Lead Management: A Comprehensive Guide

Lead management is the process of capturing, tracking, and encouraging qualified leads until they become paying customers. As the leading authority on revenue operations, MarTech, demand generation and digital transformation, The Pedowitz Group (TPG) helps companies transform their revenue engine into an efficient revenue operating system. With a comprehensive lead management process, you'll fill your portfolio with high-quality leads and maximize the individual value of each potential customer. Marketing automation helps you acquire inbound leads through first-line marketing, such as website personalization, SEO, landing pages, and forms.

Lead management is about capturing and tracking your potential customers at every stage of the customer lifecycle, so that you can adapt your marketing and sales efforts based on the quality of the potential customer and their readiness to sell. You can see that your lead scoring system can also subtract points for certain factors, since they make it less likely that the prospect will become a customer. Whether you've been working with an ineffective lead management process or without one, the steps we've described can help you create a process that actually works.

Steps to Lead Management

Lead management is a complex process that requires careful planning and execution.

Here are the four steps to successful lead management:

1.Identify Your Ideal Customers

The first step in lead management is to identify your ideal customers. Customer research doesn't have to be a hassle, you just need the right approach. Follow these 4 steps to discover your ideal customers:

• Analyze Your Current Customers: Look at your current customers and analyze their demographics, interests, and behaviors.
• Research Your Competitors: Research your competitors' target markets to get an idea of who they are targeting.
• Create Personas: Create personas for each type of customer you want to target.
• Engage With Your Audience: Try to interact with them on social media or create content for blogs and videos. In fact, 70% of B2B marketers consider video to be more effective at generating conversions than other content.

2.Set Up Lead Scoring

Once you have identified your ideal customers, it's time to set up lead scoring.

Lead scoring is a system that assigns points to each lead based on their demographic and behavioral attributes. This helps you prioritize leads based on their likelihood of becoming paying customers. You can also subtract points for certain factors that make it less likely that the prospect will become a customer.

3.Automate Lead Routing

The next step in lead management is to automate lead routing. Automating lead routing ensures that the right person follows up with the prospect in a timely manner.

LeadSquared combines the functions of lead management software and CRM and helps manage leads, customers and sales teams on a single platform.

4.Establish Agreement Between Sales & Marketing

The last step in lead management is to establish agreement between sales & marketing teams. It's important for both of them to reach an agreement on what a sale-ready potential customer is, so that Marketing only transfers usable leads to Sales, which helps Sales, since they don't have to filter out the garbage to get to what they should be acting on.This value can't be obtained without doing the hard work of meeting in the same room and determining what is and isn't a sale-ready prospect, defined by demographic and behavioral attributes.By following these four steps in lead management, you'll be able to capture high-quality leads and maximize their individual value.