Over 80% of all business transactions are now conducted online or at least influenced by the information available on the internet. It’s no wonder that the topic of lead management has gained more and more importance in recent years.
But what exactly is lead management, and how can it impact your business success? In this blog post, you will learn what lead management entails, how your marketing and sales processes can benefit from it, and how CRM software supports lead management
What is meant by lead management
According to the knowledge portal Onlinemarketing Praxis, lead management is defined as follows:
Lead Management (English: “to lead”) encompasses all measures that a company takes to turn potential buyers or interested parties into actual buyers or customers.
This means that all strategic processes and actions undertaken to acquire new prospects are included. The primary goal of lead management is to acquire new customers.
These measures often involve multiple departments within the company. This is not new and has always been the case. What is new, however, is that due to the abundance of digital channels available today, the number of leads is much larger than it was a few years ago. Therefore, it is nearly impossible to manually track all potential new customers, so automated processes are used. In practice, these processes may look like this: marketing conducts a campaign for a new product and runs online advertising for it. This generates new contacts, which are then enriched in marketing using predefined building blocks, usually emails. At a certain point, these contacts are transferred to sales for further processing. The transfer typically occurs based on defined scoring points. If a lead responds to the marketing building blocks, they are awarded points depending on the action taken. Once a certain number of points is reached, the Marketing Automation System automatically transfers the lead to the CRM.
Since the lead is now quite “mature,” and the sales team knows a lot about the lead’s needs from the previous actions, the chances of closing a sale are much higher than with cold leads. In the best-case scenario, the sales team closes a deal and gains a new customer. The new customer is then managed by the after-sales department in cooperation with sales. Leads that the sales team could not convert into customers can be returned to marketing and included in subsequent campaigns.
As you can see, with a well-thought-out lead management strategy, not only can the number of leads be increased, but internal processes and resources can also become more efficient.
What are the phases that make up effective lead management?
To ensure that lead management is as efficient as possible, different phases are distinguished, in which various departments also participate.
Lead Generation
Lead generation refers to the process of acquiring new leads. This is typically achieved through marketing campaigns conducted both online and offline, often in a combined approach. However, the planning of these campaigns should not be solely the responsibility of the marketing department but should be done in collaboration with the sales department.
Lead Nurturing
Once you have hooked the proverbial fish, you need to develop it further – until an initial interest has turned into a genuine purchase intention. In this phase, you have to make sure that your prospect is provided with the relevant information at the right time. To do this, however, you also need to know which phase of the purchase decision your potential new customer is currently in. Impossible you think now? Don’t panic. What used to be done manually can now be automated by so-called marketing automation systems. This software enables the creation, execution and management of personalized and automated marketing campaigns. In doing so, the software uses the collected customer data and triggers predefined processes. As you can see: maximum campaign success with efficient use of your resources.
The customer Jauch Quartz GmbH shows you how lead management can be successfully implemented: To the Succsess Story
Lead scoring and lead transfer
As mentioned earlier, not only the marketing department but also sales participate in the process. However, it is no longer possible to decide manually or “by instinct” when a lead has more than just an initial interest. So what can be done? Simply hand over all the collected contacts to the sales department, which will know how to persuade the prospects to buy? Absolutely not! That would be the good old cold call and almost nobody jumps at that anymore. Here, too, marketing automation software can do a good job, because it can award a certain number of points for each prospect collected, depending on which action was performed by the prospect. Only when a predefined number of points is reached is the now potential new customer handed over to the sales department. This has the advantage that the wheat is already separated from the chaff and the sales colleagues deal with the right – i.e. the promising – leads.
Tip: If you would like to learn more about this, especially which stages a lead goes through until it is purchased, you can find more information in our webinar “from Lead to Deal“.
Now you know the individual phases that make lead management successful. But theory and the purchase of marketing automation software will not make your lead management successful. Rather, it takes a company-wide strategy to make your lead management successful.
What makes for successful lead management?
Consistent processes and uniform strategies
What makes for successful lead management? We are often asked this question. Because the number of leads doesn’t explode just because you’ve invested in marketing automation software. Nor is it because the marketing department locks itself away in a quiet closet and thinks up creative campaigns. No, the be-all and end-all of successful lead management is that it is seen as a company-wide philosophy or strategy and that campaigns are designed by various departments. This includes not only marketing and sales, but also colleagues from product management, production or the service department. Marketing is only the “executive force” that packs the input of the departments that are close to the customer into a creative framework and plays it out on the right channels.
The right content at the right time
The marketing department, for example, has worked with product management and sales to come up with a strategy for generating interest in the new product series. Now it’s a matter of delivering this input in the right form at the right time. A 30-year-old production manager will most likely want to be addressed differently than a 55-year-old or will use other channels for research. And this is exactly the task of marketing: Selecting channels -online and offline- and putting the sales arguments into the right framework. This can be e-books, whitepapers, but also webinars or simply a first contact form in which a demo is offered. It is important that the future customer gives his contact details at some point. But beware: sometimes less is more. It’s best to start by asking for the email address and then try to ask for the rest of the contact information successively as the campaign progresses.
The right lead management tools
Once you have defined the relevant buyer personas and the content of the campaign and created the content, it’s now down to the nitty-gritty. If we spoke earlier about the marketing department as the “executive force”, this still needs to be expanded to include the right software that gets the content to the man or woman. After all, once a certain number of leads is reached, it is impossible to manage the campaign manually. It is therefore necessary to select the right marketing automation software. In the meantime, there is an abundance of providers. When choosing, it is important to ensure that German data protection requirements are met and that the software is compatible with the CRM system. After all, what good is the best data if only the marketing department has access to it, but not the sales department or all other departments with customer contact? And what is better suited as a leading data pool than the CRM?
You can find out more about this topic here.
Are you still undecided whether marketing automation software is for you? Then take a look at our e-book: Click here for the E-Book.
How does CRM software help with lead management?
Let’s summarize once again: Marketing automation software can be used to target messages and campaigns so that everyone receives the right information. Customer Relationship Management – CRM for short – collects and organizes customer data. So it’s clear: if you want to be successful in lead management, a connection between the two systems is essential. Because let’s be honest: no one wants to work with dozens of systems in their daily work, most of which have to be operated differently. Therefore, it makes sense to appoint the CRM as the data-carrying system and to collect and manage all relevant information on contacts there. This not only reduces data silos, but also intensifies cooperation between the individual departments, especially marketing and sales.
Advantages of integrated systems at a glance:
Reduction of data silos
More efficient collaboration between departments
CRM as a leading data pool not only combines all relevant information about the contact, but also SAP data can be made visible to everyone, at least in itmX crm.
Data maintenance without process gaps
Extensive analysis options
No duplicates thanks to automated testing whether the contact already exists
Conclusion:
Digitization has changed buying behavior. Everyone notices this in themselves. Not only our information behavior, but also the quality of the information we expect is different today than it was ten years ago. In addition, people are no longer prepared to wait long for the information they want, but want to consume it the moment they look for it.
As a company, you therefore need to ask yourself how you attract the attention of new potential customers. With the right use of content, processes and tools, well thought-out lead management fills your sales funnel with qualified sales opportunities.
Sounds interesting?
Have you caught lead fever? We would be happy to show you which tools you can use to take your lead management to the next level and what the right processes for you might look like.
