Lead Management Software Buyers Guide
Last updated: September 25, 2023
Leads are an indispensable resource to any business; big or small. These are potential customers that have exhibited interest in a brand but have yet to make a purchase. Lead Management is concerned with acquiring and managing leads until the end of a sale cycle, generally operating through a variety of marketing campaigns or projects. This is a more involved process than standard advertising and is most applicable to eCommerce stores that generate individual relationships with customers. It is a system that stores all leads, from all possible sources in one place, all the while tracking their activities, and interests. This enables marketing and sales teams to work together on the leads to prevent missing out any interaction or touch-points.
What is a Lead Management Software?
Modern-day Lead Management goes beyond the traditional manner of managing leads. Lead Management software impacts sales directly, by integrating sales and marketing. It deals with the processes of acquiring leads from different channels, arranging and categorizing them, tracking lead behavior and activities, qualifying leads, and interacting with them until they are prepared to be passed onto the sales teams for further actions. Lead Management can be exceedingly complex depending on how high the number of leads is. Lead Management software is equipped to automate and efficiently manage large numbers of leads to ensure maximum lead conversions.
What Type of Buyer Are You?
B2B buyer: B2B companies deal with other businesses and not direct customers, hence targeting a small cross-section of customers. These vertical markets demand complex value propositions and require a sales process that's considerably slower, more involved, and more complex. B2B leads are k interested in forming an emotional connection with a brand - they want to know the practical benefits of a product. As the lifecycles of these sales interactions tend to be generally longer and based on rationale, B2B buyers require powerful lead nurturing and scoring tolls to successfully maintain and grow the relationship with leads.
B2C buyer: Unlike businesses, consumers base their buying decisions on their emotional reaction to a brand. The sales cycles are far shorter and less complex the customer’s emotional connections, interaction, and personal opinion of a brand influence buying decisions greatly. B2C companies rely largely on branding, advertising, and promotions to attract leads and boost sales. The lead generation software must have lead tracking capabilities to focus, gather and categorize all relevant data about individual leads. Robust analytics features are also required to accomplish that, to help improve marketing tactics and better target sales pitches.
Why do you need a Lead Management software?
As the platforms where businesses engage with their customers have increased, so has the scope for lead generation across multiple channels. These may include website, ads, cold calls, and emails, events, text messages, etc. With modern Lead Generation spanning over several methods, it is imperative for businesses to have an advanced and effective system to manage leads as traditional spreadsheet or contact database do not suffice in the long term. Even today, a large percentage of businesses find the task of converting leads for the lack of knowledge regarding hot and cold leads. Which, consequently, causes them to lose many opportunities. Implementing lead management provides users with a centralized process to manage lead information, score more leads, maintain communication and also nurture them continually and equally.
Key Features
Lead Capture
Generate data from visitors. Creates and strategically places web forms to capture more leads.
Lead Scheduling & Tracking
Manages the flow of leads captured through various channels. Sends scheduled email communications to contacts as they are being qualified, and remind reps when follow-up outreach needs to be performed.
Lead Nurturing
Tools to monitor all previous activities, such as face-to-face meetings, phone calls, and other correspondence and automate follow-ups with relevant content to strengthen the relationship with leads.
Lead Storage
Leads are stored within a database for them to be evaluated and distributed to the relevant executive within the organization based on certain criteria.
Lead Scoring
Leads are filtered according to job title, demographics, online behavior and graded using intelligent metrics to identify hot leads.
Lead Segmentation
Sorts leads into multiple criteria-based categories such as professional qualification, geography, job role or industry for better campaign targeting.
Lead Analytics
Provides lead analysis reports such as acquisition rates, conversion statistics, close ratios, and other vital metrics with marketing and sales results summary for a better understanding of successful and unsuccessful campaigns and underlying causes.
Pipeline Management
Tracks the status of leads to help understand the sales process and assess all sales opportunities throughout the sales cycle.
Advanced Security
High-level security of lead contact information and related activities and breach protection from being accessed by unauthorized external threats and other competing reps within the agency.
Benefits of having a Lead Management Software
Better Leads Filtering: A Lead Management System offers users with an array of tools that optimize the process of lead filtration. Creating a lead scoring system and setting up custom filters and restrictions is done easily to sufficiently target the right leads.
Identify the Right Leads: With the automation Lead Generation software provides, users can maximize sales opportunities by focusing on sales-ready leads.
Better Response Time: With a lead management solution in place, users can get immediate context about their prospect’s buying intentions by reaching out to them via phone, email, or chat and in turn, increase chances of making a sale.
Higher productivity and ROI: A dedicated solution can guarantee prioritizing and assigning the right leads to the right sales rep, and reduce lead leakage resulting in increased sales, and thus improving ROI.
Targeted Engagement: Lead Generation system enables sales reps to engage meaningfully with leads and improve the quality of conversations when they are backed up by the necessary context.
Better Accountability: Lead management procedures help in accountability along with each progression of the sales procedure. By creating the correct reports, you can gain insightful information, for example, the domains producing the most leads, the reaction time of every sales rep, and such.
