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You’re using every trick in the book to get people to click your ads, visit your website, attend your events, and leave you their calling cards. You follow up with leads that look promising, transfer a few to sales for demos and walkthroughs, follow up some more, and add more names to your growing list of leads that need following up.
Then an ad of yours suddenly goes viral, and the next thing you know you’re getting questions from everywhere: email, social media, referrals from friends and past customers, organic search, even a former classmate you have not spoken to in a long time is calling about your product.
Awesome, right?
Not necessarily. If you’re getting way more leads than you can handle, lead leakage isn’t far behind.
And that’s exactly why you need to take a good, hard look at how you manage your leads.
A lead, or sales lead, is a person or organization interested in your product or service and, who, with good nurturing, may become a client in the long run.
Lead management is a process that includes systems and activities designed to acquire and capture leads, monitor their activities and behavior, educate and engage them, and when they’re sales-ready, hand them off from marketing to the sales team.
Leveraging CRM marketing to nurture leads is a necessary precursor to both the B2C and B2B sales management processes. If you manage your leads well, your sales team can focus on actually making sales instead of looking for qualified buyers.
Not all sales leads are created equal. Each customer’s buying journey is unique. Some come to you ready to purchase right off the bat, while some are in the early stages of the sales process. According to Salesforce, some leads may need approximately six to eight touches to qualify as a viable sales lead.
Others are simply “looking around” and have no interest in buying at all.
A solid lead management system weeds out weak leads and nurtures those with strong potential to convert.
Adopting one streamlines the overall sales experience for your customers and makes your marketing and sales teams more productive and efficient.
Here’s how to manage your leads in four steps:
Lead generation is the process of creating awareness for your products or services through ads, articles, how-to videos, website downloads, promotional events, PR campaigns, and various B2B and B2C marketing strategies and advertising campaigns.
Once you’ve generated enough consumer interest, you can start reaching out and validating your leads.
You don’t want to attract just anyone to your campaigns. Instead, you want your target market to notice. You want your marketing messages to resonate with them, which is why prospecting your potential audience is a critical first step. Information you need to know includes:
As soon as potential customers start responding to your lead generation strategies is when you start collecting vital intelligence about them.
You want to know who they are so you can promptly decide if they’re a good fit for your product or service.
To make the lead handoff from marketing to sales as frictionless as possible, it’s worth emphasizing that the marketing and sales teams must be aligned in their definition of a sales-ready lead.
Marketing might tag leads as anyone responding to an ad or social media campaign, while sales may categorize leads as only those who are ready to make a purchase.
This is where lead scoring steps in.
Lead scoring is the process of ranking leads to determine their readiness to buy. You assign each lead a score. It can be a numerical value or labels such as “hot,” “warm,” or “cold,” based on several elements, including:
The score determines how you prioritize your leads, how you respond to them, or what type of content to offer them, with the goal of accelerating the buyer’s journey.
For example, a company’s CEO will score higher on the lead ranking scale than the same company’s marketing intern. That’s because the CEO is a decision-maker. If you can educate and engage the CEO, convince them that your product is the solution to their problems, you’re more likely to turn them into a customer than the intern who usually has no authority to make decisions for the company.
Lead nurturing is the process of cultivating relationships with prospective buyers who are not yet ready to buy. The objective is to educate them about your brand, products, and solutions by sending them targeted, informational content at each stage of the buying journey.
Your existing customers also need continued nurturing.
Just because they’ve already made a purchase doesn’t mean their journey has ended. They’ve demonstrated a deep interest in your company and a capacity to buy, and building relationships with them through after-sales support, inviting them to events, and providing them with useful information keeps you at their minds’ forefront when they’re again ready to buy.
Here are some lead nurturing techniques and examples:
Marketing and advertising are costly, time-consuming, and labor-intensive endeavors. Sales is a demanding process as well. It’s only fitting that you treat lead management with the same rigor and care.
Lead management comes with a host of benefits, including:
Nowadays, it’s completely normal to hear people speaking about the benefits of lead management automation using CRM software. And they’re right. When used properly, CRM software provides a whole host of advantages, including sales pipeline visibility, contact management, real-time analytics, and so on.
Keep in mind, however, that CRM software isn’t ideal for every sales scenario, as you’ll see below.
You will benefit greatly from CRM software in these instances:
Using CRM software might not be for you if:
Your business not generating the revenue you expect despite having enough leads in your pipeline means an evaluation of your lead management strategy is in order. Lead management, when done right, lets you focus your energy and resources accordingly.
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