Lead management: what is and why is important

What do we mean for “Lead” in a CRM?

The leads contained in your CRM are the lifeblood of your company, it doesn’t matter if you are in small or in a big company. A lead is a potential customer that has expressed an interest in your product/service but hasn’t made a purchase yet. 

According to HubSpot, 65% of companies confirm that generating leads is the biggest marketing challenge. Since leads are so important for a company and the lead generation process can require a very big effort, it makes sense to manage as effectively as possible the leads you already have in your database.

Having an increasing number of leads is therefore a good sign for a company but also it becomes a challenge to manage them all in time. 

Even the most consolidated companies are exploring new ways to manage their new contacts, how? Implementing and testing new technologies, such as CRM or business process automation systems. 

In this way organizations are provided with exclusive and detailed insights on their leads behavior and with the opportunity to track, digitize and automate their management.

Through a correct Lead Management companies can analyze the results of their interactions, with the aim of improving the customer experience and increasing the amount of conversions along the sales funnel. 

What would happen if most of the leads you generated would get lost or ignored by your team?

You need a foolproof Lead Management process.

What is Lead Management?

Lead Management is the process of lead acquisition and monitoring. But it is not just that. Today It is also the attitude of getting as many conversions as possible along the sales funnel, using the best mix of automation, data and change management.

Building an effective Lead Management system, in fact, is more than just implementing a new process or a new technology. It means avoiding the silo mentality, leaving behind the belief that marketing and sales are two different and separate departments and embracing a more holistic vision of the company.

How to manage a Lead?

The Lead Management is composed by five key activities, involving both marketing and sales areas:

1. lead acquisition: through online channels, such as paid campaigns or blog posts, but also offline channels, such as events or direct contacts. Customer’s information get stored through digital or paper forms. 
2. lead qualification: acquired leads must be classified and profiled, for example, according to the kind of request they made
3. lead routing: that is the step of addressing the incoming leads to the sales area 
4. lead nurturing: the process of keeping in touch with the customer, or potential ones, with customized communications in order to create or reinforce the relationship at avery stage of the sales funnel with the goal to create a need 
5. Re-engagement: those are inactive leads that do not react to nurturing campaign, with focused messages their interest in the product/service can be revived

Lead management software: why you need it

Nowadays, Lead Management solutions play a really important role within companies. Risks coming from a late or a lack of response to a lead are pretty clear: not just the lead will spend its money somewhere else but probably it will talk about this bad experience with other potential customers damaging your company’s reputation and, consequently, your turnover.

Even companies that believe and invest in creating good Customer Experiences will easily fall for thes mistakes just because they don’t have an efficient internal communication or a clear digitized process. 

Therefore implementing a Lead Management software, especially if it is open source, is highly recommended. With vtenext CRM + BPM you can control each step of the Lead Management process: 

• effectively acquire and profile a lead: thanks to a unified database you can quickly profile and manage your potential customers
• create automated processes to assign and check the took in charge of each contact
• track each interaction with your potential customer (mail, calls, appointments,…) also thanks to the calendar and to the automatic alerts
• coordinate the sales team: organize your leads and implement automatisms and customized campaigns based on the customer’s maturity phase, to create specific marketing campaigns for a better lead nurturing
• planning follow-up activities: implement automatic follow-up processes to find out in advance the potential customer’s needs in order to generate new selling opportunities 
• improving the communication among business areas: promote activities through the marketing department, plan technical interventions, receive post-sales reports, keep each business unit in touch, improving the customer experience
• scheduling automatic reports: you are going to have a clear panoramic about the most profitable clients and your budget trend and you will be able to measure your marketing campaign’s result.

Digitize the Lead Management processes

Managing your leads fastly can make a big difference nowadays. With an hybrid solution, such as vtenext, which combines the CRM features to the possibility of creating automated and digitized processes, this internal flow can be easily and effectively implemented.

An example of automatic Lead Management process in vtenext

The process starts at the creation of a lead in the CRM, the creation can be made manually by a user or automatically by the system itself for requests coming from external sources like worforms, emails or from integration with other platforms e.g. social networks. 

The admin of the system, the sales manager in this case, receives a notification regarding the new lead so that it can be managed promptly.
Once the record is qualified the manager decides wether to manage to lead or to reassign it to a member of the sales team, after that the assignee will receive an email containing the main information of the lead (email address, phone number, name, company etc.).

Now the user in charge has all the data to contact the prospect! But what happens if this doesn’t happen? Easy, the system will notify the assignee, and, thanks to these reminders, salesmen won’t forget any lead. 

Here are some benefits of this process: 

• fast lead assignment and took in charge thanks to real time notification and emails
• increased number of deal closed thanks to a fast lead management 
• no record will be left behind or lost in the process
• chance to generate reports regarding the performance of the team with the goal to spot bottlenecks and to improve the workflow
• ability to spot the most profitable marketing sources 
• .. and many more!

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