From Sales Lead to Opportunity
Lead management is more than just organizing your leads inside of your favorite CRM and sending them emails. Lead management should be your bridge between marketing and sales. The whole process starts with attracting a lead. Next you qualify the lead followed by the lead converting to a sales opportunity. This abbreviated version includes lots of activities necessary to make it all work.
As previously stated, today’s potential customer is super educated about what they’re buying. This is their journey and they are in control of the buying process from beginning to end. Once they are identified as a lead, meaning the prospect is showing some interest in what you’re selling. Your job is to personalize the process of them learning more about the solution to their problem. You can help them with information about your product or service, about industry trends, and successful customers. Remember the prospect wants to be educated and not sold. Your ability to engage with and educate prospective customers the essence of lead management and lead nurturing.
Lead Nurturing Pays Dividends
Lead nurturing is all about giving your new lead the information they need to draw their own conclusion. Some leads will want timed emails, some may prefer quick responses to questions on social media, and others will want to pick up the phone and talk to someone about your product or service offerings. Creating a well thought out lead nurturing strategy pays off: According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost and boast 9% more sales reps making quota than companies that struggle with nurturing.
So for growing companies, lead management becomes about organizing and tracking not only who your leads are, but how they prefer to communicate with you, tracking behaviors online, keep track of discussions, and know what campaign they are a part of. It’s, of course, a little more sophisticated than just capturing an email address and adding it to your MailChimp newsletter. Excelling at lead nurturing means generating 2x the sales-ready leads as companies that don’t master nurturing.
Lead Management Software to The Rescue
Using a lead generation and management system like Hubspot, Ontraport, Pardot, Infusionsoft, will result in an increase in conversion rates: the number of leads that turn into opportunities and, ultimately, sales.
Lead management software helps you capture information at a point of contact like a landing page visit, opened email, or the download of a white paper. Based on the potential customer’s actions, leads are given numerical scores leading to the next action being defined. It also allows the sales rep to prioritize who to call next. Finally, A big benefit is that the data from the interaction allows you to create a one-to-one customer journey in which the person is educated and informed.
