Sales lead management is a term used to describe the overall process by which potential buyers are identified, educated, engaged with, qualified and converted to sales. One of the main process that needs to be taken care of is the lead management process. Leads can originate from a variety of ways but often sales team forget to manage and react to these leads letting the lead slip off unknowingly. Your organizations ability to hit revenue targets by following up with the leads begin with a good lead management system.
Research estimates that 80 percent of the leads that are sent to sales staff are never acted upon. The reason could be either the lead is assigned to an incorrect sales team and thus it doesn't get routed to the actual one or when the lead is not yet ready for buying, the sales representative may try few attempts and then keep it as a low interested lead. For optimal sales effectiveness, you need to provide employees with a tool that captures information and all the interaction between the sales staff and prospects as well as customers.
Leads originate through various sources. It could be advertisements, websites, referrals etc. This needs to tracked so that you know what source works well and what doesn't. This would help in a big way to invest on only useful ones. Additionally, this gives an understanding of what process is working and if there needs to be more improvement in any.
Responding to leads quickly is one of the way for closing sales rate dramatically. Customers dont like to wait and if they get a quick response that gives a good impression on your company and also keeps you high from your competitors.
Lead Management System lets you identify the lead source and can group them into different categories based on the customers interest. Also, it lets you assign the lead to a sales staff quickly. Some sofwares offer automatic assigment to sales representatives of a particular branch or department.
A lead don't get converted in a first call itself. There could be 3 or even more attempts required to get the lead to sales. Regular follow ups with the lead is very much necessary until they are ready to think about actually purchasing the product or service from you. Again, all the followup, reminders and each interaction details need to be tracked in the lead management system so that you never loose out any information.
By having a sales lead management process in place, you can ensure that your entire sales force has the tool to track, identify and engage with leads for better sales turn over.