Read how to improve your lead management process in 5 easy steps to close deals faster.
Every business wants to grow and it sounds easy to acquire and convert leads. However, without an organised approach to nurture inquiries to conversion, the path to “sales won” is treacherous. Without investing in marketing, leads are lost or fail to convert from ‘blanket’ messages. Whether you are in sales or marketing, lead management gets results for your business.
5 steps to improve your lead management process
- Leave the spreadsheet behind
- Invest in marketing automation
- Analyse your sales funnel
- Deploy lead scoring
- Deploy lead nurturing
The lead management process involves the tracking, management and nurture of prospective customers so it pays to invest wisely.
How to recognise if you need to improve your lead management process
- Do you have multiple sources of lead information that prevent accurate follow up?
- Are leads unqualified before transfer to sales and productivity lost?
- Do you have poor visibility of lead behaviour to provide content that moves leads down the funnel?
- Are opportunities and follow ups regularly missed?
- Do you have a low conversion rate on promising leads due to a lack of lead nurturing?
Many will recognise the warning signs above that stop you selling. If you want more leads at a lower cost per acquisition, why not call 01565 632206 today.
No more spreadsheets
Many businesses store leads in a spreadsheet in a manual lead process but spreadsheets are inefficient and kill conversion in up to 70% of leads according to Zoho.
In contrast, Oracle Eloqua, Hubspot, Marketo and Pardot automate lead capture, scoring and outreach. Every lead generation contact from emails, website contact forms, downloads and paid ads is captured, tracked and qualified ready for a nurture programme or passed to sales.
This is how marketing and CRM automation gives you resource and time savings, freeing staff from iterative tasks and allowing you to scale efficiently. The reward is more time to add value and sell more.
Analyse your sales funnel
A thorough understanding of your sales funnel and at what stage every lead is at in the sales funnel helps to underpin lead management. Mapping your sales pipeline combined with sales intelligence helps to increase pipeline velocity and optimise conversion rates. Ultimately, you wouldn’t invite an existing customer to a fact-finding webinar for new business or send a whitepaper to a lost lead.
If a sales team followed up on every inquiry and contact there is much cold-calling involved or chasing leads that are in-contract and cannot convert. When marketing provide a steady stream of MQLs ranked according to the highest value and engagement, those calls become hot leads. We now look at two further techniques.
Why you need lead scoring and lead nurturing
The benefits of investing in lead scoring and lead nurturing are:
- Leads are prioritised so effort is focussed where it matters most
- Leads receive the right content to push them towards sales won with high engagement
In summary, lead scoring and nurturing mean you only chase valid leads with personalised messaging. When you deploy lead nurturing, you can make up to 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost. By nurturing and engaging your contacts with marketing assets throughout the sales cycle, you make more sales for less.
Furthermore, nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured. Nurturing increases ROI but requires a little more time and investment but lead scoring compensates by focussing effort.
Full service marketing support from Think Beyond
In conclusion, marketing automation, lead scoring and lead nurturing improve your lead management process. Alternatively, leads quickly get lost, ignored or mismanaged leading to sub-standard conversion rates. Dare we mention wasted acquisition and resource costs.
Think Beyond is a management consultancy that helps you take control of your leads. From advice to get started with marketing automation or a review of your lead management processes, we are here to support you. From building the business case to analysing your marketing effort, our marketing strategy and lead generation support services deliver results.
Why not book a free consultation by calling 01565 632206 or email sales@think-beyond.co.uk.
Alternatively, you can request more information by submitting your contact details.
Finally, discover the philosophy behind Think Beyond and what drives us.