What Goes into Lead Management?
Lead management would not be possible without first lead generation. Without leads, you would have nothing to manage. Lead generation comes about either from outboard sources (cold calls, advertising, email schemes) or inbound sources (social media, PPC, referrals).
Once you’ve started compiling your list from lead generation, it turns into lead management. But remember not every potential customer is created equal. Some customers will be considered sales qualified and ready to buy or sign up for your service. Others are still in the research phase.
Lead management allows you to know where each person is and how to nurture them into becoming a bonafide customer.
How to Get Started with Lead Management?
Once you've established (or captured) your leads, you move into cleansing your list. You want to make sure you only put time and effort into leads where the likelihood of them qualifying as a customer is high. For those that need very little nurturing because they are ready to buy, they go straight to the sales team. Others who need more resources or information, but still qualify as a good lead will go into the lead nurturing stage to receive follow-ups.
Start with a well-laid out marketing plan to build your brand presence and gain leads. Remember leads can come from many avenues, including referrals, email capture, social media engagement, and outbound efforts.
As your list grows, consider a software service such as Zoho or Salesforce to help manage your list on an analytical level. Marketing experts such as Scorpion can also maintain lead management if you prefer external support.
Tips to Help with Lead Management
Lead management can help your business grow by understanding better where your leads are coming from and how to connect more with them. Some things you should consider with lead management.
Speed:
You should try to connect with the customers that fill out a form or try to call you within 15 minutes of that submission. Having speed be a part of your lead management goals will add credibility and trust to incoming customers and existing customers.
Friendliness:
Training your staff to be friendly with your customers and actively try to help their needs will improve your lead management and improve the amount of leads that turn into customers. You can provide training, record calls for training, give awards for customer service, or find other ways to make sure it's a part of your culture in the service business.
Lead management:
Having a lead management dashboard to see where everything is coming in and how it ties to your marketing efforts can help you make sure you aren’t wasting your money.
