Where You Lead: A Comprehensive Guide to Sales Lead Management

Is it possible to have too many leads for your business? Only if you don’t have a great sales leads management strategy to stay on top of them. Check out this guide for more details.

Having leads is great, but you’ll lose out on that opportunity if you don’t manage them effectively. Do you know the sales lead management strategies you need?

Research shows that some companies waste more than two-thirds of their leads from some sources. Don’t let your company be one of those statistics. When you know how to manage sales leads, you’ll never waste an opportunity, and you can keep your process for gaining new leads effective and streamlined.

This guide will give you what you need for effective sales lead management. Keep reading to learn how to maximize the potential of your leads!

1. Define Leads Clearly

Your first step is to have a clear definition of what a lead is. If you’re working with a team, ensure all the employees understand that definition, too.

At what point does a sales prospect become a lead? Most of the leads sent to staff at many companies don’t get acted on. There are two main reasons for that.

First, the lead might get channeled to the wrong person for the task. It becomes a missed opportunity if it doesn’t get passed on to the right person or doesn’t get there fast enough.

Second, the lead may not be ready to talk to a salesperson immediately. The salesperson might make a contact or two with a lead, decide they aren’t ready, and focus more on easier leads.

To prevent these lost opportunities, you need a specific definition of what counts as a lead so you’ll know what opportunities to pursue.

That way, there’s no confusion about whether or not a lead is present. And if something meets the definition of a lead, everyone involved will know to take action right away.

2. Use a Solid CRM Tool

A good customer relationship management (CRM) tool helps you maximize the effectiveness of the sales process. This gives you and your employees the right tools to save information about every interaction with customers and prospects.

This can involve integrating multiple sales channels, including online and offline channels. Whatever it looks like for your company, make sure you’re managing those customer relations – they’re an important part of the lead management process.

3. Follow the Sources

People hear about your product or service from different sources. It might be a referral, an online ad, or a different ad form. Tracking where your leads come from helps determine what works for advertising, and what methods could be replaced.

It’s also important to target the source of your leads and the following process so you can figure out other things, like how many times customer contact should be made to get results. If you can’t track the process back to the source, you can’t really understand how the lead generation process works.

4. Follow Up Fast

If you respond within a few days of getting contact from a lead, your chances of closing tend to skyrocket. Just think about it from the customer’s perspective. If you reached out to a company and requested information, but didn’t hear back in a matter of days, you’d probably take your business somewhere else.

When you respond fast, you’ll put your brand above the competition and keep the attention of those leads.

5. Nurture Leads

Sales lead management needs to involve nurturing those prospects from start to finish.

Depending on what you offer, many prospects might not be making the decision to make a purchase after the first contact. If you give your leads time and nurture them along the way, they’re much more likely to come to fruition.

Work to create campaigns that let you contact prospects more than once, so they get moved through the sales cycle. Since you’re tracking this process, you can tell exactly when they are ready to purchase.

6. Get Your Staff Excited

If your staff feels excited about each of these prospects, they’ll keep the right focus to make the sale.

The more information you can gather about your leads, the more excited your sales staff will likely get. The person responsible for collecting information about a prospect should collect additional information about the lead. Questions like “Why does this matter to you?” or “What caught your eye about this product?” can help you better understand your leads.

Make sure your salespeople are in touch with the right company decision-makers to keep the process on point, too. If things need to be changed, your salespeople need a voice to make those changes happen.

7. Use Tags

Tags aren’t just for social media posts. “Tagging” can also help you save useful or interesting information about prospects and customers.

For example, you can tag customer records with the names of competitors, customer objections, products they own, and anything else you know, you’ll have those details easy to access when you need them. When you keep your information organized, you can better use it for your company’s success.

8. Treat Prospects as Customers

A prospect might be reaching out to your company with requests or questions. Do you treat them like you would treat a customer? Or are your systems set up so prospects are more likely to get neglected or ignored?

When you treat prospects like they’re already valued customers, they’ll be more likely to want to connect with your brand in the future.

Ready to Turn Your Leads to Customers? Email us to get help developing your sales lead management strategy.