Lead Management Intro: Definition, Process, Software 

Businesses selling products or services must prioritize lead management as one of the most crucial marketing strategies. This article provides a lead management intro: definition, process, software recommendations, productive tips, and some predictive challenges to remember.

Here are the following main points we will discuss:

After reading this guide, you’ll understand lead management, its steps, and possible problems that may occur during the process. You will also gain valuable insights into the benefits of effectively carrying out a lead management process with the help of suitable systems.

What is Lead Management?

what is lead management?

Clients or businesses interested in purchasing your products or services are often called leads. By managing their interactive activities, a salesperson captures the lead, monitors their behavior, and engages with prospects before convincing them to buy. 

Lead management is a process for generating and converting potential leads into buyers. The lead management strategy consists of using specific systems, like CRM. It allows sales teams to focus their efforts on making more sales instead of spending time looking for potential warm leads.

What Are the Key Components of Lead Management?

A lead management strategy filters potential leads and removes weak ones. In fact, this allows your team to prioritize paying more specific attention to those likely to convert. Here are the most critical components to keep in mind if one communicates with clients to achieve scalable lead management:

  1. Generate
  2. Capture
  3. Qualify
  4. Distribute
  5. Nurture
  6. Score
  7. Convert

What is the Process to Follow in Lead Management?

what is the process to follow in lead management?

Managing high numbers of leads may become complex and overwhelming if you don’t have enough information on the correct methodology and approach. You can learn all about this process below and discover the success-leading stages you must follow:

Lead Generation

Lead generation is the identification of potential brand-aware buyers. This stage is the foundation for lead generation specialists to target the right clients or businesses. Identify and categorize your target market's demographics, location, interests, behavior-based activities, and pain points to ensure your messages resonate with their values.

Lead Capture

Prospects who are ready to buy

Collecting customer data is known as lead capture. When someone responds to your lead identification approach, learn more about them using online tools. Some companies buy leads and find their e-mail addresses and phone numbers. 

For example, Bookyourdata offers real-time email verification. This way, you can immediately contact and engage your prospects to discover whether they can benefit from buying your product or service.

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Lead Qualification

A few things can help you determine if a lead qualifies as valuable. This is a critical segment of the lead management process because it involves qualifying the best sales targets. During this stage, marketing teams test the prospect's likelihood of buying your products or services.

Lead Distribution

Marketing and sales teams collaborate very closely together and depend on each other. Marketers who identify and qualify leads act as distributors. They send leads to sales team members based on defined lead criteria. This process is called lead distribution.

Lead Nurturing

Building trustworthy relationships with clients is crucial to converting them into buyers. In the marketing world, this part of the process is called lead nurturing. It helps teams establish good communications with consumers during the sales process through continuous engagement.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a strategic method a marketing or sales team utilizes to assess clients' worthiness. Clients are scored based on their collaborative interest in buying and the attributes and value they bring to the organization.

Converting Leads

74% of companies prioritize converting leads into customers. If your clients have shown interest in buying your products or services, they become converting leads. This means your lead management strategy was successful, and your sales and marketing-driven teams did a great job engaging and nurturing potential leads.

Best Practices for Effective Lead Management

best practices for effective lead management

Implementing specific lead management strategies and practices is crucial for converting potential clients into customers. We present you with the most comprehensive lead management techniques you can use that are proven to work:

Understand the Source of Your Leads

Potential customers may discover your product or service in different ways. If you know where they come from, you can record the data and analyze the trend metrics to help your lead list grow even further. Your leads can appear from the following channels:

  • Social Media
  • Website Content
  • Email Marketing
  • Digital Advertising
  • Referrals
  • Web Search
  • Events
  • Webinars

Implement Lead Scoring

The more data you collect about a specific lead, the higher they are on a scoring scale. However, their interest in purchasing your product or service can also rank them high. 

Some clients need time to think before purchasing, while others are ready to buy immediately. Make those most interested in your product or service a priority and focus on turning them into customers.

Prioritize Clean Data

A long list of leads may lose value if it contains duplicates and outdated or inaccurate data. Collecting everything you find about clients and storing it in your database makes it harder to filter which potential leads become buyers.

Lead management software is a perfect solution for this problem. It helps to keep your data clean and prioritizes data privacy compliance.

Nurture Your Leads

Over 60% of businesses don’t have a developed lead nurturing strategy. Even if specific leads are not ready to purchase, they might still show interest in your offer during the interactions. You should work on retaining a connection by educating them about your product or service. 

Your existing customers also need continuous attention, making them loyal and consistent buyers. Therefore, you must communicate with them regularly and answer any possible inquiries they may have.

Regularly Review Your Lead Management Process

You won’t know how far you’ve come if you don’t track your progress. Even if you believe the lead management process is going well, you must still ensure that someone monitors it to guarantee its continuous efficiency. 

Start by reviewing the customer touchpoints that led to booming sales closings. Study the exact contribution of each touchpoint in customer relationship management. This is to plan the path of the leads, taking them through your sales funnel.

Prove Your Expertise to Your Prospects

Leads stay loyal to a product or service they trust. To maintain this customer experience and loyalty, making them believe in your expertise and the offer's continuous efficiency, you must build a good reputation and stand out as one of the best in the industry.

What are the Best Lead Management Systems?

what are the best lead management systems?

Lead management software tools identify and analyze leads’ behaviors and activities to evaluate whether they qualify as potential customers. Choosing the right system may be tricky because each offers the opportunity to try different features. 

So, we compiled a list containing the best choices to help you determine which aligns with your needs:

Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional

Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional

This cloud-based lead management platform variety is mobile-friendly and straightforward to use. It is AI-powered and offers numerous innovative features and access to lead lists. 

Features:

  • Allows marketing automation of the lead management processes.
  • Indicates which leads are more likely to convert during the lead-scoring stage.

Pros:

  • Automatically assigns higher-scoring leads to the right sales team members.
  • Creates tasks to streamline and accelerate lead management. 
  • Tracks sales performances.

Cons:

  • The initial learning curve of the platform is steep.
  • The UX/UI is outdated

Pricing:

  • $25 to $100 per month, free trial available.

Why should we select Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional as the best lead management system? 

This system offers automated features that can ease the lead-generation process.

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM

Zoho is a CRM-integrated tool. It is one of the best lead management software because it helps you stay organized with lead generation, storage, and increasing conversion rates. 

Features:

  • Evaluates and categorizes quality leads.
  • Nurtures promising leads.
  • Analyzes essential lead information.
  • Converts lead into buyers quickly.

Pros:

  • Offers features that align with the needs of small and large companies.
  • Automatically follows up on tasks and stores lead data. 
  • Associates the collected data with a client’s information, making the retention stage easier for sales representatives.

Cons:

  • The customer support on their page could be more responsive.
  • The free plan doesn’t allow integrations.

Pricing

  • $14 to $52 per month; a free trial is provided.

Why should we select Zoho CRM as the best lead management system? 

This tool helps businesses generate high-quality leads and improve their lead nurturing process.

Freshsales CRM

Freshsales CRM

Freshsales CRM, with its pipeline-centric features, is a lead-tracking software that has made converting leads to customers more manageable than ever before. 

Features:

  • Tracks sales-focused activities.
  • Captures leads.
  • Stores clean data.
  • Improves the way sales teams enrich prospects and turn them into buyers.

Pros:

  • Customizes and streamlines the steps of the lead management process based on your company needs.
  • Identifies sales pipeline trends.
  • Facilitates faster response times.

Cons:

  • There are more user-friendly technology platforms.
  • It hardly integrates with other tools.

Pricing:

  • $9 to $59 per month, free trial available.

Why should we select FreshSales CRM as the best lead management system? 

This software plays a big part in lead capturing and data enrichment.

HubSpot CRM

HubSpot CRM

Although a significant investment, this deal-tracking system offers a lead management tool with many high-quality feature types worth trying. 

Features:

  • Stores all your lead data in one place.
  • Cultivates follow-ups with lead touchpoint integration.
  • Automates customizable scoring criteria.
  • Offers a more flexible and personalized lead nurturing. 

Pros:

  • Forget manual data import. HubSpot CRM’s lead management tool shows you the lead information you need.
  • It measures sales activity. 
  • It reports on conversion-ready clients to salespeople.

Cons:

  • Limited email availability per contact.
  • Lacks industry-specific customization options.

Pricing:

  • $15 to $800 per month, free trial available.

Why should we select Hubsport CRM as the best lead management system? 

It helps businesses organize, score, and nurture leads.

Zendesk Sell

Zendesk Sell

If you struggle with lead list building and outreach automation, Zendesk Sell is the ideal lead management system. 

Features:

  • Creates targeted lead lists.
  • Provides accurate lead data.
  • Personalizes the sales outreach.

Pros:

  • This tool prioritizes keeping your lead list fresh and accurate to size.
  • It helps with reaching more customers and growing a business’s revenue. 
  • Thanks to its automated features, sales reps can find new conversion opportunities faster.

Cons:

  • Delayed receiving of emails.
  • The default offers limited prospect information.

Pricing:

  • $19 to $219, free trial available.

Why should we select Zendesk Sell as the best lead management system? 

It provides lead list accuracy and outreach personalization for more conversions.

Pipedrive CRM

Pipedrive CRM

If you want to pay special attention to each prospect and establish a long-lasting connection with them, Pipedrive CRM is your best friend. 

Features:

  • Manages proper lead list organization. 
  • Optimizes measurable import function that lets users simultaneously import more leads into spreadsheets. 

Pros:

  • Stores clutter-free data and eases the lead qualification process.
  • Helps sales representatives prioritize contacting warm leads and turn them into buyers.
  • Customizes sale pipelines.

Cons:

  • Lacks features for giving lead scores.
  • Needs follow-up reminder upgrades.

Pricing:

  • $12 to $79 per month, 14-day free trial.

Why should we select Pipedrive CRM as the best lead management system? 

This CRM offers many customization options and helps businesses qualify leads more easily.

What Are Common Challenges in Lead Management?

Lead management can sometimes be effortless and, in some cases, challenging. For this reason, frequent analytical reviews are required to secure deal closes, ensure consistency in follow-up, and adapt to ever-changing client needs. 

So, let’s learn more about the common challenges that may occur during the lead management process, which will make it easier to avoid them:

  1. Data-Driven Quality Maintenance: Chasing leads not interested in buying your products or services wastes time and resources. This challenge occurs because businesses store inaccurate and poor-quality data, prioritizing quantity over quality.
  2. Lengthy Lead-Sorting Process: Lead sorting takes much more time when not optimized and done manually. The manual approach may result in inaccurate sorting between warm and cold leads, negatively affecting the success of the lead generation process.
  3. Difficulty Finding the Right Target Audience: Every lead management strategy requires identifying a target market. However, many need help finding qualified leads because they don’t execute analytics on the ideal customer profile demographics, preferences, and pain points.

Essential Lead Management Points to Remember

Lead management is a crucial strategy for B2B and B2C organizations to reach potential buyers. Software that offers automated features can speed up the buyer journey instead of requiring specific actions to be performed manually.

The lead management process involves a lot of steps. Therefore, the key to success is relying on a system that helps boost sales quickly. However, take your time to research the available systematic software options. Your goal is to grow your business with the right tools.

Don’t have time to search through numerous platforms? Bookyourdata can help you get warm leads, guaranteeing 97% accuracy and user-friendly lead generation features. This increases sales and enhances business performance. 

Click here to convert potential leads into deals effectively.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Do You Effectively Nurture Leads?

An efficient lead-centric nurturing strategy includes regular communication with potential clients by presenting valuable information and listening to their needs. It also involves consistent follow-ups to ensure leads get relevant updates.

What is the difference between a manager and a lead manager?

Managers are decision-makers regarding the business’s daily operation and team management. A lead manager aims to create ROI-driven marketing tactics to enhance the lead management process within an organization.

Can you automate the leads management process?

A suitable system can optimize the main lead management steps, including generation, nurturing, and closing. This strategy gives marketing teams a helping hand in avoiding spending valuable time manually managing leads.

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