Lead Management is based on the principle that not all leads are created equal. Based on the source of specific leads, for this blog, we will explore the importance of lead management and the process to follow to manage your leads effectively.
What is Lead Management
Lead management starts with the idea that in order to help each of your unique leads solve their challenges, you need to understand who your leads are and why they have shown interest in your company. Lead management is the process of acquiring new leads, evaluating them for quality, engaging with them, and nurturing them through the buyer’s journey. It is important to understand that leads can be in different stages in the buyer’s journey. Based on the stage the lead is in, your message will vary. It is important to note that lead nurturing is not lead management, but is a part of the process. Consider this article on lead nurturing. There are 6 main reasons for lead Management: 1) it helps you convert your leads into customers; 2) it helps marketers improve their campaigns and measure their ROI; 3) it solves some of the most common pain points for salespeople; 4) it solves sales marketing misalignment; 5) it helps you grow your organization using an inbound methodology approach; and 6) lead management is crucial for scaling businesses. Consider this article to learn more.
Fundamentals of Lead Management
The Fundamentals of building a lead management strategy starts with the following: Sales and marketing participation, Buyer personas being well defined, service level agreement which is an agreement between the service provider and its customer that guarantees a certain output. Technology that can be used is a CRM system to track customer data and all sales engagements with your customers, consider this article for the benefits of using a CRM. Once these fundamentals have been established or defined, you can then learn to understand a standard lead management process which includes 5 important steps. These steps are: Lead generation, lead qualification and segmentation, lead nurturing, lead scoring and routing, then measurement of success. We will explore how to measure the success of your lead management process against these 5 steps in the next section.
Measuring Success
To Manage the success of your lead management system, you first need to establish your KPIs (key performance indicators). You should ask the following questions when deciding which KPIs to track: What metrics will indicate if we’ve achieved our goal? Is there a target number or conversion you are aiming for? For more information on KPIs consider this article. Some lead generation metrics you should consider include the visitor to lead conversion rate, which is the percentage of users who visit your website and convert into leads. Segmentation and lead qualifications metrics can include click though rates which are the percentage of people who receive and open your email. Click through rates are the percentage of people who open an email and click the content. Segmented list growth is the number of new contacts added to your segmented list. To track lead nurturing metrics, you should be looking into email open rates, lifecycle stage and conversion rates. The last stage to track is lead scoring and lead routing MQL (marketing qualified lead) to SQL (sales qualified lead) conversion, this will help determine if your sales reps are receiving quality SQLs. We have discussed quite a few different KPIs so you may be asking which ones we should focus on and track? It is better to focus on a few KPIs that are the most important to your business. Focusing on too many KPIs means you could be gathering data that does not help you in tracking the success of your system against the goals you are looking to achieve.
Remember the key to managing your leads starts with the way your track your customer information. If you need help with your lead management process you can always reach out to me for a conversation.
