Manage Daily Business Leads By Lead Management Software
What are the leads? Leads are actually “would-be customers” or, in more appropriate words, potential customers who might make a deal with our company and help in growing our business.
These people are the ones who are interested in creating a business deal with you but haven’t confirmed it formally. You cannot say whether this interest will turn into a successful business deal or not. Whether large or small, any business needs to have leads that they need to convert into clients or customers.
The number of points depends on the number of clients or customers a company has. If it is a start-up, then the number of leads might be minimal, and the sales team needs to work hard to get more points. Now, as soon as the company starts converting these leads to clients, the number of edges also increases linearly and hence makes the business a success.
Then, a time comes when the numbers of leads are so increased that the sales team might get a bit stressed to handle them, unable to attend them, unable to solve their queries, and sometimes missing follow-ups.
This can affect the company’s growth as the number of leads may gradually decrease. Here is where the Lead Management concept comes into the picture.
Mean Of Lead Management
Now, what is meant by Lead management? Well, in simple words, it is a process to handle the leads. Starting from attracting the leads from various campaigns like social media advertisements, seminars, emails, cold callings, etc., to maintain their data, analyze it, establish communication, closing the deal, and generating reports of the agreement, everything is covered in a lead management process.
The system in which this is carried out is known as a leading management system. This system usually comes built-in with the CRM, i.e., Customer Relationship management system.
Advantages of a lead management system include lesser time taken for marketing, i.e., more leads generated in lesser time, as the follow-ups, analysis is now quickly done, the rate of converting a point into a client has been increased drastically, etc.
Again, a question might arise, what does the lead management software do to reduce our manual labor and generate more leads in less time? How does the conversion ratio of the company increase using a lead management system?
Also Read: How To Achieve Business Benefits With Business ERP Software.
Working Process Of Lead Management Software
The lead management system works in five steps, starting from first recognition to its nurturing. Let’s have a look at these steps.
Lead Recognition:
In this step, leads are gathered using various marketing paradigms like social media, advertisements, seminars, webinars, cold calls, emails, etc. After this, the collected data of the leads are automatically transferred to the CRM by the lead management system, hence reducing the manual efforts of an employee of entering the data of every lead in the software. It can also record the source from where the lead is generated, i.e., either from social media, advertisements, emails, etc.
Lead Tracking:
Once all the entries of lead are fed into the lead management system, the lead management system continuously keeps track of the lead activities through their social media profile, etc. If a company has its website, the software can also keep a record regarding which page is viewed the most, which product has been added to the cart or have been purchased the most in case of E-commerce business, etc. which can also help track the lead’s interests. You can even predict which product your point will be interested in purchasing, in how much quantity and which product stock you need to upgrade soon.
Ranking the Leads:
This step is also known as Qualification of Leads. This is decided based on the lead’s interest in doing business with us. There are specific leads, who just for the sake of getting information about the company, show interest in our marketing campaigns. They might not be interested in doing the business, and hence they are ranked at the least position and also called unqualified leads. On the other way hand, qualified leads are the ones who show interest in our business by maintaining secure communication with us, regularly updates us regarding their plans for the company, and are eager to know more and more about the strategies for doing the business with us.
Hence, these qualified leads are ranked at the topmost positions. From this step, we can decide how much time and effort are required to be spent on the leads. The lead’s ranking and qualification are agreed on in response to the lead on our phone calls, emails, and the interest shown by them by frequently visiting the company website.
Distributing the leads to the right sales representative
If you own a small scale business, then the sales team members work hard on every lead. But when the business grows, and the number of points keeps on increasing, there arises a need to distribute the edges among the team members based on some criteria as not each member can handle every kind of lead.
The requirements can be found on the geographic location of the point, the paradigm by which the lead is generated, like a person A handles the lead generated by emails, other team member feels the lead generated by calls, or we can also distribute them based on products. For example, if a company has five products, we can assign the lead interested in a particular product to a specific team member who might be an expert in selling that product.
Educating your Leads regarding your business
As we discussed earlier, not every lead is interested in doing business with us. But there are some leads, which are having 50-50 chances of conversion to paying customers. They are interested in doing a transaction with us but are ready to take a risk in fear of lack of much business knowledge, loss, etc.
So, the sales team must educate them by providing facts and figures for our business and also convince them that doing business with us would be beneficial for them. Before converting the lead to the customer, the sales need to make sure that the lead is 100% convinced, and there are no second thoughts regarding the business decision. This step is also called lead nurturing.
Hence, following the above steps, the lead management system manages daily leads for a business and thus reduces the sales team’s workload.
