How To Improve Lead Management

Did you know that 60% of salespeople are still struggling with their lead management process, leading to missed opportunities and untapped revenue potential?

If you are in sales, effective lead management is not just an optional strategy - it's the key to turning potential customers into loyal fans.

If you’re not taking care of your customers, your competitors will. And since we want you to get better at what you do and keep your customers, we want to show you the systems that had helped us to improve our lead generation, sales and overall business results.

That’s why today we’re going to show you tactics that can improve your lead management.

By the way, if you want to try and use the best lead-generation tools, we’ve got your back - make sure to read this article.

What Is Lead Management?

Lead management is the process of collecting, organizing, tracking, and nurturing potential customers from initial interest to conversion - as simple as that.

The goal of lead management is simple: help your sales team capture lead information, keep track of where those leads are in the sales cycle, and guide them effectively until they become paying customers.

However, lead management is not without its challenges. 😢

Assigning, organizing, and tracking these leads often takes up valuable time - time that could be better spent actually connecting with prospects and closing deals. It's not just about maintaining order but about optimizing your entire sales cycle, which, for many B2B businesses, can take up to 2.1 months to close.

The good news? Implementing effective lead management strategies can ensure repetitive admin tasks don’t slow down your buyer's journey, and instead, keep deals moving towards a close.

So, as we love to say, what time is it? Closing Time! ⚡

Why Do You Need Lead Management?

An effective lead management process helps your sales and marketing teams achieve the following:

• Reach interested prospects before the competition does ✅
• Prioritize the most valuable leads ✅
• Ensure qualified prospects don't slip through the cracks ✅
• Automate time-consuming tasks like manual lead assignments ✅
• Create personalized customer experiences that convert better ✅
• Speed up your entire sales pipeline and close more deals, faster ✅

Lead management also gives you insightful data about your customers, lead sources, and sales processes, so you can based the decision on the actual data.

There’s a various of things that should be done for a single lead: follow-ups, reminders, questions regarding shipping, informations for the invoicing and accounting department etc, so imagine that some of your team members is doing that on its own without any tool that can actually remove manual work.

No bueno. ❌

That’s why a vast majority of the companies today use lead management tools also know as CRMs (Customer Relationship Management) in order to keep the track of all the hot inbound leads, cold outreach results, campaigns and so on. They can store all the informations in one place and divide them into:

• Contacts ✅
• Companies ✅
• Quotes ✅
• Deals etc. ✅

So the point of having a lead management processes and tools is to make sure that your time is invested into right things and tasks - you want to get the most out of the potential buyers, and then turn opportunity into sales.

Now let’s see how lead management process actually looks like.

Stages of the Lead Management Process

A well-structured lead management process usually follows these steps:

✔️ Lead Generation: Identify potential customers and capture their attention through ads, content marketing, and social media. You can also do cold outreach, which is a 4th way to get the leads.

✔️ Lead Capture: Collect contact information via website forms, gated content, webinar signups etc.

✔️ Lead Tracking: Monitor their behaviour on your website and their engagement with your content and emails.

✔️ Lead Scoring: Assign scores based on engagement levels to determine which leads are most promising.

✔️ Lead Qualification: Evaluate how well a lead fits your product and their readiness to purchase.

✔️ Lead Nurturing: Improve your interactions and messaging to move qualified leads towards a decision.

✔️ Lead Distribution: Assign qualified leads to the right sales reps.

✔️ Lead Conversion: Close the deal and smoothly hand off the customer to your customer success team.

These are 8 steps that simply can’t be skipped. You need to complete them in order to call your team a successful sales team. And remember: the best salespeople are the ones that are genuinely care about customers.

What Types of Leads Exists?

There are 5 types of leads, and they’re known as:

• Inbound Leads: Prospects that come to you, like website visitors filling out a form, also known as hot leads 🔥
• Outbound Leads: Leads that your team reaches out to first via cold calls or emails (cold leads) 🥶
• Information Qualified Leads (IQLs): At the top of the funnel, typically with minimal engagement. ✔️
• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): Engaged with your marketing materials but not ready for sales yet. 🔖
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs): Highly interested leads that are ready to make a purchase. 💰

All of those leads can be better managed if you have a lead management system.

A lead management system refers to software or a suite of tools that helps businesses manage their leads throughout the sales cycle. Tools like Salesforce, Zoho CRM, and HubSpot can make managing leads simpler and more effective through automation, reducing manual tasks for your team.

While lead management software focuses on organizing and nurturing leads, CRM software addresses the full customer journey - helping sales, marketing, and customer success teams work together to ensure the customer experience is smooth from first contact to ongoing service.

There are a few good examples of lead management.

For example, Calendly's lead management stack includes Marketo for communication, Salesforce for customer information, and Clearbit for customer insight. Together, these tools ensure every lead is tracked, nurtured, and moved through the pipeline effectively.

On the other hand**, Searchant** was able to automate repetitive lead tasks with tools like Calendly and Zapier, which allowed their sales team to focus more on selling and less on admin work - leading to a 25% decrease in no-shows.

🎁 Bonus Lesson: 6 Lead Management Best Practices

Practice makes perfect. In order to have a better lead management process, make sure to work on the following things:

1️⃣ Focus on Lead Qualification

Ensure your team spends their time on high-quality leads. Lead qualification involves evaluating a lead's fit for your product, their level of interest, and their readiness to purchase. Define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and make sure your qualification efforts are focused on leads who fit this profile best.

2️⃣ Set Up Lead Scoring

Lead scoring helps quantify how engaged a lead is. Assign values to actions like content downloads or demo requests, then let your lead management tools prioritize leads accordingly. This helps ensure your sales reps are talking to the most interested leads at the right time.

3️⃣ Gather the Right Data

Use your marketing forms to gather the critical information needed for qualification, but avoid overwhelming your prospects. Tools like Clearbit can help reduce form fields while still capturing important details, improving the experience for leads.

4️⃣ Choose Tools That Integrate

Using disconnected tools can limit the efficiency of your lead management system. Choose software that integrates well with the rest of your tech stack, ensuring your data flows seamlessly across your sales process. This makes it easier for your sales and marketing teams to collaborate.

5️⃣ Measure → Iterate

Get it done, then get it right, or if we want to say it better in terms of lead management: measure, then iterate. Lead management is an ongoing process. Continuously measure key metrics like lead response time, conversion rates, and deal size. Use insights to improve your process and ensure that you're hitting your sales goals more efficiently over time.

6️⃣ Automate Lead Routing

Manual lead assignment can delay follow-up time and lead to missed opportunities. Automate your lead routing using tools like Calendly Routing to instantly match leads with the right sales rep based on their location, company size, or other characteristics.

📦 Wrapping It Up

Effective lead management can transform your sales process, ensuring that every potential customer receives timely, relevant, and personalized attention. The point is to ask yourself: how we can close deals faster? How we can make more better deals? How we can improve Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) and customer’s lifetime value (LTV)?

For more insights on improving your sales game, be sure to check out our related articles:

• 9 Business (And Networking) Lessons From Suits Series
• 5 Predictions for Marketing and Sales Strategies in 2024
• How Sales People Are Wasting Time

The right lead management strategy could be the difference between losing a lead and closing a valuable deal. Don't underestimate its power - let's make sure every lead counts.