Lead Management - How to Turn Cold Calls Into Hot Customers

Lead management is a forerunner to sales management and customer relationship management. This forerunner assists in increasing the company's ROI by acquiring new customers, nurturing existing customers and creating a brand name. In other words this is customer acquisition management.

The Lead Management process

The process starts from lead generation, acquiring intelligent ones, narrowing them and forwarding the qualified ones to the marketing team for nurturing. The highly qualified ones are given to the sales team for conversions. Thus an effective lead management system aims at tracking and managing the complete lead lifecycle thereby increasing sales.

Techniques used for Lead management

• Education – This includes extensive use of webinars, whitepapers and ebooks
• Scoring – Once the buyers start showing interest, the sales team gets into lead scoring. It means using a formula to assign a rating to sales prospects based on the buyer's area of interest
• Qualifying – These interested buyers are hooked up with the sales team and the sales lead management starts getting shape. Thus a qualified lead is acquired
• Follow up – The sales team follows up with this prospective client and converts it into a profitable one or sends it back to marketing labeling it as an ‘to be nurtured’

A Lead manager requires a special skill set whereby he can show the buyer a solution and convince him that this solution will work and is correct for his/her business. In addition, the marketer identifies the proper content required by different buyers at different levels in the buying process.

Thus the B2B model is able to generate more qualified sales leads and more revenue for their businesses. Companies also prefer using an automated software as it allows campaign automation and tracking.

Lead management process in brief

• Tracking
• Capture via email
• Nurturing
• Distribution
• Scoring
• Aging
• Analytics

Avoid the pitfalls lead management process

There is always a possibility of leads falling through the cracks simply because the sales team did not follow them through.

Thus money and effort is down the drain. It is very important to complete this cycle which ends with converting qualifying leads into a potential customer thereby generating revenue and better credit standing

Conclusion

Lead management is the backbone of any B2B business. The way you manage them will make all the difference in your revenue generation. The keyword that a lot of companies ignore or are too busy to pay attention to is ‘Follow-up’. If you don’t follow-up, you end up losing a potential customer. Just creating leads is not enough, maintaining them and nurturing them is equally important. And don’t forget the role of metrics here; they give you the insight into the quality and source of potential customers.