Proper Attention To Lead Management Helps Grow Business Faster

Most of the companies spend a lions share of their marketing budge on generating leads

, and yet they do not keep a count of the number of leads actually captured, leave alone follow up those sales leads. In most cases companies fail to invest and engage in a process for competently capturing, responding to and administering the sales leads generated by marketing efforts. Needless to say, that this leads to poor customer relationship and decreased ROI. Well there are actually some organizations that are good at generating B2B sales leads, while others excel at nurturing and closing those leads. But successful companies are those that can perform both efficiently. Effective B2B lead management can certainly yield better long-term benefits. Only you need to follow some lead management best practices.

Lead management best practices

The first and the most important thing that you need to do is follow every inbound inquiry within 2 days preferably 1 day. Statistics show that leads have a short shelf life and a person, who was interested in your offer this day, may not remember who you are the next day. So it is essential that you reduce your response time to improve your chances of having meaningful dialogues with your prospects.

Use a single system (CRM or marketing database) to keep a record of all the leads that you capture, along with the pertinent marketing and sales data. There are companies that maintain more than one opt-in inquiry database, making it very hard to execute drip marketing campaigns.

Lead scoring is an important part of lead management. For the lead management system to work successfully, you need to set uniform criteria for qualifying and then scoring leads. Simply put, there should be uniform and reliable metrics at every step of the process. Lead qualification is essentially a marketing task and not the responsibility of the sales people. So keep it that way. Sales reps are good at closing deals while the marketing people are more conversant with initial lead scoring. Although this is broad generalization and there are exceptions, but you will usually get more efficiency if you follow this pattern in your business.

Co-ordination between sales and marketing teams crucial in lead management

There should be a proper service level agreement signed between the sales and marketing teams clearly stating the responsibilities to be divided between the two departments. Marketing team should be clear about what it is going to deliver to sales in terms of inquiries and qualified leads and the sales team should be set the goal of closing those leads in gradual steps. Its only when these two teams work in close cooperation and harmony that the company experiences long term success.

Conclusion

Lead management is as important as generating leads. Proper nurturing is required to convert as many leads as possible. Market researches show that constant follow up and nurturing substantially increases the chance of closing those leads that arent ready to buy now. So invest in good lead management process and help grow you business.

by: Celena watson

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