What are the Best Lead Management Practices to Drive Conversion?

Understand the Lead Management

Lead management is the process that comprises capturing leads, tracking their behaviours and activities, qualifying them as leads, and giving them attention to make them sales-ready. Once they have passed this process, they are handed over to the sales team.
Leads are captured from several sources such as emails, advertisement clicks; websites visited, phone calls, face-to-face interactions, recording these interactions, and even recommendations. These sources allow an organisation to understand what the customers like and which customer is more likely to be interested in their products.
The main stages of lead management are lead generation, capturing inquiry, filtering and qualifying leads as potential customers, lead distribution and nurturing, and opportunity management.

Opportunity management is the latest concept concerned with handling sales opportunities with a single contact in the process of lead management.

Lead management is vital for businesses as it helps them understand what strategies suit them and brings in more leads. It aids them in optimising sales and marketing campaigns and tailoring those which will be effective further. Companies can analyse the customer journey, the pain point, and the drawbacks of their existing process. Lead management ensures the success of sales operations.

“You are out of business if you don't have a prospect.”

Lead Management Practises to Drive Conversion

Some of the recommended lead management practices for driving conversion are:

1. Have a definitive buyer's persona

Defining your buyer's persona is extremely vital. Your products or services are the best solutions for someone out there. Recognising your buyers will help you find them. Once you know your ideal buyers, you can focus your efforts on finding them and converting these leads. The more qualified the leads are, the easier it will be to convert them into customers.

To build the ideal buyer's persona, you will need the previous customer data, such as which leads are more often converted and the common factor in all of them?

Once equipped with this information, you can create a persona and communicate with them through the marketing channels.

2. Nurturing Programs

Planning the nurturing programs is important as not all of the leads will convert instantly. Even if you have the ideal buyer's person drafted, you will need these programs as some customers tend to be hesitant. They will need a little bit of persuading. Lead nurturing will ensure that when they are ready to make a decision, they will be purchasing a product from you. Building a lead scoring system to categorise potential leads for conversions is one of the methods to do it.

Nurturing programs for each category can drive them into your sales funnel, after which the sales teams will handle the prepared leads.

3. Recommendation

Lead generation can be expensive. At the beginning of your business, you may not be able to afford it as not all leads convert into customers. However, you can ask your existing leads to refer your product/ services to someone who requires your solutions. Asking for referrals from converted leads can drive the business. A lead is a potential customer paying you for your product and someone who can increase further with recommendations.

Build referral programs and offer rewards to motivate the customers. Send out promotional emails and messages so that the customers and leads are aware of it.

4. Lead Management Software

For lead management, you will need good software. This software will handle the core processes of the practises and bring more leads into the business. To choose a good lead management software, you will have to decide between CRM, Customer Lifecycle Management Platform and lead management software. The three are equally beneficial; however, their application is dependent on your business needs.

So, before choosing software, identify your business needs. Once you have this part down, pick out the top 3 or top 5 software in the industry. Draw a comparison and pick out the one that suits your needs more. Look out for pricing, customer support, customisable solution and even response time.

The commonly used solution for lead management is CRM. The Customer Relationship Management software allows organisations to maintain a record of customer interactions. All the customer data is stored in one place as companies can track the journey from leads to customers. CRM is sought after because of its multi-functionalities. First, it serves as a lead management software that closes a deal and then as a customer service software after the sale has been made. Optimiser CRM is a fine example that comes with a lead management suite to help with your individual business needs.

5. Collaboration

Converting leads is not a part of the sales department. All the teams should collaborate on converting leads to customers as that makes the process far more efficient. Sales teams require all the information to know the potential customers better. Encouraging the departments to share the information on the customers can aid the sales team in drafting effective strategies. Involve other teams in the process of creating a buyer's persona and lead management. Integration of marketing and sales teams can significantly improve lead conversions. Having a robust strategy, any organisation can build a powerful lead management plan.

SUMMARY

A lot goes into the process of converting a lead into a customer. For some, the process can take time; for others, the customer will efficiently move through the sales funnel, closing the sales cycle quickly. Lead management's job is to ensure that the potential customers you reach out are interested in your products and are most likely to convert. To drive the conversion, you have multiple solutions, such as Nurturing programs, at your disposal.