The ability to effectively manage leads is a necessary, yet often overlooked skill when turning prospects into sales and, ultimately, loyal customers.
From my experience at Marketo, I’ve learned that when done right, lead management will help you deliver more educated buyers, help you better understand their needs, and ultimately satisfy those needs, leading to more revenue.
Lead management involves capturing incoming leads, enticing them to seek further information and guiding them through the sales funnel. To do this, a well-developed process needs to be in place, incorporating best practices for managing leads at all stages.
Following the tips below will assist you in the reorganisation of your lead management plan and turn engaged prospects into loyal customers.
Define a sales ready lead
Your marketing team should already be working in correspondence with the sales team to analyse which leads convert to sales and why. Are there any patterns and correlations between certain types of prospects and conversion rate? To further maximise relationships, work with the sales team to create a list of defined and universally acknowledged steps prospects go through, before being referred to the sales team.
This plan inhibits prospects from being sent prematurely to sales. The process should make certain that prospects are properly educated on the company and products or services on offer, their options and their own needs before being sent to the sales team. Sending educated buyers to the sales team will allow you to increase the turnover rate of prospects to sales.
Get to know your prospect
Take every opportunity to learn about your prospect as the relationship develops. While the prospect goes through the sales funnel, learning more about your product or service, your marketing team should correspondingly be learning more about the prospect.
While you can analyse their website and email activity to understand the prospect better, using forms is another great way to get more information on a lead. Be smart with your forms: instead of asking your prospects to input personal information you already know, use the opportunity to get new information that can only be attained directly from the prospect.
Use a lead-scoring system
Your marketing team should have multiple ways of gathering data on leads. From tracking their online activities to monitoring their email interactions, prospects are constantly leaving around bits of information about themselves, their needs and their interests. This can help marketers create a better, more personalised, customer experience.
These bits of information can be used to determine a lead’s position in the buying process. To help determine their position, create a numerical-based scoring system. Use your email system to track their opens, clicks, downloads and response rates. On your website, track their number of visits, the web pages they look at and the information they sign up for or download.
Give each activity a numerical point score. You might count opening an email as one point and clicking on a link in that email as two. Downloading a pricing sheet might be worth more than filling out a form to receive more information.
Recycle leads
With an airtight lead management process, there hopefully won’t be many leads that slip through the cracks, or head to sales too early, resulting in a failure to convert. There will be a few, though, and, when there are, you should be ready to implement your lead recycling strategy.
In instances where a lead was prematurely sent to sales, or the sales team didn’t follow up with a lead, don’t let the lead be sent to the waste bin. Instead, send the leads back to the marketing team to further educate and persuade the prospect before sending them to the sales department again.
As I like to say, lead management is a helpful tool for understanding your buyers and turning those buyers into sales. If your sales funnel and lead management process has holes in it, you risk losing leads, developing poor quality relationships with customers and suffering an overall decrease in ROI. Perfecting the above lead management practices will, however, have your marketing team creating lasting customer relationships with educated buyers.
