customers find it easier to interact on social media comments and messengers compared to usual email or ticket based communication on website. Social CRM is helping the Marketers get more up-to date real-time customer sentiments and feedback about their products and services from social media. This helps them improve their product and service offerings. Also it helps them optimize & improve their marketing communications.

Benefits of social crm for service teams:

  • Customer Issue Resolution: Sometimes Customers use social media channel as an escalation mechanism if they are not happy with the resolution provided by your usual service help desk. This shall help Service teams take the issue on priority and shall help them transfer the ticket to a more experienced customer service rep to take it to satisfactory closure. 
  • Process Improvement and Knowledge base Development: With social media sentiments on the issues, you get to understand certain frequently occurring issues which are painful for your customers. This data helps you do deep dive towards improving your customer resolution process better and improves you’re the knowledge base documentations for your service teams to serve future similar issues better.
  • Ease of Connect: Whenever customers are unable to get certain help with your product and services from available public sources, they find it easier to interact with their brands via social media or on your social media community to find answers to their queries.

Things to look for in a social crm:

  • Integration: Features such as Integration with top social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc.
  • Analytics & Insights: The platform should be equipped to extract data from your social media channels to give you reports, analytics and actionable real-time insights on what is working out versus what is not working.
  • Social Media Management: It should let you manage your multiple social media accounts from one single platform such as post scheduling, comment and message notifications. Primarily it should equip you with Listening, Publishing and Engagement on your social channel.
  • Team Collaboration: It should offer a collaborative way of working so that you can add your team members in the application and work together.

Advances in Social CRM:

  • Automated Chat bots for answering to user messages, product enquiries, frequently asked questions sent on Social Media messengers.
  • Follower tracking features which lets you track lost followers in addition to new followers. Source of followers such as organic vs paid.
  • RoI Insights such on Organic Impressions vs Paid Impressions.
  • Budget based alerts and controls on Paid Social Media campaigns.
  • Integration with Video meeting platforms such as Skype, Zoom, Slack , etc, to take up instant product demo, calls or meetings with prospect.
  • Integration with document storage platforms to automatically sync and store artifacts related to key client conversations.
  • Social media sales workflow for automating many repeatable sales processes associated with new lead capture and nurturing via social media channels.
  • Ability to pull contact and other information from Prospect’s social media public profiles such as LinkedIn, Public databases, etc.

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Looking for a Sales CRM? Try ToolsOnCloud CRM for free


 Benefits of using a CRM Software

In the current fast paced business environment, a good CRM software plays a critical role in the growth story of an organization poised for hyper growth. In this post, Let us learn about 5 Key Benefits of using a CRM Software for your business.


1. Better Customer Segmentation and Personalization:

CRM Software helps you centralize your data by bringing all the contact information into one single platform. With all the data in a single place, you are now more equipped to segment your contacts effectively. 

With better segmentation, your communication with your contacts are now more personalized. This ultimately helps the organization improve conversion rate thus helping reduce sales cycle duration and increase revenue.


2. Improved Customer Satisfaction and Retention:

Overtime, the CRM Software becomes a repository of your interaction with your customers from multiple sources such as past Email communication, Chat conversations, past Incident history, Interests, past Purchase history, etc. This data helps your Sales, Marketing and Service teams better serve the contact so that they can provide them more contextual solution to their problems. This helps improve customer satisfaction ultimately helping increase customer retention. 

More satisfied and happy the customers are, more are the chances of them referring your products and services within their networks, which ultimately increases your business prospects. Remember that a prospect is 20x more likely to buy a product or service from you if it is recommended by one of their friends. Your satisfied customers become your product evangelist and become your free sales army advertising about your products and services with free word of mouth marketing.


3. Automation of key Business Processes:

There are many business processes performed by Sales, Marketing and Services teams. Some of the commonly expected business processes are listed below.

  • Sales: Lead Management, Account Management, Cross Selling, Up selling, Quote Management, Sales Activity Management, Invoicing, Report & Sales Analytics, etc.
  • Marketing: Customer Segmentation, Campaign Management, Activity based workflow Management, Reports and Marketing Analytics, etc.
  • Service: Request Tracking, Ticket Assignment, Knowledge base Management, Chat bot, Performance Reports, etc.

A Good CRM Software is equipped to automate all of the common business processes. This can significantly bring down the time taken to do the same tasks manually. Now, the team can achieve more in lesser amount of time.


4. Productivity Improvement of Sales, Marketing and Service Teams.

With the help of a CRM Software, your team members in Sales, Marketing and Service teams would now spend lesser time on data entry and operational tasks. This would help them focus on more important tasks. 

  • Sales team can spend more time interacting with customers and closing deals rather than spending time scrambling through multiple mail chains and their rolodex. 
  • Marketing team can focus on increasing customer engagement with more personalization instead of working on low ROI marketing techniques which is usually the case in absence of any organized data about contacts. 
  • Service team can now focus on solving more complex customer issues rather than spending time on smaller repetitive queries whose resolution response can be automated.


5. Real Time Reports and Analytics

One of the primary reason why businesses fail is because they fail to take right corrective action at the right time. This usually happens when the leaders do not get timely insights on the whereabouts of their business and the KPIs which decides the fate of their business. 

In conventional organizations, they still tend to rely on periodic (Quarterly, Monthly or Weekly) reports prepared manually by an Analyst in their team. Rarely do they realize that by the time they would uncover certain issue in the numbers, the data would be stale by that time. 

Modern businesses need fast paced solutions to keep tab on their numbers in real time. Modern Cloud based CRM Software helps them achieve that by providing real time reports and analytics so that they can keep track of the status of their business on real time and take strategic action instantly to meet their business objectives.


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What is Net Promoter Score and how to calculate it?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an Industry recognized benchmark score for measuring Customer Engagement and Loyalty. Compared to conventional customer satisfaction survey scores, NPS helps you more, by giving a measure of Customer Advocacy. 

You can scale up your business at hyper scale growth if your customer does your sales and marketing for you instead of you going behind prospects to win deals. An Ideal Marketing strategist should build the product and the ecosystem around it in such a way that the customer should like using your product and in addition to that customer should recommend your products & services to other customers in their network. When your customers become your army of influencers or advertisers, your growth is going to be 10X. Customers are more likely to buy something recommended by an existing user than by blindly going on the words of a sales rep. 

NPS tells us how likely is your customer willing to recommend your product & services to another colleague or a friend.


How to calculate Net Promoter Score?

Follow these steps to calculate NPS,

  • Administer a Survey. It can be an online survey via Google Forms or other Online Survey tools. 
  • Keep one simple question: "How likely would you be willing to recommend <your Company name/Brand Name/Product Name> to a colleague or a friend?"
  • In the answer option, you should have a 0 to 10 pointer likert scale where score 0 represents Highly Unlikely while the score 10 represents Highly Likely.

 

  • Based on the scale responses, you may categorize your customers into 3 types:
    1. Promoters: Those who rate your product between 9 to 10 are called Promotors and are the real advocates of your products. They are highly likely to recommend it to others.
    2. Passives: Those who rate your product between 7 to 8 are Passive customers and are neutral about your offerings.
    3. Detractors: Those who rate your product between 0 to 6 are called Detractors. They are not at all likely to promote your product, instead they may detract others from your product.


  • Based on the survey response, make a count of number of responses in each category i.e.
    1. Number of Promoters  (a)
    2. Number of Passives (b)
    3. Number of Detractors. (c)
    4. Total Number of responses (a+b+c).
  • Net Promoter Score is calculated as, 
NPS = ((Number of Promoters - Number of Detractors)/Total number of responses)x100 


  • NPS ranges from -100 to +100. Here -100 represents all your respondents were Detractors while +100 represents all your respondents were Promotors.

Check out this Free Net Promotor Score Calculator on our website.


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