What is lead management and what are the steps to manage your contacts?

We know it’s no easy task, in fact, 61% of content marketing professionals say that generating traffic

and lead generation is their biggest challenge.

Leads are the lifeline of businesses both online and offline . This is why marketers spend at least half

of their budget on lead generation and management.

With this strategy, along with lead scoring and lead nurturing, we can nurture ideal customers who

did not convert to the point where they can trust the brand enough to buy from you.

In parallel, our sales and marketing teams will work together to implement a rating system that allows

us to eliminate subjectivity from this entire process and see the full picture of which users have the

best chance of conversion.

Keep reading, in the next few lines we will explain in detail what lead management is, its importance,

key stages and how to unify terms using two analogous techniques.

What is lead management and how does it happen?

Lead management can be simply defined america phone number list as the process of acquiring and

managing potential customers to the point where they make a purchase.

It sounds pretty practical and simple, but why does this concept come about?

The reason is that as organizations grow and maintain a high level of scalability, the volume of leads

will increase to a point where it becomes difficult to manage.

This could lead to lead leakage, lack of follow-up, and ineffective engagement.

This is where lead management comes into play with solid processes for handling potential clients to

capture, nurture, classify and distribute them to the respective departments where they can become

sales.

Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Now let’s move on to its relevance in today’s business world that is

characterized by digital transformation in all sectors.

Importance of an efficient lead management process

An efficient lead management process how to charge a customer the right way and avoid defaulting allows lead generation to be as effective as desired, allowing users to move through all stages of the sales funnel without any friction.

Key points include:

Helps to get the right leads into our CRM

One of the processes we will see later b2c phone list in lead management is “qualification”; this helps to identify qualified and unqualified potential clients.

This way, we can focus on those that our data analysis deems high value and maximize sales opportunities without wasting efforts on those that are not qualified.

Optimize advertising spending and marketing strategies

Lead management makes it easy to identify the best platforms that provide the best results in terms of prospects for our business.

This will allow us to focus on software , thus maximizing our investment in advertising and digital marketing techniques.

Improve the shopping experience

Have you ever felt so special that you would like to buy again? Well, I can tell you that you were a very well managed lead.

This was thanks to the data generated from the company’s customer management, which is useful for sending attractive materials that give them a pat on the back, well, more than a pat, it is a push to make an informed purchase decision.

As expected: Increase marketing and sales productivity

When we have all the data on the table and know how to use it to our advantage, it’s a piece of cake to prioritize it to find out who is most likely to convert and pass them on to the sales team.

We can see lead management as a fundamental part of the alignment of both sectors, allowing them to optimize their workflows and thus increase their productivity.

5 key stages of lead management

We already know what lead management is and how important it is for organizations. Let’s move on to learn about the 5 key stages of this process that you should know:

1. Prospecting

Lead capture is the process of collecting contact information from users who have shown themselves to be most interested in the brand in order to transform them into “leads.”

To do this, it is essential to place a Call-to-Action —CTA— in an image, text or interactive video on our website, blog or social media channels.

Once the user clicks on the CTA, they will be taken to a landing page where they can learn a little more about the product or service and, in addition, we will leave them a form to enter their personal data such as, for example, email address, name or some other contact information.

2. Lead tracking

Lead tracking is a sales and marketing strategy that is based on monitoring the activities of already captured prospects from the first contact to the sale.

In this step we will manage and monitor all marketing channels, such as the blog and social media campaigns.

This will tell us where these highly engaged users are coming from so we can allocate budget to the best channels; here we can capture leads:

• Inbound : These come from organic searches on search engines like Google, online forms, blog CTAs, among others.
• Outbound : Comes from email marketing campaigns, cold calling, direct mail, and display ads.

3. Lead qualification

The truth is that not everyone who shows interest in our product or service will buy right away. In fact, one study found that only 5% to 10% of leads become successful for marketers, which is why we need to properly qualify our prospects.

At this point, “lead qualification ” comes into play .

• It starts when the user enters their data into our system;
• The marketing team then checks to see if it fits the personality of our target audience;
• The “case” is then passed on to the sales reps to schedule a call to discuss their needs and readiness to buy.

The outcome of this contact determines whether this person is a good fit and needs further follow-up, or not.

4. Lead nurturing

Lead nurturing is the process of sending relevant content to leads at different levels of the sales funnel.

In this case, as its name indicates, it will seek to provide data that users expect to receive in order to encourage the desire to buy.

5. Distribution of prospects

Lead distribution is the final step and involves assigning prospects to different sales teams.

This makes it possible to match potential customers with the right sales reps who have the skills and experience to handle them; this can be done through automation software , or manually.