The Ultimate Guide to Understanding Lead Management

The Concept of a Lead:

A lead is a person who has already shown interest in your platform or services.

It encompasses all stages of an internet user’s journey, from their first click on one of your content pieces to their final conversion into a customer.

The more likely they are to become your customer, the more qualified they are. To achieve your goals, it’s crucial to nurture them throughout their user journey within your sales funnel.

Defining Lead Management

It is the entire application and monitoring of methods used by a company to capture leads, gather information about them, qualify them, and then hand them over to the sales team to close the deal.

Here’s what a good lead management strategy encompasses:

• Lead Generation: Generally practiced as part of an inbound marketing strategy, it aims to capture the lead’s interest through targeted content push.
• Lead Qualification: The further a lead is in your prospecting funnel, the more qualified they are. Good lead scoring management can help you see things more clearly.
• Lead Nurturing: This is the entire process of providing information to a prospect to gather more details about them. Through this method, you can adapt your prospecting workflow.
• Handover from Marketing to Sales: Once your marketing teams have done their job well, your Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is mature enough to become a customer (Sales Qualified Lead, SQL). The lead manager then liaises with the sales teams to ensure a smooth transition.
• Lead Retention: To optimize lead retention on your website, it’s best to ensure you have enough content to maintain their interest.

Identify Your Leads

Without this step, your lead generation strategy is pointless. It’s important to clarify your personas before you start spending money.

Several characteristics will help you refine your search:

• Company Data: What is its size? What budget can it allocate to a new tool? How many people are on the sales team? What stage of maturity is it in?
• Demographic Data: In which geographic area do they operate? What is their age? What are their interests?
• Professional Data: Which company do your leads work for? What is their hierarchical level? What is their seniority?
• Behavioral Data: How do they consume content online? What are their preferred channels?

Prioritize Your Leads

Now that you’ve identified your personas and started generating leads, you need to sort them. This is an integral part of lead management.

The less your leads resemble your persona, the less likely they are to convert. Therefore, they must be prioritized.

This will prevent you from drowning in excessive volumes and wasting time and money on profiles that don’t fit your company’s vision.

Collect Information About Your Leads

This step is inseparable from lead nurturing. Information collection about your leads happens at various stages of your prospecting funnel:

• Your Lead’s Entry Point: You must be able to identify the channel through which your lead entered. Did they click on your LinkedIn post? Did they read an article on your blog? Are they subscribed to your newsletter? Did they fill out a form to access specific content?
• Their User Journey: This involves determining their consumption habits on your website. Do they just browse your blog? Do they download resources? Do they regularly check your pricing page?

The more information you collect about them, the more you can enrich their data in your CRM.

The more your CRM is filled with data on your potential customers, the more leverage points you’ll have to support your sales processes when the sales team takes over the lead.

Qualify Your Leads with Lead Nurturing

Capturing your leads’ attention is good. But what’s next? It’s time to build a trusting relationship and develop rapport.

This stage is paramount in your lead nurturing strategy. The further you can move your prospect through your sales cycle, the stronger the bond of trust between you will become.

Beyond optimizing lead retention, it’s also an excellent way to collect more and more information that will help you close a deal.

It’s up to you to push the right content and personalize it effectively. The more you tailor your marketing levers to their needs, the more you’ll advance your prospects through your sales cycle to convert them into customers.

Guide them from the consideration phase to the decision phase.

Identify their pain points, define a solution, and demonstrate that your solution is the most suitable to address them.

This infographic from Hubspot illustrates quite well the stages your lead might go through:

Score Your Leads

The reason lead scoring is often mentioned at LGM is not by chance. It’s the most effective way to gauge a lead’s maturity.

To briefly remind you what lead scoring is, let’s just say it involves assigning a score to your prospect.

It’s based on their positive or negative actions recorded throughout their user journey, such as:

• Reading your article online
• Commenting on a LinkedIn post
• Subscribing to the newsletter
• Accepting a phone appointment
• Marking your emails as spam
• Downloading a white paper
• Participating in a webinar
• Purchasing a product on your website
• Cart abandonment

The higher the score, the higher their degree of maturity. The higher their degree of maturity, the more ready they are to be handled by the sales team.

Align Marketing and Sales

Do you feel your prospect is ready to make a purchase? Sound the alarm for the sales team.

When your lead’s score is high enough to become a Sales Qualified Lead, it’s time for the sales representatives to take over.

Thanks to the information gathered by marketing and stored in your CRM, your sales team has all the tools needed to convert your prospects into customers by encouraging them to make a purchase.

We’ve explained in detail in this article why aligning sales and marketing is crucial.

Analyze Your Results

This is the only correct way to proceed. Following all the previous steps without analyzing the resulting statistics is like trying to hit a target in the dark.

In coordination with marketers and sales teams, the lead manager must always measure the effectiveness of a prospecting workflow.

Here are some KPIs to consider:

• Website traffic
• Conversion rates
• Response rates
• Your ROI or ROAS
• Your CPL (Cost Per Lead)
• Article bounce rate
• Newsletter open and click-through rates
• …

       

Découvrez Comment Générer +100 Leads Qualifiés par Semaine

Participez à des sessions animées par des experts pour maîtriser l'outbound et découvrir des stratégies de prospection qui fonctionnent vraiment

Rejoindre la prochaine session

Automate Your Processes:

“This is all very well… but it’s just unachievable and far too time-consuming on a daily basis.” Yes, that’s true. But it’s also the most effective solution for converting efficiently.

Your superheroes are summed up in two terms: marketing automation or sales automation.

By automating most time-consuming tasks, you’ll be able to focus on all the crucial aspects:

• Analyzing statistics
• Refining copywriting
• Optimizing your sales prospecting workflows
• Converting your prospects into customers and closing your deals

Here is a list of various platforms that can help you automate your prospecting.