Leads are the lifeblood of every business, and the generation of these integral players is typically the primary focus when deciding which tactics to bring into action. With over 50% of marketers viewing lead generation as a top priority, these decisions require deliberation based on insights, behaviors and trends.
However, prompting a lead to enter your sales funnels is not always conducive with a conversion. In fact, approximately 79% of leads never convert.
So, how does one bridge the gap between generation and conversion? The solution presents itself as lead management.
Throughout this article, you will gain an understanding of the nature of lead management and the processes and strategies that accompany it. In addition to this, you will discover five of the best lead management softwares that your business can implement to increase acquisition and drive sales.
What is lead management?
Lead management, in its simplest form, is the process that is used by businesses to connect with prospects and convert them into paying customers. This is done by employing a variety of targeted strategies, as well as utilizing available softwares that are specifically designed for the management of leads.
If a business begins to thrive, their lead volume will increase exponentially and with this brings the challenge of maintaining control. This includes preventing lead leakage, remaining consistent and efficient in your follow-up activity and the continuity of engagement.
Implementing lead management practices offers businesses the opportunity to successfully capture, nurture, qualify and distribute leads to respective departments, adequately priming users for conversions.
Why is lead management important?
Generating leads can be a challenging and expensive process, requiring the use of multiple channels and the curation of multi-faceted, informed strategies.
In the ever-changing business landscape of today, time and finances are precious resources, meaning an effective management plan is necessary to ensure that efforts are not wasted and opportunities are maximized.
With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at the five key benefits of lead management;
1. Acquiring appropriate leads
Lead qualification is an element within the lead management process that aids businesses in the identification of qualified and unqualified leads.
By having the ability to decipher between the two, you can concentrate on high-value leads and maximize sales opportunities.
2. Maximize advertising spend and strategies
Management helps you to decipher the platforms that offer the best generation opportunity for your business. In doing so, you have the ability to switch your attention to specific channels, ideating campaigns that are best suited to these platforms and funding them accordingly.
This eliminates the wastage of resources on redundant activities.
3. Enhance the buying experience
The data generated from partaking in lead management can be extremely helpful in distributing valuable, educational material to leads. This can be used to prompt them towards an informed purchasing decision, particularly with prospects who are unsure of action to take.
4. Increase marketing and sales productivity
Having a knowledge of your lead quality allows you to prioritize them correctly. This prioritization means that marketing communications are distributed to the most suitable leads, which are then passed to the sales team at the most opportune time.
This series of events increases the likelihood of achieving conversions and enhances overall sales productivity.
The lead management process
Having established the nature of the process and the value that it provides, you may now be asking – how does lead management work?
In short, it consists of a series of five processes that your business is recommended to follow in order to yield results.
1. Lead capturing
Lead capturing refers to the process of collecting important information regarding prospects in order to generate leads and inspire conversions. This can be done by embedding a lead capture form within your advertising or website, or assigning call to action buttons to prompt leads towards a desired action.
Once a user completes the form, or clicks the CTA and is brought to the designated page, they can submit their personal details and be added to your database.
To create a robust lead capture system, you should consider taking the following steps;
- Define the lead capture purpose
The first step in creating a lead capture system that works for your business is to understand how it fits into your sales funnel. Within the sales funnel, there are three stages – the awareness, consideration, and conversion stages.
The purpose of your lead capture can be to generate sales by taking your website users from the awareness stage to the conversion stage.
Once you are clear about the purpose, the next step is to determine the lead generation offer.
- Include lead magnets
We recommended using lead magnets to entice your leads toward an action, be it a subscription or sign-up to avail of an offer. These are made available in exchange for contact information and can be placed on your website or social media channels.
Lead magnets can include ebooks, content upgrades, checklists, cheat sheets, swipe files, resource lists, free tools, etc. Give them the offer in exchange for their contact information.
Take a look at how Optin Monster uses this tactic.
The lead magnet that you offer should be relative to a user’s stage within the sales funnel.
- Create a captivating page
When you have determined which lead magnets you intend to include, you can begin to create a visually captivating and easy to navigate to design lead capture page. It is important this page is well designed, as it must convince users to engage with your magnet.
For some inspiration, take a look at this lead capture page extracted from the Leadsbridge Complete Guide to Lead Management ebook.
Studying this example, you can clearly notice that it includes a captivating title, sharp CTA, clear image of the book and description of what the user will receive after downloading, as well as a concise instruction on how to get it.
- Automate your lead capture system
As your business develops, your lead volume will grow. This means that you will have a decreased ability to manually manage your lead capture system. Therefore, you may be wondering how to manage leads effectively?
The answer to this is automation, which will be especially true if your businesses uses Facebook Lead Ads, LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, TikTok Lead Generation, or Google Ads to generate leads.
LeadsBridge cuts out the manual tedium of inputting leads into your CRM, giving you the opportunity to place your focus where it is needed most by employing integrations that automate a wealth of actions. These integrations include, but are not limited to, the following;
With these integrations, you can connect your tool of choice to your preferred CRM. As leads come in, our integrations automatically funnel them into your CRM where you can instantly follow-up and maintain engagement.
To learn more about the possible lead generation strategies that your business can employ, take a look at these articles;
- Lead generation for digital marketing agencies
- Lead generation automation
- 97 tactics to put wings on your lead generation
If you use Facebook Leads Ads, Google Ads Lead Form Extensions, TikTok Lead Generation, or LinkedIn Lead Gen forms to generate leads, take a look at these articles;
- A step-by-step guide to Facebook Lead Ads
- Everything you need to know about LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms
- Google Ads Lead Form Extensions – The complete, always-updates guide to Google Lead Generation
- How to master TikTok Lead Generation Ads & get more leads
2. Lead tracking
Lead tracking refers to the monitoring of lead activities, from the initial touch all the way through to the sale. This allows you to manage and track the entirety of your marketing channels, be it blogs or social media campaigns.
Tracking informs you as to where exactly your leads are coming from, enabling you to appropriate your budget to the best channels.
These leads can be inbound, from organic search, form fills, etc., or outbound, from email campaigns, display ads, direct mail etc.
Employing lead tracking practices helps achieve the following;
- Gauge how close a lead is to completing a purchase, which helps to create processes that promptly push them toward the conversion.
- Avoid losing leads along the sales funnel
- Make pipeline projections using data that has been collected via tracking
- Fine-tune your marketing campaigns to place greater focus on strategies that drive results.
There are three ways that you can organize your lead tracking process, which include;
- Source
Leads can be sourced from a variety of places, including social media campaigns, blog content, banner ads, etc. This source reveals important information about the user, such as what type of content they find most engaging.
Organizing your lead tracking according to the source gives you the opportunity to understand which platform and marketing campaigns are most valuable for your business.
- Location within the sales cycle
Every lead will be at a different stage of the buying process. Some may be at the awareness stage searching for information about the product, and others will be lingering in the consideration stage, looking for different solutions to their problems.
Depending on their location within the cycle, each lead will have a unique and specific set of nurturing needs. This can also be dependent by which source the lead has originated from, or what lead magnet prompted the submission of their information.
For example, it is safe to assume that a lead in the consideration stage may need guides, webcasts, and videos in order to help them make an informed buying decision. Therefore, as they enter your funnel, it is imperative that you begin to nurture them with this type of content.
Take a look at this LeadsBridge example.
Our blog page offers a list of webinar replays that can be accessed by users at any time. These replays would be suited to leads within the consideration stage of the sales funnel.
When a prospect clicks on a webinar, they are directed to a landing page where they can submit their information and register to access the webinar. This page also features a teaser that encourages the lead to request a demo with our team experts, which can help them to solidify their purchasing decision.
If the lead decides to click on the demo request, they will be directed to a landing page that allows them to input their personal details and schedule this demo. On this same page, we feature client testimonials from satisfied customers, encouraging users to engage with our product.
- Number of interactions
You can also organize your leads according to the number of interactions that they have had with your business. A visitor may visit your website once, others may come again and again to view different content.
For instance, assuming two visitors come to your website and download a free ebook. The first lead did not return immediately but the second lead returned to view more content.
These two leads, although they came at the same time, should be tracked differently because of the number of touches that they have had.
3. Lead qualification
In reality, not every person that displays an interest in your product or service will decide to purchase from you immediately. According to studies, only between 10-15% of leads reach the bottom of the sales funnel.
Therefore, leads need to be appropriately qualified.
Lead qualification is the process of evaluating a prospect with the intention to determine whether or not they are ready to buy from your business. This process begins when a lead inputs their information into your lead capture system. From here, the marketing team checks to see if the lead is matched with the defined persona of your target audience.
Additionally, implementing effective sales lead tools can significantly enhance the lead management process by providing insights, automation, and organization to your lead tracking and qualification efforts.
The benefits of this practice include;
- Improvement in the efficiency of sales
- Reduction in time and finances spent pursuing unqualified leads
- Creation of personalized promotion for leads who are ready to purchase
Now that you have developed an understanding of lead qualification, you can begin to learn exactly how to qualify these leads.
How to qualify leads
All leads are unique and differ from one another in a variety of ways, some have a simple qualification process and others may be a tad more complex.
It is for this reason that it is important to establish a system that aids the qualification process.
These are the five frameworks that can be used to qualify your leads;
1. BANT
BANT is an acronym for budget, authority, needs, and timeline. This takes into account the budget of the prospect, their authority to make a buying decision, their needs for the product, and whether or not they are ready to make a purchase.
The BANT system of lead qualification is especially useful if your business sells expensive products or services, as not all prospects will have the ability to engage with your price point.
2. CHAMP
CHAMP (challenges, authority, money, and prioritization) examines the challenges that the lead faces and assesses whether your product/service will solve them.
This framework works in situations where leads do not possess a full understanding of your product. Therefore, deciphering the prospect’s challenges is integral to understanding if your product is a suitable fit, helping the sales team to quickly filter out leads that are not aligned with your offering.
3. MEDDIC
MEDDIC stands for metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, pain point identification, and champion. This system is best suitable for businesses that sell high-priced products and encounter a lower volume of leads, as acquiring all of the aforementioned information for each lead can be considerably time consuming.
4. ANUM
ANUM (authority, need, urgency, and money) is similar in nature to BANT, but arranged in a distinct order. The ANUM system of lead qualification focuses more on the decision-making authority of the buyer, while the buyer takes the back seat.
This is suited to B2B businesses that do not have a clearly defined process of making a purchase. Such businesses should determine who holds the power to finalize a buying decision.
5. FAINT
FAINT, an acronym for funds, authority, interest, need, and timing, focuses on the lead’s budget and their in making a buying decision. Additionally, it considers the interest and need of the prospect. This helps the sales team to determine whether or not the prospect is interested in the offer.
You can choose any of the above systems to appropriately qualify your leads and make a decision on whether or not to move the prospect down the sales funnel. It is important to note that qualified leads will generally show the following attributes;
- Correctly answer your questions about their needs
- Express interest in your product/service
- Have a knowledge of how your product/service can benefit them
- Understand whether or not they can afford your product
- Show the potential to make a buying decision in the near future
- Share similarities with your previous and current customers
To learn more about lead qualification, take a look at our marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads posts.
4. Lead nurturing
According to a study by Marketo, 96% of visitors who visit a website are not ready to commit to a purchase. Although this figure may seem somewhat discouraging, there are steps that you can take to counteract this.
The steps are elements of lead nurturing.
Lead nurturing is the process of sending relevant, engaging content to leads and customers at different levels of the sales funnel. This practice is important for the following reasons;
- Leads that have experienced nurturing typically make purchases that are 45% larger than purchases from leads who have not been nurtured.
- 50% of prospects choose the business that is the quickest to respond to them
- Nurtured leads have sales cycles that are 23% shorter than average.
Keeping this in mind, let’s take a closer look at some nurturing strategies that can be easily implemented to drive conversions and increase your sales.
1. Segment your email list
One common mistake marketers make is lumping leads into a basket and distributing the exact same content to each of them. General emails are of absolutely no value to subscribers, and doing this is a surefire way to boost your subscription levels.
Instead, engage in email segmentation and begin to send targeted emails that are aligned with your subscribers position within the sales funnel.
Email segmentation can improve your open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. After all, segmentation brought about a 760% increase in revenue for the companies that employed this technique, with personalized subject lines alone increasing the open rate by 26%.
You can segment your list according to;
- The content subscribers download from your website
- A subscriber’s position in the sales funnel
- The pages subscribers visits on your website
- The subscribers that did not open your emails
- The subscribers that reply to your emails
Take a look at how Self-Care Society used segmentation based on pages that subscriber visited in their follow-up email
2. Use email marketing automation
Email marketing automation is the process of sending emails to leads and customers based on triggers. Using automation is an effective way to instantly engage with your leads and swiftly move them down the sales funnel.
In fact, automated emails perform excellently across a range of metrics, achieving an 83.4% improvement in open rates, 341.1% increase in click rates and a staggering 2270% boost in conversion rates.
You can select a wealth of triggers for your automated emails, such as form filling, call-to-action clicks, page views, etc. Once the user takes the required action, they will automatically be added to the workflow and begin receiving email communications based on their behavior.
In order to achieve maximum efficacy, businesses should tie all automated emails to their conversion paths, including social media ads (Facebook Lead Ads, LinkedIn Lead Gen Form Ads, TikTok Lead Generation, and Google Ads Lead Form Extensions).
At LeadsBridge, we offer integrations for Facebook Leads ads, LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms ads, TikTok Lead Generation, and Google Ads Lead Forms extensions. Using our service, you can integrate your preferred CRM and your autoresponders with your social media platforms. By doing so, you can promptly nurture leads as soon as they enter your sales funnel.
3. Use multi-channel lead nurturing
The most popular method of lead nurturing is email marketing. However, the use of spam filters on emails and expired email lists is reducing the efficiency of email marketing. To bypass this, it is recommended to implement a multi-channel nurturing system.
This will enable you to reach and nurture your audience on different channels.
These channels include;
- Dynamic website content
This means creating personalized content for each of your users. For instance, if they browse a page on your website, use retargeting ads on social media to bring them back.
- Mobile marketing automation
According to Statista, mobile accounts for approximately half of the web traffic worldwide. For this reason, it is non-negotiable that you add mobile devices to your lead nurturing campaign. You can use these to send SMS communications directly to your lead.
- Social media
Engage with your leads by posting relevant, valuable and educational content on your social media channels. You can also send relevant messages through Facebook messenger as the need arises.
4. Use lead scoring strategies
Lead scoring is the process of ranking leads based on a scale that represents their value to your business. Effective lead scoring can have a direct impact on your business by increasing your revenue.
Most marketing automation platforms allow you to score your leads by assigning numbers to conversion events, social media interactions, or website browsing behaviors. The score will show you which leads you need to directly follow-up with, the leads that need more nurturing, and those that you can discard.
Here are some additional resources that you can use to learn more about lead nurturing;
- The importance of lead nurturing in your marketing strategy: 4 lead nurturing best practices
- The complete guide to email nurturing for businesses
5. Lead distribution
Lead distribution involves assigning leads to various sales teams. This will enable you to match leads with the right sales team that has the correct abilities and experiences to handle them.
Lead distribution can be automatic or manual, as it involves gathering leads from different sources, be it social media, events, emails etc.
Engaging in leads distribution can help to achieve the following;
- Reduction in the response time by your sales team. This is imperative as leads are most likely to interact with those who contact them first.
- Production of consistently high-quality leads as only qualified leads are distributed to the sales teams.
- Accurate targeting due to the fact that your sales team is ensuring that leads have better experiences.
- Simplifies the attribution of revenue to the leads that generate the most revenue.
To understand how to distribute leads, you can follow this step-by-step process;
- Generate leads and deliver them automatically
You will need an automation system to capture the leads as they sign up for your email list. In most cases, you can connect your marketing automation tools to your CRM automatically. At LeadsBridge, we provide an email notification tool that can be integrated with your chosen CRM or autoresponder. This ensures that you get alerts directly to your inbox as soon as leads come in.
- Qualify your leads
Since you have qualified your leads before they get to distribution, it is time to filter out leads that do not align with your goals and focus on those that are ready to convert. This ensures that only qualified prospects are distributed to the sales team.
- Determine where to distribute the leads
Now that you have high-quality leads at hand, you can begin to distribute them to the right sales representatives. In order to do this, you need to consider the experience, expertise, and availability of the team members.
- Use different lead distribution methods to determine the best fit
There are a number of different lead distribution methods to choose from, including;
a) The round robin method automatically sends new leads to all sales team members at once.
b) The cherry pick method allows sales reps to choose the leads they are most comfortable with pursuing.
c) The shark tank method notifies all the members of a sales team when a new lead enters the funnel, and the first person to respond acquires the lead.
Lead Management Software
Lead management software helps businesses capture, route, nurture, and convert leads to customers. These tools use interactive forms and post-click landing pages to aid the capture of prospects. Once the leads are captured, the tracking software monitors their activity along the sales funnel using phone calls, emails, meetings, and chats.
With the assistance of a built-in lead scoring tool, high-value leads are then determined. From here, the software distributes the leads to the most suitable sales team based on their skill and experience. Analytics and reporting tools in the management software provide metrics, such as conversion and acquisition rates, that help you monitor the leads and prevent leaks along the sales funnel.
5 best lead management software
1. Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is a robust lead management system that helps businesses generate, score, and convert leads. It ensures leads encounter adequate follow-up and are moved from one level to another as swiftly as possible.
This solution provides businesses with smart web forms to help in capturing leads from landing pages and other lead sources. By providing lead scoring rules to help sort and filter leads, you can prioritize sales leads for faster conversions. With this, you can assign higher scores to lead sources delivering high-value leads.
The predefined workflow rules within Zoho CRM facilitate the distribution of leads to sales reps according to the geography, product, or department.
Using this solution, you can nurture your leads through omnichannel communication. This involves nurturing leads through telephone (for example using landline), email, live chat, social media, and in person.
Creating and sending targeted email campaigns to leads in Zoho CRM allows you to engage with your prospects at every stage of the sales funnel. With this, you can nurture them appropriately with relevant content that can inspire conversions.
Zoho CRM provides information on which of your ad campaigns is bringing you quality leads. Also, with Zoho’s in-built analytics tool, you can measure the number of leads you captured, conversion rates of lead sources, sales reps that convert leads to customers the most, and much more.
In addition, LeadsBridge also provides integration for Zoho Campaigns and Zoho Forms.
2. Salesforce
The Salesforce lead management system provides robust features that can help you to easily track your marketing ROI, build relationships with leads, automate the sales process, and much more. This creates a fuller pipeline of qualified leads and higher conversion rates for your business.
Salesforce enables you to track leads’ information. With this, you can see where a lead came from and nurture them through emails.
The automatic lead scoring and routing tool helps you to assign numbers to leads according to their relevance. Then, you can route them to the right sales reps with the right skill and experience to follow up on the leads.
By implementing the Salesforce lead management process, you can track your marketing campaigns across different channels such as social media, mobile, website, etc. This will show you the impact of your marketing activities on sales.
Based on this, you can make an informed decision on where to invest more to get high-quality leads that can convert to customers.
3. HubSpot
The HubSpot lead management software helps you to manage leads in one place (i.e. on the dashboard). There, you can see sales activities, company and contact records, and communication history.
With this system, you can manage and follow up with leads in one dashboard as shown below.
Looking for how to personalize your follow-up messages with leads? HubSpot provides prospects’ details such as emails, recorded calls, and sales notes on the prospect’s timeline. This gives you the information you need to create a personalized follow-up.
With the HubSpot tool, you can follow up with leads, make sales calls, send emails, assign tasks, etc. When you use HubSpot marketing, you can distribute leads to the right sales reps, and create follow-up tasks.
This CRM’s dashboard shows the number of calls made, emails sent, meetings held and other tasks completed by the sales reps. From here, you can determine the productivity of the sales team and ensure that they follow up appropriately and on time.
4. FreshSales
FreshSales helps businesses to identify and track high-value leads till they convert, with a 360-degrees customer view providing robust information about a lead. This includes the conversions, touchpoints with your business, tasks and appointment schedules, phone calls, etc.
The lead scoring feature of the lead management system helps you to rank your leads based on their engagement with your business. With this, you will know the leads that are sales-ready and thus, increase the opportunity to make a sale.
FreshSales auto-profile enhances leads, contacts, and account information of leads to save you the time you would have spent to find them. This includes social media profiles, company details, and photos.
With FreshSales lead management tracking, you can organize your sales team by geography, deal size, product divisions, skills, and experience. You can also automatically assign leads to the right sales rep.
FreshSales also enables you to collaborate with the team on different tasks, notes, and files. You can schedule meetings, demos with leads and customers.
5. Agile CRM
The Agile CRM lead management system helps businesses capture leads, channel them through the sales funnel, and close more deals within a short period.
With Agile CRM, you can generate more leads, score them in the various stages of their sales funnel based on their behavior and demography. The lead management tracking software helps you to track the leads down the sales funnel to prevent bottlenecks that get leads stuck in the funnel.
This solution provides a lead qualification tool that can be used to enhance your sales team’s focus on the leads that are most likely to convert, filtering out any prospects that are not qualified.
The deal management features help you manage deals in the sales funnel. This includes deal tracking, deal filters, and deal metrics. This shows where the lead is and the action that should be taken to move the lead through the sales funnel.
Agile CRM offers robust sales pipeline reporting software that includes sales forecasting, growth reporting, and predictive analytics. It is also possible for you to monitor the performance of sales representatives.
Lead management strategies
It is imperative for businesses to have a lead management strategy in place. This will help to decipher what source your leads are coming from, how to score and nurture them and eventually reach conversions.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the lead management best practices that your business can employ.
- Use various lead generation content
Most online businesses use a single form of lead generation content, which is typically an e-book or whitepaper. However, to differentiate yourself from competitors, it would be wise to consider adding to the mix of your content.
You can do this by adding video content to your strategy, in order to enhance the user’s experience. Additionally, you can add interactive content to your website in order to increase engagement.
- Integrate your management platform with a third-party app
Leads are more likely to convert when contacted within minutes after submitting their details. It is a lead management best practice to contact prospects immediately after they opt-in to receive your communication, as this will help you to sustain their interest in your products/services.
As well as this, prompt follow-ups make it easier to nurture and convert users to customers. One way you can achieve this is by using an integration. At Leadsbridge, we offer several integrations specifically designed for lead generation platforms, such as Facebook Lead Ads, LinkedIn Lead Gen Form Ads, TikTok Lead Generation, and Google Ads Lead Form Extensions.
With LeadsBridge, you can integrate these platforms with your favorite CRM, so as soon as leads come in, they are funneled automatically to your database in a simple, streamlined manner.
For more information, take a look at how Kayak Pools Midwest generated leads using Facebook Lead Ads campaigns and integrated them with their CRM via LeadsBridge.
In total, this campaign generated +36% ROAS, 7,820 new leads, and a $3.1m revenue increase.
- Clean up your contact database
Every year, some data that exists within your CRM goes bad. This can happen for a variety of reasons, such as your contacts changing their emails, getting new telephone numbers, job changes, and more.
This occurrence is the reason you need to regularly clean up your database as part of your lead management strategy, due to the fact that outdated contact information can lead to failure in your marketing activities. To do this, ensure that you remove all duplicates, bounced and opted-out emails, as well as verifying new data.
- Up-sell and cross-sell by sending emails through automation workflows
Up-selling is the process of convincing a customer to buy more expensive items from you. Cross-selling is increasing the value of sales by presenting different products to a customer. Using these techniques will help you grow your revenue tremendously.
You can use automation workflows to upsell and cross-sell your present customers by providing them with products/services similar to the ones that they have purchased. Additionally, you can tag your contacts based on the product they have bought from you and use automation to recommend other products that are complements to the product they bought.
Final thoughts
If you wish to grow your leads, nurture them thoroughly and drive conversions, lead management is non-negotiable practice that your business must commit to engaging in.
Using the capabilities of comprehensive softwares, you can eliminate the manual work needed to achieve quality management and set these processes on autopilot.
Combining this with the implementation of strategies, such as employing a third-party app like LeadsBridge, can help to generate better results and grant your lead generation activities longevity. Discover our entire range of lead generation solutions here.
