Let’s admit it: lead management is not easy.
Keeping track of leads, assigning lead scores appropriately and having a holistic view of all the leads you have can be extremely challenging — especially when you are juggling lots of other responsibilities too.
Most business owners find lead management challenging because they must do so many different things simultaneously.
In this blog post, we will walk you through some best practices for effective lead management solutions. So let’s begin!
- Define your current lead management system’s flaws
- Assessing the effectiveness of your lead management systems
- Know what leads are worth to your business
- Set up a smart lead-scoring process
- Take the guesswork out which leads to follow-up on
- Automate tasks for repetitive lead nurturing
- Lead management is not just about ROI
- Wrapping up lead management
Define your current lead management system’s flaws
Before you go about trying to improve your lead management tool, you need to first understand exactly what’s broken with your current system.
That way, you can be sure that any changes you make aren’t going to make those flaws even worse.
To get started, look at your current lead tracking data and workflow. How many leads are you able to track and respond to? Are they being handled and managed to your satisfaction? Are there any opportunities to improve your system and increase efficiency?
Now, also try to determine why your current system is flawed. Did it start out faulty, or have you added to the problems over time? If you can get to the root of the issues, you’ll be in a much better position to start fixing them.
Assessing the effectiveness of your lead management systems
Now that you understand the flaws in your current system, it’s time to take a good, hard look at its effectiveness. To do this, you’ll want to run an audit on your lead flow and see where your leads are coming from.
Now, all of those leads are important, but some will be more important than others.
You don’t want to discount low-value or low-quality sources, but you do want to prioritize high-value sources. This way, you’ll be able to manage your sales process and prioritize your sales efforts accordingly.
Looking to improve your sales further? Check out “Increase Conversion Rates“.
Know what leads are worth to your business
The first step towards managing leads effectively is to know what they are worth to your business. To explore this, think about your business model and how much profit you expect to generate per lead.
While this will vary depending on your industry, you can use the information below as a general guideline to help you put a dollar value on each lead type.
These are just rough estimates to help you assess what each lead type is worth to your business. Once you have a dollar value for each lead type, it will be much easier for you to prioritize them and know what to do with each one.
Set up a smart lead-scoring process
Next, if you’re serious about streamlining your lead management process and making sure that you have an effective lead scoring process in place, then you’ll have to choose a lead scoring solution that enables you to do this.
A lead scoring system is an essential part of every effective lead management process. It helps you to prioritize your leads and gives you a better idea of when to follow up with them.
Choosing a tool that has a built-in scoring feature will give you more control over your lead management process and help you to more effectively prioritize leads.
This will allow you to assign each lead a unique score based on the criteria that are most relevant to your business.
Take the guesswork out which leads to follow-up on
One of the biggest challenges faced is deciding which leads to follow-up with — and when. You don’t want to follow up with leads too soon, but you don’t want to wait too long either.
You also don’t want to follow up with the wrong leads. This is especially challenging if you have a lot of different lead types coming in and don’t have a way of keeping track of which ones you’ve contacted and which ones you haven’t.
If you’re using a customer relationship management tool, you can easily keep track of which leads you’ve contacted and how many times you’ve followed up with them.
For example, if you send an email to a lead and they open it, you can mark that lead as “contacted” in your CRM.
Having a system like this in place will help you to follow up with the right leads at the right time and will make it much easier for you to manage your leads overall.
Automate tasks for repetitive lead nurturing
Another way to improve your lead management is to automate any tasks that you do repeatedly.
For example, if you have certain email sequences that you send to each lead type, you can set these up to be sent automatically so you don’t have to remember to send them manually.
If you use a CRM tool, you can set up rules to trigger certain actions whenever a lead takes a specific action.
If someone fills out a form on your website and you want to follow up with them using an email sequence, you can set up rules to trigger emails to be sent automatically once they submit the form. This will help you to save time and energy so you don’t have to manually follow up with each lead.
Lead management is not just about ROI
Finally, remember that while it’s important to track the ROI of each lead to assess how valuable they are to your business, you can’t forget about investing in building relationships with each lead.
If you treat each lead as a dollar sign and don’t invest time in building relationships with them, you can’t expect them to buy from you.
Keep in mind that lead management is a never-ending process. Once you’ve managed one lead, you need to move on to the next.
You need to keep track of all your leads, assign them a priority based on how valuable they are to your business and follow up whenever it’s appropriate. If you do this effectively, you will make more money and have happier sales and marketing teams.
Wrapping up lead management
Improving your lead management system is the single best way to grow your sales.
The best lead management software will help you by identifying flaws in your current system, assessing its effectiveness, and rebooting it with new tracking processes and better automation.
You can also start adding new tracking processes, implementing a lead scoring system, and making sure that your sales reps understand the system and why they’re prioritizing leads the way they are.
It’s now up to you in taking your lead management system up a level.
Breadstack can help optimize your business so you can continue to improve efficiency and allow yourself to scale. Contact us today to get started!
