Lead Management: How Can It Improve Conversion?

Lead management is a step-by-step process created to generate and handle new potential business clientele and convert sales leads to customers. It is merely the cycle of tracking and managing customer activity from start to close.

Generating high-quality leads is one of the highest business tasks for marketers. Looking at the lead nurturing approach from the customer experience perspective proves vital for most companies to achieve a better conversion rate. In general, according to Forrester, most marketable customers have a low average customer score.

Working On Customer Experience

1. Personnel involved: Committed sales development representatives. Someone who connects and qualifies leads. Also personnel who strive to achieve the highest conversion rates and efficiency costs per opportunity in leads.
2. Defined processes: Concentrate on lead qualification procedures before sending leads to the sales team. The process to troubleshoot primary inquiries and remove those that do not qualify for your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Establish a sought agreement between marketing and sales on the meaning of a qualified lead. For example, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) outline sales tasks once they have a sales-ready lead.
3. Technology-Enabling: Market-driven tech tools that help lead scoring focus more on the human touch rather than substituting it.

How To Increase Lead Management Conversion?

The first stage in increasing lead management conversion is to design a service level agreement (SLA). To establish a SLA, marketing and sales should get together on the following:

• Build a general lead definition to define sales-ready leads
• List your guidelines for lead routing, i.e., product interest, territories, vertical focus, etc
• Draw up your sales time to align with desired outcomes. It might be 4 hours, 8 hours, 24 hours, or 78 hours depending on your expectations
• Afford support for sales management to assist and ensure the accountability of the sales team
• Monitor and record your trial process on how leads go through from the beginning till the end

Simply generating leads in not enough. You also need to identify the best leads that your sales team should be working with.

4-step process to increase lead management conversion

1. Filter Leads Based On Universal Lead Definition (ULD)

This step involves filtering and selecting leads according to the general definition of leads. At this point, it is important to check that you have defined the manager’s qualifications and follow-up process. At this stage, sales development representatives (SDRs) with internal sales knowledge are needed to help determine when a lead can be selected for ongoing testing.

2. Develop your pre-mature leads until they get to a “sales-ready” point

Developing your lead or nurturing is the procedure of dialoguing consistently with eminent potential clients irrespective of their timing to do business. Lead development and enabling aims at solidifying relationships you create with clients even if they end up not making a purchase. Many people often see the lead development phase as just automated email workflow in marketing. Conversely, it needs to be reimagined in a much broader term as getting across relevant, valuable, and helpful information to people using different channels.

3. Nurturing leads also includes offering content related to customer needs at any moment

Streamline the lead routing process from marketing to sales. Routing leads between marketing and sales is vital, though often underestimated. Some mistakes often happen when moving leads through the funnel. In order for the routing and linking of marketing and sales to run smoothly, you need to document the previously agreed processes of sales and marketing. Certain clearly defined processes must be established to ensure that leads are routed the right way. Make sure filtered leads are sales-ready before linking them. Make sure you have a well-defined, precise lead routing process.

4. Supervise lead changes

Lead routing is essential because it also highlights progress made in assisting your sales team convert.
Close the cycle to trace and refine your approach. Communication is consedered golden to measure the effectiveness of marketing and sales in an organization. Meetings need to be organized as often as possible to monitor progress made. It gives both the marketing and sales teams opportunity to work together, review, and amend errors.

Meetings provide teams with honest, hands-on-deck feedback from sales, which also assist in determining:

• The vitality and accuracy of information provided by the lead
• The sales-readiness of the lead
• The suitability of marketing leads to the ideal client persona

In addition, these meetings help companies to track metrics such as; salesperson responsiveness, forecast revenue, and time to close, lead to revenue ratio (won/cost-per-close sale), etc. The implementation of lead management should be constantly tracked.