Lead management is a procedure of working with leads starting from the marketing funnel to the sales pipeline. It is a process to track, manage, and thereafter qualifying the leads, with the ultimate goal of turning them into a sale.
It all seems so very simple- right?
But what happens if you have hundreds of leads pouring in every day?
How can you nurture each of them individually?
You cannot just do it manually, and so that is the exact reason why you need a lead management platform like a small business CRM software to help your sales team stay organized and prioritize on hot leads by nurturing them towards a sale.
However, before we discuss how this small business CRM platform works and can benefit your company, let us talk over the basics of the lead management workflow.
What is Lead Management?
Lead management consists of four key elements, which include:
Each of these four components aids the procedure of converting a lead to a sale.
To understand more of this framework, let us dig deeper into each before we talk about small business CRM software.
Lead Generation
From a higher perspective, the lead generation process primarily gets started in the marketing department of any organization. The purpose of lead generation is to attract prospects who match your ideal customer persona or profile for your business.
Lead generation is further classified into inbound and outbound marketing campaigns. Campaigns can include anything from blog posting, social media advertisements, e-book and whitepaper distribution, email campaigns, cold calling, referrals, and others.
Lead Capturing
When any prospect responds to the advertisements or a marketing campaign sent from your best small and medium business CRM software, the next step is to learn more about them.
This process is known a ‘lead capture”, and generally occurs on the internet using a web form.
Some of the most common lead capture strategies are to offer a free trial, e-books, or a registration to a webinar in exchange of personal information like a contact information, name, company information and others. As this information gets captured these individuals’ moves through the funnel from being a prospect to a lead.
Lead Organization
Once the lead’s information and data have been captured, the distribution process initiates. The lead distribution process sorts and categorizes the leads based on their potential to become a sale. Marketing and sales team members mostly use “lead scoring” technique to ascertain which leads should be passed on to sales, and which among them demands future nurturing.
Lead Nurturing
With the end goal of turning them into a sale, the process of lead nurturing depends on how the initial contact goes with the leads to determine whether it needs to be followed up before transferring the leads from the marketing department to sales.
Therefore, while lead management makes marketing and sales team more efficient, it is extremely hard to control or complete the process without the aid of a secondary organizational platform.
This is where lead management platform like best small and medium business CRM software comes into play.
What is Customer Relationship Management software?
A small business CRM or Customer Relationship Management software for small businesses helps SMEs to manage and streamline their lead management process. This lead management software helps organizations to organize their prospects, leads and, sales and keep track of them as they move down through the funnel.
While different small business CRM software vendors have their own unique features built into the software, they all come with the same blueprint, which consists of certain basic functionalities that include:
Tracking Leads
The best small business CRM software is a platform that will allow you to tag where the leads are coming from when they are initially captured into the CRM database. Ideally, any good small business CRM software should allow you to demarcate the origin of the leads on a geographical level as well as how the leads found your brand or how they filtered on your website. For example, did the leads come from a trade show, or from e-book download web form etc.
By performing this documentation of registering the point of origin of the leads, companies can better assess how to use their marketing channels for getting more leads into their pipeline.
Assign and distribute leads
Another essential feature of all best small business CRM is the ability to assign leads to the members of the sales team. With the help of CRM software, you can easily monitor each sales rep’s track record as well as their current lead to sale conversion rates providing a better picture as to how you can improve the performance of your sales team.
Status tracking
Once the marketing team passes on the matured and qualified leads to the sales team, CRM software helps to track the leads as they move through the sales pipeline. Most best small business CRM software allows the sales reps and the management to view the status of where the different leads are in the sales process, as well as when and how long they are taking to turn into a sale.
Most small business CRM software provides the user with the ability to view and track the complete lifeline of any lead- from the start to the end.
Therefore, if you see that your leads are starting to drop off, you can set the software to put in certain lead nurturing method to keep the leads alive before they culminate in a sale.
Conclusion
Hence, to conclude, lead management is a powerful tool that helps you to track and guide your prospective leads through the marketing and sales funnel into a sale.
Therefore, investing in lead management platform such as a best CRM for small business is an ideal decision that helps to improve your lead management results and make your marketing and sales team members much more efficient at their job.
You can even start by trying out ConvergeHub’s free 14-day trial since you never know what you are missing unless you give it a try.
Wait! If you have 2 minutes to spare… leave a comment below letting us know what your biggest takeaway was!