What is Lead Management?

Lead management is the process of qualifying, analyzing, and nurturing incoming leads to convert them into a business opportunity. A lead management system typically involves the creation or capturing of leads from multiple channels. Such a system allows you to make the most of the prospects who might be really interested in the services or products you are offering.

Biggest Challenges Faced in Lead Management

While putting efforts towards expanding your business, you may find it exhausting to hunt for leads manually, keep your database updated, and do follow-ups. A lack of a lead management system can make it hard to handle the leads you may generate on daily basis. Here are some of the common challenges with a poor lead management system:

Manual Lead Scoring:

Poor lead management can lead to loss of productivity since there is no process that exists to qualify or rank the leads in order to importance.

Lack of Insight into Lead’s Activities:

Without a lead management system, it can be difficult to track the activities of prospective leads on the website, or email which can lead to the loss of potential buyers.

Duplicate Leads:

A CRM is filled with several duplicate lead entries. This can waste the time of your team and even result in the slipping of the leads.

Lower Conversion Rate:

It also leads to lower conversions as the sales and marketing teams are bound to send delayed query responses and miss follow-ups.

Lack of Lead Nurturing:

Lack of information about the requirements of the potential leads/customers can cause liability to send emails on time. This can devoid you of lasting relationships.

Here’s What a Successful Lead Management Process Looks Like

Lead Capturing

The first step to lead management is the lead generation process. It is true for both inbound and outbound sales activities. The outbound lead generation involves putting together a list of potential leads along with their contact information. For inbound marketing and sales teams, this first stage is about encouraging leads to reach out. It includes using a strong call-to-action on websites, emails, social media, and other channels. A lead management software works by identifying and capturing these leads automatically, cutting down on the manual data entry process which often leads to lead leakage.

Lead Tracking and Insights

Once the leads are captured, a lead management software tracks & evaluates the captured leads and figures out which one’s the most beneficial or shows high conversion potential. A lead software automatically captures the lead’s profile information, such as company, job title, and contact details. The insights through these reports promote the personalization of the sales efforts and help your sales & marketing teams in crafting better campaigns.

Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is among the most important components of lead management. In this stage, the lead has either converted or stuck in indecisive mode. Well, in both cases, the leads are nurtured and engaged. This is usually done using targeted emails about any new offers, product launches, new features, etc. The nurtured leads are then moved to stage 2 of qualification and tracking, leading to higher sales.

Lead Distribution

A strong lead asks for the attention of the sales team. Traditionally, this step was handled manually. But lead management software can automate this step through simple automation & let you assign and distribute the leads among your team. The team receives a complete lead profile so that they can get a better understanding of the lead and have an effective conversation with them.

Lead to Opportunity Creation

Once the captured leads are converted into sales-qualified leads, the next step is to create the opportunity. It is a critical sales step and a crucial part of the lead management process. The majority of lead management software provides effective tracking and management of these opportunities. When combined with a CRM platform, it can help in driving the opportunity development and management in a dynamic and distributed manner.

Best Practices of Lead Management You Should Follow

1

Define Ideal Leads

For this step, start by carefully monitoring your current customers’ data. It will tell you about which leads are hardest to convert, which leads are converting more often, and the characteristics they all have in common. With the help of data, you can enrich their profile and make strategies to engage them.

2

Plan Nurturing Campaigns

A great plan is usually followed by great results. To effectively convert a lead, you require data from leads and the sales funnel. You can expect success by studying your target audience closely and building campaigns that effectively lead them through the sale funnel. Using proper care and a well-crafted email lead nurturing campaign, you can drive conversions.

3

Segment Your Leads

No two leads are the same. So, don’t treat them as one. While creating campaigns, combine the lead automation approach with emails, and other ways to manage your leads. By doing lead segmentation, you can come up with incentives or offers that are relevant to the leads. So, even if you are advertising the same thing to all potential leads, make sure you gather all the information about your leads to group them together. That can help you cater to their needs.

4

Improve Communication between Teams

For successful lead management, there needs to be clear communication between the teams involved. You need to ensure that the communication between the teams is clear and precise while reaching out or following up with the leads. A lead management system helps these teams get context and access to the pipeline, leading to better communication.

Benefits of Using a Lead Management Software

Efficient Lead Tracking

With an effective lead management system, you can overcome the struggle of keeping tabs on your leads and prevent losing any quality leads. The software makes lead tracking easy, making it a valuable asset to a business. It allows you to closely track your leads so that you can optimize the experience for leads closer to conversion. That way you can make better use of your time and money.

Easy Automation of Lead Capturing & Assignment

The system automates the lead capturing process from different sources that may include social media campaigns, web forms, or emails. A lead management software even allows you to contact the leads through calls or chats, making it easy to process quality leads. Once the system tracks and captures leads, it can automatically assign the leads among the team, based on your lead-routing command.

Save Valuable Time

Automation processes of any kind can save time. So, a system offering lead automation gives you the ability to program the automation of routine tasks. That leaves you with plenty of time to pursue the leads and work towards the conversion process, thus leading to higher productivity.

Real-time Tracking of Lead-Cycle

One of the crucial parts of running an online business is knowing what is driving your leads. With an effective lead tracking and management system, you can understand the lifecycle and activity timeline of your leads at different stages. This real-time information provided by the CRM allows the sales team to communicate seamlessly with the leads across channels.

Deeper Insights

An effective lead management solution allows you to keep an eye on quality leads with its advanced tracking capabilities. It helps you follow the customer journey and get an insight into their decision- making process. This can help you in converting the leads as well as creating a roadmap to provide a better customer experience in the future.

Effective Lead Nurturing

With the help of lead management software, it becomes easy to nurture leads that are most like to convert into loyal customers. These leads can be nurtured through methods like email marketing and may give you better business than the leads that aren’t nurtured.

Take Your Business to the Next Level with Tutterfly The Best CRM Lead Management Software

Tutterfly is travel-specific lead management software that works by automating the complete lead & sales cycle to increase sales efficiency and minimize the turnaround time. It improves customer experience by allowing for easy collaboration between the clients and the team members. With Tutterfly, you can streamline the processes to eliminate redundancy, reduce manual data entry, and boost the sales process. It is equipped with lead management modules that automatically capture the leads and feed them into your database. The software can help with lead tracking, segmentation, and lead nurturing them in one place.
Features of Tutterfly CRM Lead Management Software

Features

  • Lead Capture
  • Lead Activity Tracking
  • Lead Scoring
  • Lead Distribution
  • Lead Nurturing
  • Built-in Communication Options
  • Advanced Security Options
  • Integration with Other Business System
  • Marketing Automation

Frequently Asked Questions

The work of lead management software is to bring in the leads and guide those leads through the process of qualifying, organizing, and nurturing. The software assigns those leads to the sales representatives for better and faster conversions.

Here are some of the main stages in the lead management process:

  • Lead capturing
  • Lead tracking
  • Lead distribution
  • Lead nurturing
  • Lead management analytics
With a solid lead management system in place, a business can avoid the loss of leads. It prevents leads from getting slipped in the most effective way. The most important reasons why you should have a lead management system are-
  • Lead generation takes time, effort, and most importantly money. Managing those leads should be one’s highest priority to avoid wastage of all that investment.
  • Leads don’t convert right away. Sometimes the leads require nurturing over time to reengage them or convert them.
The best indicator of what your best lead management software should be, come from your business goals. If you are wondering, a decent lead management software includes features including lead capturing, lead tracking, lead scoring, lead nurturing, reporting & analysis, etc.
The lead tracking feature helps you identify the performance of the marketing campaign you are running. With tracking, you can figure out which campaigns are giving the best result by providing a substantial ROI and which activities are just exhausting your budget.
To organize and manage your sales leads, you should utilize the best sales lead management software equipped with features required for your business. To know more about business compatibility with a lead management system, contact us at Tutterfly.
There are multiple benefits of using lead management software:
  • A lead management software cuts down the distraction and helps you focus on sales-ready leads, thus increasing the possibility of sales.
  • It offers automation that helps in saving the time of the sales team, which goes into manual data entry. The more time they save here, the more effort they can put into making more sales.
  • If there’s a high potential lead that has higher chances of conversion, lead management software offers the option of directly contacting them.
  • With its tracking feature, lead management software can identify the source of strong leads, drive your team’s focus towards productivity and increase the ROI.