The 6-Step Lead Management Process?
1. Capturing Leads:
The first step in your Lead Management process should always be about capturing leads. Without first being able to bring prospects into your sales funnel, there is no Lead Management System. Capturing leads can be done in a number of ways, some more effective than others. The most effective way to capture leads is through offering high-level content such as trade shows, conferences, and events. According to Drift, companies rated events like those mentioned at 32% effective for capturing leads. Other effective tactics include SEO, your company website, Email marketing, and webinars.
2. Scoring Leads:
Lead scoring is used by a business’s sales and marketing teams to ascertain a prospect’s buying readiness. It places a value on each lead to help you identify those leads that make ideal customers for your product or service. Scores are typically based on two types of behaviors: latent and active. Latent behaviors include attending a webinar, visiting your website or blog, and engaging with early-stage content. These leads tend to receive lower scores than those participating in active behaviors. Leads who click through your website’s pricing page, watch demos, check out mid and late-stage content, or use branded keyword searches receive higher scores. Lower scores indicate that a lead might still need to be nurtured before being funneled to your sales team, while those who receive higher scores are likely more ready to buy.
3. Prioritizing and assigning leads:
Once your leads have been accurately scored, you can start prioritizing and assigning them. This part of the Lead Management System allows you to identify which leads are closer to purchasing, therefore you can prioritize them. It’s important to ensure that leads who wish to purchase are quickly assigned to a sales rep who can close the deal, otherwise, they may slip through your fingers and backslide into a previous stage, or cool down entirely and change their minds. If you make those leads that are close to buying a priority, you have a greater chance of closing the deal.
4. Converting qualified leads:
So you’ve captured a lead, scored them, and prioritized and assigned them to a sales rep. Now what? Now is the time to convert those leads into contacts. Your marketing team has done the work and handed off the lead to the sales team. Converting them from a prospect to a contact or account is how your sales rep drives them through your sales process.
5. Nurturing leads:
This is probably one of the most important steps for your Lead Management System. This is due to the fact that more often than not, a qualified lead is just not ready to make a purchase from the moment they’ve entered your sales pipeline. They often need to be nudged more and more until eventually they’re convinced. The secret to nurturing your leads properly is building strong relationships with your prospects so that you know what information to give them and when. Overwhelming them with info about your product when they’re not quite ready yet can often scare them away. But the more you get to know your lead, the easier you can predict the right time to give them the right information.
6. Evaluating leads:
And now we come to the final step in your Lead Management System process, evaluating leads. Lead evaluation takes lead scoring one step further. It’s in this stage that you will determine which leads are ready to purchase and which ones need more nurturing. But it’s also more than that. Lead evaluation allows you to funnel leads through your sales pipeline based on the quality of those leads. While you want to follow up on all potential leads, it’s important to prioritize those who are of higher quality, or who are likely to spend more money on your product or service. Evaluating your leads allows you to differentiate between top-quality and lower-quality leads.
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