Want to know what’s new in lead management best practices, and which are out of the window? Here’s our brief guide to be used “on the go”, for rookies and top guns alike.
Basics-to-go: what is sales funnel management?
Sales funnel as the major indicator of your business’s health offers a full-fledged overview of the opportunities your company is able to enjoy if it manages the funnel well. Proper sales funnel management always leads to more revenue.
Crucial components of the process are opportunity management and leads management. Let’s dive deeper into leads management tricks.
We won’t take the lid off the fact that an acquisition of a new lead is costly. According to a research, it’s 6-7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. So, smart lead management strategies can help in reducing cost and decreasing time spent in the sales funnel.
To increase your leads number and conversion rate, you need manage your leads in a structured and systematic way. We will share a handful of valuable practices, tactics and strategies accumulated by our inhouse experts to help you reach your most ambitious goals in lead management.
7 lead management best practices: tips and tricks.
Here is a set solid of actionable practices that will help you can increase your pipeline, streamline your activities with leads and analyze your bottom-line performance.
Create comprehensive plan
Before launching any campaign, you need to create a detailed action plan on to how to qualify and route your leads, how to manage and archive your data, and so on. It’s a rule of thumb for any activity, and it holds true for lead management too.
Here are some useful tips. Don’t neglect any stakeholders who are involved into the lead management process, even the minor ones. Also, establish close cooperation and mutual understanding between marketing and sales: it is a prerequisite for future success.
Qualify the lead
Know thy lead. Describe your buyer persona. Determine behavioral traits, problems, interests and preferred communication channels of your perfect leads. The traits will indicate when you need to pass your leads to the sales team or dismiss them.
To avoid wastes of efforts at the earliest stage, you’re to evaluate the following points: budget, authority, needs, and timescale. Don’t waste your temporal/financial resources on the prospects who do not qualify your criteria.
Use lead scoring method
Lead scoring helps tracking prospects’ behavior and their level of interest in your product/service. On its basis, you can determine the maximal amount of time and efforts your reps can reasonably spend on a lead. This will directly influence your sales results.
Implement nurturing process
Sometimes, you come across situations when you feel you’ve reached a deadlock with a lead. Here’s an email you can write in such cases:
Marketo and Annuitas Group did very instructive researches. According to the first one, if companies succeed in lead nurturing, they generate 50% more leads at a 33% lower cost.
The second research shows that properly nurtured leads make purchases that are 47% more expensive as compared with leads lacking thorough cultivation.
Employ lead management technology
Automation solutions can enhance your lead management and eventually help your business prosper. A proper tech stack can streamline your activities in the sales funnel, help you make smarter investment decisions, and evaluate your marketing activities.
Aberdeen’s study revealed that 71% of top ranked companies use lead management technology to their advantage. In our fast-changing world, automation tools facilitate your ability to change your management strategy and tactics on a dime.
Being flexible and adaptive to rapid changes offers competitive advantage to those sales reps who fully embrace a sales tech stack.
Rate your efforts
It’s important to calculate your performance rate throughout the sales cycle. It will help you evaluate the cost and time required to nurture your leads, as well as on cost-profit correlation.
If you get unsatisfactory results, don’t get dispirited. You can organize additional trainings for your staff and offer educational programs on sales automation tools.
Keep your sales alive.
It doesn’t matter whether your company’s activities in the sales funnel are powered by Salesforce CRM or any other system.
There are time-honored traditional practices to make your sales funnel remain alive and kicking throughout high and low seasons. At the same time, if you address the issue responsibly and implement sales automation software, it will repay a thousandfold.
Learn more about how you can align your sales strategy with software to make your sales more efficient, predictable, and grow more revenue.
