Lead management is a customer acquisition process that also fills in the gap between marketing and sales. It helps you identify your leads or potential buyers. Thereby, you can educate and engage the leads. Once the leads are qualified, they can be transferred from marketing to sales.
Are you sure the lead management process in your organization is efficient? If you are unsure if you have a robust system for managing leads, keep reading this article. It provides six guidelines that will help you implement an efficient B2B lead management process.
1. Identify your leads or potential buyers
The first step is quite obvious. For implementing an efficient lead management process, you have to begin by identifying your leads. Thereby, you can determine in which area of the sales process these potential buyers stand.
For that to happen, your marketing team needs to understand buyer types and their respective personas. This understanding will give you a clearer picture of your leads. Buyer personas can be determined in the following ways:
- Demographics: Find out the demographic details of your customers, like where do they live, which industry do they work in, what’s the size of the organization they work for? What are their concerns and needs?
- Behavior: In what ways do they consume the information? Do they read the blogs, or do they prefer finding information with a quick search via Google?
- Lead source: How do leads reach you? Get to know if they find you through one of your tweets, did they read any blog that mentions your name, or did they come from direct traffic to your website?
Apart from that, try to find out the mindset of your ideal customer. It is how you develop a complete understanding of your leads, and you can serve them better.
2. Generate & gather intelligence about your leads
The next step is to generate leads and gather intelligence about them. The best way to go about it is to create and track content.
- Offer content along with a lead-capture form. Thereby, generate leads and collect critical lead intelligence information about them.
- Whatever links you share through email marketing and in your social media feeds, add a tracking token along with it. It is how you can gain insights into leads’ behavior.
- Utilize marketing analytics to identify which kind of content leads are looking at, as it will help you understand people’s interests and requirements.
3. Lead scoring
It is a process that lets you know the lead’s potential interest in your products or services. Demographic information and behavioral activity are the key elements to help you with this.
The actions that were taken by the lead usually determine scores—for instance, clicking (or not clicking) email links or blog posts.
The sales team can prioritize calls based on the level of engagement from the lead.
If the core is higher, most likely, the lead is going to convert.
Thus, carve out a well-defined lead scoring process and give a boost to the lead conversion process.
4. Nurture your leads
Use the information collected from the above steps to identify their likely position in the sales cycle. Determine how close they are to the top of the funnel.
Consider passing those leads who are not showing enough willingness to pass off to sales into a lead nurturing campaign. Most of these leads might be in the research and awareness phase. Find out if your product or service can resolve their issues. At this point, consider demonstrating to these leads how your product serves their needs through valuable content and promotional offers.
Following are a few tips to nurture your leads:
- Use a content map to decide what content you need to offer to each type of lead.
- Personalize your emails and social media communications to nurture your relationship with them.
- Include appropriate CTA in each of your content.
- Offer targeted content and maintain the communication until the lead gets ready.
5. Pass off leads to the Sales team
Make sure that your leads are sales-ready and not pre-mature before passing them off to the sales team.
Score carefully. Ensure the marketing team offers detailed and thorough information on the lead’s activity that they collected during the lead generation process.
In addition, also make sure that the sales team researches well to collect lead intelligence information about the lead.
Offer consistent contact support to leads to ensure there won’t be lapsing back into nurturing.
Incentivize the sales team to make them pursue leads more strategically.
6. Evaluate your leads
It is crucial by this time that you evaluate leads well. Keep on refining, scoring, and evaluating as much as possible. The key here is, a lead should move ahead in the sales cycle and not be sent back to marketing.
Continue evaluating the sales performance and also, measure marketing and sales ROI.
Conclusion
Lead management is a critical process that needs to be implemented the right way to ensure success with lead generation and conversion. This blog has offered six guidelines that help you make your lead management process effective and efficient. Read through and get started to implement the efficient and successful lead management process.
