The majority of companies have a 3 step approach for managing leads: Marketing generates the leads, the leads are then qualified by inside sales, who then converts them into opportunities and finally the opportunities are worked by the sales team. For other companies it is just a 2 step process: Marketing converts leads into prospects once they meet or exceed certain pre-arranged criteria like a good lead score. The prospects are then passed over to the sales team.

The 7 best practices below will help you increase your leads, guarantee you focus on the correct leads and provides a process that tracks what is working and what isn’t:

1. What is the Perfect Lead?

What are their troubles or interests? What kind of content attracts them and keeps them engaged? How do they spend their money online or offline? What is their preferred mode of communication? What part do they play in the buying process? You need to be able to answer these questions about your lead so that you can define their behavioural traits. Only then will you know if the prospect is ready for the sales team. Let all your marketing and sales teams know about the kind of prospect you are looking for and how the lead generation approach works.

2. Use Targeted Content to Lure Them

As much as

67% more leads

are generated by companies that blog compared to those that don’t. Blogs are a great chance to sway the decision of the buyer by highlighting the company’s management and specialist knowledge. Blogs are also a great tool to find out more about the needs of your customers. You can breakdown your target market and deliver highly targeted content with appropriate calls to action. Another advantage of blogging is that you can combine your lead generation and your social media campaigns to boost brand awareness, communicate with a wider range of viewers, and educate potential customers.

3. Align Your Marketing and Sales Teams

These are the quarterback and receivers of your company. Before the game even begins, they need to know the plays. To ensure efficiency, you have to set up a marketing-sale lead response timeframe that has been jointly agreed on. Both teams will need access to a central database of customer data as well as marketing and sales actions. The greater awareness and information every teammate can supply regarding the prospect, the better their possibilities are of generating interest and closing.

4. Plan the Nurture Journey

The nurture journey is important for a) strengthening relationships with leads, and b) maintaining lower qualified prospects for potential future interest. This is probably the most routinely broken or ignored aspect of

lead management

. Only prospects that meet the lead-score threshold should be passed on to the sales team. The nurture process should be reserved for the less than “perfect lead” or those who didn’t meet the lead threshold. What are your funnel offers at the top, middle and bottom levels?

5. Invest in Marketing Automation

You will likely benefit from marketing automation software if you think your business will expand. You should begin with using the right tools, unless you are not planning on scaling your business or if you don’t want the headache of fixing a process that is broken. You will see the results of your marketing campaigns as well as help you to make smarter business decisions.

6. Maintain Clean Data

Incorrect info is costly, and can result in lead attrition, credibility problems, and also reduced conversion levels. With reliable info, you can pinpoint the performance and weak points of your sales and marketing campaigns.

7. Establish a Feedback Loop

Is your job done after you close a deal? How about when a lead is lost? Not quite. You can still learn a fair bit in the info gathered from the various teams. What was stopping the customer from buying at the beginning? How did sales get pass initial objections? What were the deal breakers of the product options? How many interactions did it take to

close the deal

? Set up a system so that feedback can be distributed to all team members working in lead management. This will greatly improve your future processes and sales success.