Why Your Business Needs Lead Management Software

Leads are the lifeline of any business. However, when leads are coming from multiple sources, businesses may find it difficult to manage them. This is where lead management software comes in.

Lead management, also referred to as contact acquisition management is the tracking and management of prospective customers of your business. Lead management can be done manually or through an automated lead management software solution.

A lead management system makes it easier to manage prospective customers. The lead management software tools can automatically capture leads from various sources, track their activities, and manage them based on various actions.

Lead Management Process Stages

Lead management comprises of several stages or processes:

• Lead Generation: Businesses market their products through different avenues. The marketing is meant to invoke interest from prospective customers and generate leads.
• Lead Capture: This is the recording of the prospective customer’s data into your CRM system.
• Lead Filtering and Enrichment: After the lead generation software captures leads, it sorts them out according to their requests. Additionally, any publicly available data such as names, job titles, and location is added to the leads’ profiles.
• Lead Scoring: This process helps to uncover the potential interest that a prospect has in your product. From the information generated, you can know whether a prospect is likely to end up becoming a customer or not. A high lead score indicates that a prospect is likely to convert. Sales reps can use lead scoring to prioritize their interaction with the leads.
• Lead Distribution: Based on the lead scoring information, the lead management system will then distribute your leads to the sales reps. The automatic lead distribution process helps sales reps to prioritize leads that are more likely to convert.
• Lead Nurturing: This process is meant to guide and educate leads who are in the research or awareness phase about the value of your product to make them conversion-ready.

Why Your Business Needs Lead Management Software

Lead management software is essential for any business hoping to increase sales. Here are some benefits of lead management software for small businesses:

1. Easily Track and Filter Leads

If you have leads from many sources, it can be challenging to keep tabs of them manually.

A lead management system will track them in real-time and sort them based on their behavior or demographics. This sorting makes it easier for sales reps to convert leads into customers.

2. Save Resources

Lead management software saves you money, time, and effort spent on the lead management process. You’ll get insightful reports on the marketing campaigns that are working and information on specific leads that are likely to convert. With this information, you can focus your money, personnel, and time on the right marketing channels and leads.

3. Integration

Lead management software can integrate with your CRM software and even the social media profiles of your prospective customers. This integration allows you to get information that may be difficult to acquire manually.

4. Insightful Reports

Lead management software generates real-time reports on lead activities. You will also get data on the sales reps who are converting the most leads. This information can help you improve your lead generation strategies.

Some Useful Resources: Spotlight on Leads

Lead Management Software vs. CRM

Lead management software captures leads from different sources, tracks their activities, and manages them.

On the other hand, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a software that manages how a business interacts with its customers. The software can have features such as lead capture, retention, upsell, customer feedback, and more.

While lead management software is often not used past the point of lead conversion, a CRM system goes further and manages the relationship between the customer and the business.

FAQs

1. What is the best lead management software?

The best lead management software should save you time and money. It should have multiple tools for generating, tracking, distributing, and nurturing leads.

The best lead management system should reliably capture, qualify, score, distribute, and nurture leads in real-time, resulting in more conversions. It should also offer real-time reporting on your marketing data, which you can use as a roadmap to generate leads.

2. Does lead management software capture leads from all the major sources?

A quality lead management software should capture leads from all sources. It should automatically capture leads from paid and organic sources, including phone calls, chat, website, email, paid ads, and more.

3. Can a lead management software be customized to fit any business?

Yes, you should get a lead management software that can map out your lead characteristics. For instance, the lead attributes of an insurance company are different from those of a real estate company. The lead management software should be flexible to easily be adapted to your lead attributes and stages.

It should be molded to reflect your lead development needs based on various attributes and processes.