Lead Management: A Comprehensive Guide to the Five Major Steps

In an ideal world, every potential customer captured would become a customer. But not every potential customer is ready to buy right away. To foster potential customers, you need to adapt your sales pitch to the stages of the sales funnel. For example, someone in the awareness phase may receive an email about your products and services, while someone in the decision phase may receive a phone call explaining the next steps to become a customer.

It's essential to nurture the relationship with potential customers until they're ready to buy. The entire process of creating a lead could take anywhere from one month to more than 12 months, or even longer. Take time to build the relationship over the phone, through email and focus on when the customer will be ready to take the next step with your company.

Potential customers

can increase sales opportunities by 20%, and companies that nurture leads get 50% more sales at 33% lower cost than unpromoted leads.

It's important to understand what works and what doesn't when it comes to generating leads. Lead training should be personalized and responsive, and ideally follow a predefined sequence. It's not just responsiveness in your lead management process, but also adherence to multiple touches that pays off when it comes to creating qualified opportunities and, ultimately, sales. A qualified lead is defined by a combination of digital behavior and information demographic. This gives your sales team more time to nurture leads, helping them meet sales goals and convert potential customers into revenue-generating customers.

Both sales and marketing must commit to following the SLA for the lead management process to work. As long as there is an agreement between Sales and Marketing on the new definition of a potential customer ready for sale, and as long as executives hold people accountable for new behaviors, you will achieve success and drive more SQL. A lead management system will look different for each company and will depend on desired sales results, customer demographics, and available marketing channels. Your company implements strategies used to generate these contacts to ensure that your potential customers are of quality and worth cultivating for the future. Knowing what tasks are considered routine and not routine is a good start, as is understanding the typical steps that nurturing leads takes when translated into sales. These are just a few examples of the many technologies that have added complexity to the lead processing back-end.

You have already defined your qualified sales potential, but there are other stages that also need to be defined. Consulting a lead generation agency with highly trained sales representatives and appointment schedulers may be more cost-effective.

The Five Major Steps of Lead Management

Lead management involves five major steps: identifying potential customers, qualifying them, nurturing them, converting them into customers, and measuring success.

1.Identifying Potential Customers

The first step in lead management is identifying potential customers who are likely interested in your product or service. This can be done through various methods such as online advertising campaigns or social media outreach.

2.Qualifying Potential Customers

Once you have identified potential customers, you need to qualify them by determining if they are likely to become paying customers or not. This can be done by asking questions about their needs or interests or by analyzing their past purchases.

3.Nurturing Potential Customers

The next step is nurturing potential customers by providing them with relevant content or experiences that will help them move further down the sales funnel. This could include sending emails with helpful information or offering discounts on products they may be interested in.

4.Converting Potential Customers into Customers

Once you have identified and qualified potential customers, it's time to convert them into paying customers. This can be done through various methods such as offering incentives or providing personalized customer service.

5.Measuring Success

The final step in lead management is measuring success by tracking how many leads were converted into paying customers and how much revenue was generated from those conversions. This will help you determine which strategies are working best for your business.

It's important for both Sales and Marketing teams to reach an agreement on what a sale-ready potential customer is so that Marketing only transfers usable leads to Sales. This helps Sales since they don't have to filter out the garbage to get to what they should be acting on.