Lead Management Best Practices

Have you ever thought that supporting lead management could improve sales? Yes, instead of trying to increase the inflow of leads, you can focus on contributing to the lead management system you got. 

For sure, new leads are essential. However, imagine how many you can miss due to poor responding to leads or implementing inaccurate lead scoring. 

This article will deliver the main lead management system features and provide some tactics for effective lead management.

What is Lead Management?

Lead management contemplates the processes and methods a business implements for capturing, identifying, and distributing leads to turn them into customers. 

Usually, businesses attract new leads with the help of various lead-generation techniques. That’s why sales management starts with capturing the attention of new leads and including them in the more extensive system. There, salespeople handle the interactions and decide what leads to target further and what kind of messages to send them. 

Sales lead management is concerned with different stages that specialists call lead management system features. 

What are they, and what should you do at each stage?

• Capturing. You can apply the best practices lead generation offers to get people to start the customer journey. You can use the tools with CRM features or those that will add to contact management, such as an GetProspect email scraping software or a separate database.
• Identification and Tracking. Upon the reaction or interest of the leads, you should identify who they are and what you can offer them. Try to see correlations between analysis, behavior, and customer persona there.
• Tracking and Filtering. After identifying and tracking the prospects, you should accurately define what they want for the sake of segmentation of prospects. You can use automation to support your sales lead management research and analysis there.
• Qualification and distribution. Next, based on what stage the people are at, you start scoring leads and determining the action to be encouraged among leads by sales. Such an approach allows you to plan your strategy and organize the sales team’s time.
• Nurturing. Effective lead management requires you to make a cold lead warm. Nurturing is about it. In this regard, use personal follow-ups and prove to them the value of your product or solution.
• Sales and reevaluation. Once your leads are ready, they will purchase a product. Yet, before letting them go, reevaluate if they can come back in the future. Good sales lead management contemplates re-engagement with the leads and offering new deals.

Best Practices for Managing the Leads

Now, you have an idea of the elements and processes of the management system. However, picking the right approach to management can be difficult. You need to consider the business niche, the lead management system, and the strategy you have.

At the same time, there are effective lead management techniques that any business can implement. What are they?

Have a clear understanding of your buyer persona

Knowing future customers’ needs, pain points, issues, and interests will only facilitate sales lead management. That’s why the accurate buyer persona can add to lead generation, identification, qualification, and nurturing. The insights about leads allow you to find points and values to underline as well as wording to use when offering products. Moreover, they will show which leads to focus and better results in the end.

The improvement of buyer persona can start from the existing customer data, analytics, polls, and social listening.

Keep your lead management system in order

Also, effective lead management contemplates that you have a workflow defined for each of the lead management system features. Thus, you need to develop clear criteria for the identification, qualification, and distribution of leads. Moreover, create a specific space for each, whether it is Google Sheets, a database with CRM features, or certain software. Yet, it is even better to create a space where you can maintain information in lists and groups for better segmentation and planning. 

For instance, having a developed and structured system, you can track the lead’s journey and provide additional comments for better engagement in the later stages of the customer journey. Imagine you sell cat food. A note on the lead’s cat name or characteristic in such a system can add to the personalization at a nurturing stage. How? A person is more likely to answer you if you remember such details.

Response to the leads effectively 

Also, it is crucial to keep your leads warm for effective management. What does it mean? Once you get an answer from the leads, try to follow up with them as soon as possible, as their interest level fades with time. 

What else can you do except for responding promptly? The best practices for lead response management tell us: 

• To be consistent in planning, funneling, and giving answers to leads
• Always remain professional
• Develop personalized messages and offers
• Insert a clear CTA

Support your nurturing efforts

Moreover, your leads are not always ready to close a deal. In this case, providing additional materials is important to keep a person engaged and interested. They can be content pieces, guides, recommendations, etc.  

Significantly, the nurturing should be based on segmentation for effective lead management. The campaigns designed for specific lead categories will allow you to make them more interested and move through the customer journey. At this stage, the cooperation between marketing and sales teams is crucial.

Do cleanups of data

Lastly, do not forget to clean up the sales lead management system you got. You may have duplicates that need to be deleted or data replaced (like an email address). Notably, in regard to email address extraction, you can use an email finder, that will help you find leads data by domain or name. In the end, such cleanup practice will support the order, making your data more reliable.