Effective Lead Management

It would be a dream come true if every person you talked to was an ideal candidate for your product or service.

It would be a win-win situation if your prospects or leads interested in your products came to you and you knew what they wanted.

Well, modern technology is helping to make this dream come true, by streamlining the overall sales experience and assisting the entire sales force at large, by providing digital lead management capabilities.

So, what is LEAD MANAGEMENT?

In very simple terms, lead management is the process of capturing, tracking, and managing prospective customers.

The process can be broken down into the following four steps:

• Lead generation: Involves the creation of consumer interest and awareness of products or services through a range of effective marketing strategies. These could range from blog posts, digital advertisements, white papers, social media, email campaigns, expos, and PR campaigns.

• Creation of Sales Lead: Prospects who respond to the marketing strategies mentioned above and express their interest in the product or services are tagged as sales leads.

• Sanitizing / Qualifying the Sales Lead Funnel: Leads are then prioritized based on their likelihood of becoming a customer based on deal size, geographic location, customer segmentation, and other key parameters relevant to the business. These are then assigned to sales reps who would then reach out to them.

• Lead nurturing: Leads are then contacted and categorized as contacted or not contacted and then scheduled for timely, fail-proof follow-ups. These follow up would help in lead nurturing and would go through the cycle of product walkthrough, demo, and commercials.

If the process ends with a sale, then the lead has successfully traversed the sales funnel and emerged as a customer.

This is where a robust and agile Lead Management application would come in handy. The efficiency of a lead management application is high when your Sales rep calls 10 qualified leads rather than 30 unqualified ones. More importantly, timely and rigorous follow-up is critical to maintaining a high percentage of prospect conversion thereby improving sales efficiency. In short, Lead management is the backbone of a successful sales operation as it accelerates revenue growth.

How does an effective lead management application help accelerate Sales and achieve your revenue targets?

A robust process for managing leads helps your business understand which tactics are bringing in the best leads so that you can optimize your sales strategy to be both effective and efficient. The majority of lead management applications document a prospect’s full history of interactions and experiences during the sales cycle which in turn helps you to analyze exactly how an inquiry was converted to a lead and then to a customer.

Automating lead generation and the subsequent sales process ensures that there aren’t leads falling through the cracks. Most of the lead management applications integrate seamlessly with the Sales process to manage the Sales Funnel and accelerate achieving and at times surpassing the Sales revenue targets!