When we say ‘Lead’, it not only means a prospective contact who may or may not get converted to a customer, but also it means that it’s a business opportunity. It’s a way forward towards your business expansion. Every lead received is a stepping stone to achieve the target. It should be given due importance and managed professionally right from the instant it lands on your turf.
‘Lead Management’ is a multi-faceted and pivotal part of a business.
A perfectly managed lead carries >60% possibility that it could turn into a converted opportunity.
Here’s complete guideline which will give any professional a complete in and out idea of Lead Management.
- What is Lead Management and how to have make it effective?
- Does your business need a Lead Management System? 3 symptoms to look for.
- How to choose the best Lead Management System?
- How to get business analytics from Lead Management System?
- 3 Best Software solutions for Lead Management.
Lead definition can be different for different types of businesses. B2B and B2C businesses can have their own categories and conditions to deep a particular contact as their lead. And going ahead they also have their own workflows defined for management of the lead.
Since a lead is channeled uniquely for every business, lead management method too varies in nature. But every entity strives for leads and a good system to manage and nurture these leads is always a requirement.
What is Lead Management and how to have make it effective?
Lead Management is nothing but ensuring that the lead is properly handled right from the arrival throughout the journey towards the last stage.
It means ensuring that the prospect is contacted instantly, requirements are understood, addressed, quoted and deal is driven towards closure.
Example: Let’s say you manage a team of 5 sales people and your product is a SaaS software. If a person contacts you with an interest in your product, that’s a lead for you.
It’s your job to ‘manage’ this lead from here. You may handle this lead by yourself, or assign it to your sales executive.
This sales executive connects with the lead, understands their requirements and deems whether your product offerings are in line with the requirements of the prospect. If yes, then they’ll take it ahead for technical discussions / product demo.
If all the pieces fit well then lead goes ahead as a prospective opportunity and thus will be provided with a quotation.
Considering an ideal case, negotiations could take place and at a point of agreement, the lead is converted into a customer.
(we know, a sales process is never so simple 🙂 , but let’s consider so for an example!)
Lead Management Stages
How to make Lead Management more effective?
Is it enough just to manage leads? No! We must manage them ‘Effectively’ by working smart, by using efficient tools and processes.
Here’s a 3-step quick guide:
- Create a clear filter of ‘Qualifying’ of the leads
You may be receiving ‘n’ number of leads every single day. Especially B2B business deal with this ordeal every single day-quite a large number of leads coming in every instant, the sales executives half of the time goes in finding out good leads and discarding the unqualified ones.
To address this issue, it’s important to have a defined filter, preferably automatic, to qualify the leads as they arrive.
In practical sense, it can be done so by having a proper lead form in your lead source. The lead form must have data fields which will define the quality of the leads.
For example: If your product is a SaaS software and you entertain only prospects with minimum 4 users, have this as a data field in lead form and use it as a qualifying factor. - Prioritize the highly qualified leads
These qualified leads deserve a higher importance and quick connections.
Ensure these leads are contacted immediately and requirements are gathered perfectly. It’s always preferred to have a pre-defined form wherein most of the requirements would be clear and leads can be further prioritized as per their status- eg.- hot, warm, cold, etc. - Track every lead and escalate matters quickly to management
Every lead which goes through the sales pipeline must be tracked inch by inch. The sales executives as well as managers must have a complete view of all the leads, their statuses and progress.
Any escalation or a matter which requires immediate attention of a senior authority must be brough to notice of the management and must be taken action upon instantly.
Since we’ve already qualified the leads and processing them forward, there are high chances of this lead to get converted into a business. So lead nurturing must be carried meticulously. No leads should be missed at this stage.
Any lead miss should be immediately addressed or escalated to the management.
P.S.: These steps can be seamlessly and automatically implemented with a Maple CRM and workflow can be customized for the business niche. Get more details here: Maple CRM for Sales Management
Does your business need a Lead Management System? 3 symptoms to look for.
Now that we’re through with what is lead management and how important it is to manage it effectively, we can understand that having a Lead Management System will work better than managing the leads manually. Check if you face the following issues:
1. Leads come in plenty, but get leaked out of the sales pipeline for no ‘apparent reason’.
– Does it happen that there’s no accountability of the leads which are unresponsive or which plainly deny taking it ahead? There could be underlying issues here. It could be that delay in contacting them when they approached you with their interest, or delay in sending them the first mail of company introduction.
After all, the first contact depicts your professionalism!
2. No defined system for lead updates:
– You have a dedicated sales team, but they’re unaware of number of leads which are ‘New’, or ‘Contacted’, or ‘Interested’.
Since there’s no defined system for lead status updates, there’s always a possibility of losing track of the leads which are highly prospective. Manual errors may occur and executives may forget to follow up prospective leads and worse even, may waste time on non-prospective leads.
In addition to being a waste of time, this also drains the executives of their energy and spirit which should have been used to pursue the cream layer leads.
3. Managers depend on manual entries and updates:
– We can never underestimate the repercussions of manual errors. One lead missed updating may lead to loss of a huge business opportunity.
If managers in your organization and their team uses manual methods to note down the leads and updates, it’s a big NO!
Managers do not get a bird’s eye view of the leads and updates of the entire team if the recording is done manually. They have to navigate through multiple sheets, and tables and still may not get the expected outputs.
This in turn leads to lead losses, resulting in lost business.
Is your business facing these issues too? If your answer is yes then it’s high time you need a proper system for lead management.
It’s time to upgrade and raise your team’s productivity and ultimately witness a steep rise in sales too!
How to choose the best Lead Management System?
A lead management system must primarily meet the following 3 requirements:
- It must be EXACTLY suiting your workflow requirements and customizable.
- It must be scalable
- It must be a cross platform app
A system must be such that it blends with your workflow requirement; i.e., there shouldn’t be a need to alter your sales pipeline structure in order to fit in with the system.
Commonly, a SALES CRM software caters to lead management requirement.
Choose a CRM which makes your work easier and is customizable as per your business type.
It should be flexible enough to have the lead form created with data fields exactly as per your practice. The CRM should also have an automation to capture the leads and qualify the good ones and notify the executives on the same.
In short, the Lead Management system should be molded into your business requirements and enhance it for better performance.
Scalability is utmost important for a Lead Management system. Scalability is the ability of a system to be expanded when the number of users / data fields / data in the system increases.
A good online system is scalable to any practical extent without disturbing the usual working of the process.
In this world of devices, one cannot be confined to just a computer to know the status of their business. The Lead Management system should ideally be an online app which could be accessible from any device- computer, laptop or mobile. Seamlessly the user should be able to access it and work from anywhere, any time! Only then can we call it as a perfect system which provides ease of usage too!
How to get business analytics from Lead Management System?
Management of leads also means that you must have a dashboard and charts to give a complete idea of how the business is progressing. Reports and Analytics play a major part in planning of strategies and knowing the reasons for wins and losses in a business.
A Lead Management system enables you to:
- Generate reports with all the necessary data required for analysis
- Generate reports based on various contexts, like leads received vs leads won / lost, quotations generated, leads in pipeline, future prospects, etc.
- Generate custom charts in any format as suitable for you – example: Generate a Sales pipeline (Funnel Chart), Generate chart of lead sources and number of leads from each (Pie-Chart), chart of leads won from the last 6 months (Bar chart), etc.
- View and customize dashboards for performance monitoring and drilling down to data which needs attention.
- Generate Analytics table which can help understand which lead source is performing better and which is not, number of leads being handled by executives and their conversion rates, etc.
In short, reports and analytics are a window through which you can monitor the business performance, know the benefitting and denting factors and take necessary actions.
3 Best Software solutions for Lead Management:
Maple CRM is one of the most user friendly and highly customizable CRM software solutions. Lead Management offers the following features:
- Automatic Lead Capture from online sources
- Customizable Lead form
- Bulk upload of leads
- Automatic re-assigning of leads to executives (rule-based)
- Pre-defining of filters for lead qualification
- Auto prioritization and categorization of leads
- Automatic email trigger to leads
- Mobile app (Android + iOS)
- Custom Dashboards and Charts
- Custom reports
- Customizable workflow
Maple CRM is the best suitable software for Lead and Process management for B2B and B2C businesses due to its flexibility for customization and ease of use.
2. Zoho CRM:
Zoho is a platform on which Lead Management system can be configured as per the requirements. Zoho can be used as a CRM for start ups, medium and large scale industries. With a wide variety of applications involved, Zoho can be a great solution for overall workflow management and data analysis.
3. Hubspot CRM:
Hubspot is one among the oldest CRM software solutions with applications catering to sales management, service management and process management. Hubspot facilitates lead management with its dashboards, charts and reports. Sales pipeline can be seamlessly managed with Hubspot.
This user guide is intended to shed light upon the benefits of using a system for Lead Management and not resort to age old, error-prone methods of manual records.
A good lead management system can be your gateway towards great lead management and boosting customer success!