Wouldn’t it be nice if every person you communicate with through your website was an ideal candidate for your product or service? Imagine a world where prospects come to you – where you know exactly what they want, how they found you and what information you need to provide.

With lead management this can already be your reality. Technology can help you to improve your entire customer experience. It can help you to send the right message at the right time to the right person.

Lead Management is a technique that enables your company to track and promptly optimize the entire sales process.

Maybe the concept of modern Lead Management has not yet reached you or you are not yet very familiar with it, so let me explain.

Lead Management is the technique of tracking and managing prospects, also known as leads. Sometimes referred to as customer acquisition management or contact management, lead management usually involves the following processes:

  • Lead Generation: Companies create interest in products or services among potential customers through a variety of marketing techniques. These marketing techniques, now called inbound and outbound marketing, include blog posts, white papers, social media, events and PR campaigns – it is not only digital, but wherever your prospect is and interacts with you.
  • Lead capturing: Potential customers respond to your marketing efforts and the interactions are captured in your Marketing Automation tool. This way, you create a marketing lead which you can get to know and nurture.
  • Lead Qualification: Lead Qualification combines two heavy hitters in sales and marketing – lead scoring and lead nurturing. Lead scoring is an objective ranking of one lead against another. On the flip side, lead nurturing is the process of cultivating leads that aren’t ready to buy by equipping them with information.

There is an essential principle in lead management: this is the premise that a prospective customer looking for a solution or a product first wants to get informed before she needs a real purchase offer. However, if she is confronted with product offers or sales discussions, she may quickly feel annoyed. And you would have invested in campaigns and content for NOTHING.

A so-called lead nurture allows you to nurture a prospective customer who, for example, has downloaded an e-book from your website and named his e-mail address for it.

In doing so, you can stick to methods of e-mail (or respective other channels like SMS, Push, or even Print) marketing. To do this, you should ask yourself the following questions from the perspective of the desired customer:

  1. How does their buying process work?
  2. What information does he or she need to get to grips with the topic, with concrete solutions or even with products?
  3. Which contents appeal to them, which questions move them?.

After your leads are qualified, they need to be routed/filtered according to the validity of the request, based on the interaction with your website and the way in which they were rated as a lead, and then forwarded to either a sales qualification team or the right sales rep to be contacted.

The complexity of lead management depends on the size of your company – managing 200 leads is very different from managing 2,000 or 20,000 leads. If the leads then convert to customers, you must continue to nurture those relationships.

Why do you need Lead Management?

A well-defined Lead Management process helps companies to filter out which tactics produce the best and most qualified leads in order to optimize a sales strategy for both efficiency and effectiveness. In today’s world, you can’t afford to lose a lead or miss an opportunity to sell.

With Lead Management you can avoid that loss! By recording all of the potential customer’s interactions with your brand, you can accurately analyze how an individual has changed from a prospect to a lead to a customer.

Besides the marketing benefits, the outlined way of managing leads can have a great impact on the bottom line. Lead management is the backbone of a successful sales force, because without effective leads, there is no need for a CRM system and maybe even not for a sales team – simple as that.

This basic concept covers the first step in the sales cycle to create qualified opportunities and ultimately satisfied customers.