By definition, lead management is the process of attracting potential customers and moving them from the top of the sales funnel to the bottom, culminating in a purchase. Lead management typically consists of six main sequential steps…
Lead capture
Data enrichment of leads
Lead qualification and prioritization
Distribution of leads between managers
Warming up the leads
Lead conversion
Lead management can be considered successful when two things have happened: First, you have established a strong relationship with prospects who have entered your sales funnel, and second, they have made a purchase, choosing your product over a competitor’s solution.
Why is lead management important?
Lead management has a number of benefits for any business, large or small. Here are some of the most important…
Helps you build relationships with prospects . A good lead management strategy allows you to connect with prospects who enter your sales funnel as quickly as possible, which in turn helps you move them down the funnel faster.
Helps you stay in constant touch with potential clients. Effective lead management ensures consistent, relevant communication, which is a key influence on a client’s decision to choose a service.
Promotes effective lead tracking. With lead management principles, you can know exactly who your leads are, what channels they come from, what they respond to best, and how well they convert.
Saves your business time and money. Good lead management saves sales managers time and effort by shifting their focus away from prospects email data with a low probability of buying. Instead, managers can focus on more valuable leads that are more likely to convert.
How does CRM help manage leads effectively?
Effective lead management can set you apart from your competitors and significantly increase your sales.
In this era of rapid technological progress, manual management of potential customers is no longer enough. To grow your business organically in is it worth learning business intelligence? today’s environment, you need to arm yourself with reliable software, namely a CRM system , which will allow you to effectively manage your leads. And it’s actually easier than you think.
CRM is the ideal solution for lead management, allowing you to target , engage leads, enrich them with relevant data, qualify them, distribute them to sales managers, and support them more effectively. As a result, your business will have a higher conversion rate.
Let’s take a look at how CRM can help with all of these lead management processes.
CRM and lead generation
Having a CRM system for lead management can improve your lead generation processes in several ways.
First, it makes prospecting much more bfb directory efficient and successful. With a CRM system, it becomes easier to identify your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and use it to find new leads to fill your funnel.
By gathering all your customer data in one place, you can structure and analyze it to find similarities. Start with the customers who are already paying you, because they are the audience you want to grow. Use CRM data to…
Identify common traits shared by your current customers
See who you’ve already sold to successfully
Find out why you lost deals
This information will help you identify the leads with the highest chance of conversion. It can then be used to develop the marketing message that resonates most with that audience, write email and call scripts, and engage only the channels where those leads are in your strategy.
Check out our article to learn all about lead generation .
In addition to helping you identify your ideal customers, a CRM system can also help you engage them. For example, with NetHunt CRM, you can create customer cards from incoming emails, calls, website forms, or chats. Customer cards will be created automatically, and every bit of their data will flow directly into your database.
CRM and lead data enrichment
Data is the oil of the 21st century.
Customer data is your business’s most valuable asset; and the quality of your data directly impacts the quality of your business propositions. It’s important to make sure the data you collect about your prospects is complete, reliable, relevant, and accurate. CRM does a great job of this.
CRM improves the quality of lead data by automating the process of enriching leads with data. Modern CRMs offer numerous integrations with LinkedIn, Facebook, email, and other specialized services to automatically pull public data from these sources and then add it to lead profiles.
NetHunt CRM offers integrations with Google Workspace, LinkedIn, and Binotel. These integrations allow you to pull public data from your prospect’s Google account or LinkedIn profile and enrich their CRM profiles with a bunch of data, such as first and last name, company, position, birthday, social media profiles, etc. All this is possible in just a couple of clicks.
Another CRM feature that helps keep your data clean is duplication prevention. NetHunt CRM offers its users the ability to automatically detect any duplicate data.
Finally, CRM allows you to structure your customer database. You can add and remove fields to collect only the data you need; mark them as required so that customer profiles are always filled in; create folders; link customer profiles to company profiles, and more. Tag leads and segment your audience in a way that works for you.
CRM and distribution of potential customers between managers
According to statistics, 50% of potential customers choose the provider that responds to them first. What’s more, responding within the first minute of receiving a message or signup increases lead conversion by 391%.
If you want to gain a competitive advantage over other companies in your market, make sure that lead nurturing starts from the moment a prospect enters the sales funnel . Any delay reduces your chances of winning the deal.
The best way to quickly respond to leads entering your funnel is to automatically assign them to a sales manager.
CRM systems, including NetHunt CRM, automatically distribute leads between managers. You can assign managers randomly (to each manager in turn), or based on a set of predefined criteria, such as the lead’s industry, company size, country of location, etc. After that, the CRM system notifies the responsible manager about the new potential client.
Here’s how you can set up automatic distribution of leads between managers in turn in NetHunt CRM…
Lead distribution between sales managers
Lead distribution between sales managers
This screenshot shows that after a potential client fills out a form on the site, a client and company card is automatically created, a manager is assigned to him (at the Contact and Company creation stage), and a task is immediately created for the manager to “Call the potential client.”
CRM and lead nurturing
The next step on the path to successful lead management is nurturing leads. It’s not enough to simply assign a lead manager. Immediately after that, the manager must take actions aimed at pushing potential customers to make a purchasing decision.
50% of sales occur on the 5th follow-up email. Moreover, the average sales manager sends only 2 emails. Thus, salespeople make a fatal mistake that leads to lost deals.
If you need examples of follow-up letters, you can find examples in this article .
If you send follow-up emails, thereby nurturing leads, manually, then it’s understandable why you’re not sending enough emails. After all, you need a good memory and endurance to remember who, what, and when to send.
You can speed up this process and make it much more efficient by automating lead nurturing with your CRM system. Set up a series of emails and other actions at a certain interval and join the conversation personally when the prospect is ready (for example, you have received a response from them to your third follow-up email).
Automated lead heating
Automated lead heating
This is an example of a lead nurturing campaign set up in NetHunt CRM.
You can find more processes that can be automated using a CRM system in our article.
CRM and converting leads into customers
Finally, any successful lead management process must end with the conversion of a lead into a paying customer.
CRM improves your relationships with leads and customers, encouraging them to buy your product faster. Here are all the benefits of using a CRM system to drive lead conversion…
CRM allows you to track all the details of interactions with leads
Managers can record and access every detail of every interaction they have with a prospect. All of these details are securely stored in one place and easily accessible to everyone involved in the sales process. Your comments and communication details provide a more holistic view of your company’s relationship with each specific prospect.
In turn, you gain insight into their buyer journey, their pain points, their needs, and their wants.
As a result, you can tailor your follow-up communication, highlight previously discussed points, and prove that you truly care about your customers.
CRM allows you to communicate with potential customers at the best time
CRM helps you track leads in your sales funnel and communicate with them when they are most likely to convert.
