Only 5-15% of your leads are ready to buy. Lead Generation for the Complex Sale, shows that most of your contacts still need to be Marketing Qualified Leads: they are leads not qualified enough to become customers. Lead management, or the management of your commercial contacts, is therefore essential to maintain the relationship with them, this being part of your marketing automation and learning of how does call tracking work.
Lead management is a set of actions to nurture and maintain relationships with your business contacts while qualifying your leads. Before confronting your users with your sales gifts, you must nurture, educate and prepare them for sale. Here are some essential steps to implement and succeed in your lead management strategy.
1 – Adopt SMarketing
Before implementing any strategy, setting goals to achieve is essential. What do you expect from your lead management strategy? Enhance your goal-setting process by incorporating OKRs to establish.
Keep in mind that managing your leads is, first and foremost, a team effort. Hence, the importance of setting up an SLA (Service Level Agreement) is none other than the agreement between the sales and marketing teams. An effective SLA comprises several components to establish with your sales team (if you have one).
- The same language: Who is the contact? A leader? A Qualified Marketing Lead (MQL) and a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)? This avoids misunderstandings.
- The marketing automation tool and CRM to implement
- Lead qualification: Establish the lead management processes to be implemented to qualify your leads and, therefore, in parallel, the non-validation criteria you should know what is a lead management system.
- KPIs: What indicators allow you to carry out your strategy?
- Quantity: How many qualified leads can you handle on a sales level?
- Reporting: They allow communication between the marketing and sales departments when they are seconded but also monitor performance.
Even for a small structure that does not have a marketing and sales team, establishing an SLA remains a good practice because you will have to wear several hats and define when you wear them.
2 – Attract your future leads
There are different ways to set up and trigger your lead generation strategy.
- Inbound marketing: Attract with SEO, blogging, inbound marketing, social networks or even marketing campaigns such as webinars. Convert with CTAs, landing pages or forms.
- Demand generation: PPC ( pay-per-click), social media ads, banners and display ads, marketing emails, telephone prospecting, trade shows, events, and offline marketing.
The goal is to have visitors that you convert into leads.
3 – Feed your leads
Put a lead nurturing strategy that strengthens the relationship between the brand and its leads by “feeding” it with content, advice and Why A Lead Tracking System Matters. Moreover, your prospects are different, hence the importance of segmentation:
lead segmentation. That is to say that you will not “feed” all your leads in the same way. Your lead nurturing strategy relies on your contact lists to nurture the relationship with your potential customers.
A perfect understanding of the Buyer’s Journey is essential to deliver the right message at the right time and to the right person. It illustrates the different stages of the potential customer’s journey.
Awareness: The persona faces a problem and begins to identify it. He tries to put his needs into words
Consideration phase: He is aware of his need. He looks for suitable solutions
Decision phase: He is ready to buy and is looking for information allowing him to make the final decision.
4 – Score your leads
Your task will greatly facilitate if the SLA has been correctly defined. Lead scoring allows you to target your leads and prioritize and personalize your actions. Here are the main steps:
- Classification: Establish demographic, quantitative and behavioral criteria that define whether a lead is qualified. These criteria serve as a basis for segmenting leads and defining levels to obtain the most relevant scoring.
- Automation: Automate your scoring with your chosen automation and CRM tool.
- Attribution: Assign points based on the actions your leads take on your site.
- The comparison: Compare your lead scoring with your current results. Is it efficient? This allows you to redefine specific criteria if necessary.
5 – The next step for the lead: the sale
Depending on the different scores and the level determined for the “qualified lead”, you can transfer lists to the sales team or put on your second hat. Prioritize lists that pass this stage (some are more important than others).
When you perform your tasks (Lead scoring, for example) and you have defined a lead as an MQL. The transfer of this leads to the sales teams must be rapid, if not instantaneous.
6 – Measure your efforts
It is only possible to be operational and practical if we measure performance to improve it. Hence, importance is given to analysis. Your marketing automation tools must include analysis and reporting features allowing you to have a clear view of the performance of your actions at different stages of your strategy and outsourced lead generation.
Exploiting all the data at your disposal does not bring anything efficient. The good reflex is to group and combine the data in line with the objectives. In other words, it allows you to test your action plans, see their effectiveness, and readjust them (or not) to be as efficient as possible.
Conclusion:
Lead management, to be effective, must therefore make marketing and sales actions complementary. By tuning your violins and automating the actions that can, you increase your chances of converting your leads and putting your sales skills to good use. Saving time and performance are therefore on the agenda.
