8 Steps to Creating an Effective Lead Management Process

An effective lead management process is the lifeline of a thriving business. Why do we say that? Because if you try to make sales with unqualified or unnurtured leads without tracking their buying behavior, you’ll lose potential customers and revenue.

Do you know that 67% of customers turn to your competitors if they encounter a poor customer experience with your brand? Now that might sound scary, but it’s true. 

We don’t want that to happen. So, the solution is to remember that generating leads is essential, but working strategically to manage and convert them is equally important. Building a strong lead management process workflow helps you achieve exactly that.

Read along to understand the lead management process in-depth, why it is important, the steps to create an effective lead management process, and how to automate it.

What is Lead Management Process?

The lead management process involves acquiring, qualifying, analyzing, and nurturing potential customers (leads) until they make a purchase. 

It starts with attracting potential customers from various sources, recording their information in your database, and categorizing them based on how likely they are to buy. Your marketing team can then engage and convert leads through personalized marketing efforts.

For instance, some potential buyers visit your e-commerce store and check out some products but leave without making a purchase. In that case, collecting these leads and sending contextual emails or showing ads on their socials as per their behavior will keep them interested. 

This will acquaint them with your product and convince them to purchase it when ready. So, the lead management process starts when visitors land on your website and continues until they become your loyal customer. 

Why Is the Lead Management Process Important?

Businesses are 50% more likely to generate hot leads at 33% less cost if they nurture their leads with contextual and relevant marketing efforts. When lead nurturing (a part of the lead management process) can deliver such ROI, imagine what an efficient lead management process can achieve.

Suppose your e-commerce store receives tens of thousands of leads. Out of this, a few drop off due to a lack of relatability, and others due to unaligned prices. Now at least half of them (your hot leads) are eager to purchase but could not due to payment failure or high site traffic. The result? Your qualified hot leads would land on competitor stores that fulfill their needs better. 

Without lead management, your marketing team could be wasting its efforts on unqualified leads while your sales-ready leads drop off. An efficient lead management process prevents this fiasco.

But that’s not all; here are five rewards you get from a well-structured lead management process: 

1. Garners data that skyrockets sales

   An efficient lead management process track and leverages customer behavior to develop digital marketing strategies for all levels of the customer journey. This engages your leads better and swiftly slides them down the funnel.

2. Gives you a competitive edge

   You get an edge over your competitors when you constantly make an effort toward lead nurturing via personalized marketing strategies. How? By achieving an unwavering position in the lead’s mind. So, they’ll always turn to you when they are ready for your offerings.

3. No irrelevant leads

   A lead management process ensures you don’t have to deal with leads that aren’t your ideal customer. It filters out those who don’t qualify, saving time from catering to their queries while leaving space to nurture your hot leads.

4. Increases customer retention

   The goal is not to hit the sales target once but to continue doing it. To achieve that, it is extremely necessary to re-engage after sales. Lead management keeps introducing your customers to new launches and discounts, so you are always on their minds, and they keep coming back for more.

Now that we understand why to lead management is non-negotiable let’s move on to the stages of the process.

8 Steps of Lead Management Process

There’s no cookie-cutter approach to building a lead management process flow chart. It varies based on the scale and type of your business. Consider these eight steps as a guideline and add a new perspective wherever needed. 

When satisfied, put the process to use. You’ll eventually understand what modifications can enhance our business performance.

1. Lead Generation

   For the first step of the entire lead management process, you must generate leads from various marketing channels–website, blog, live events, or social media. Lead generation involves gaining maximum visibility to make prospects aware that you exist. 

   Sales reps should put in lead generation efforts to capture attention, make prospects marketing-qualified leads, and eventually get them sales-ready.  

   

   Let’s see how the lead generation process flows: 
   • Visitors discover your brand through your marketing channels.
   • They tap on the call to action.
   • A CTA leads to a form that they got to fill out to avail of the offer.
   • Finally, they become your lead. 

   There are many free open source lead generation software available in the market to automate this stage for you. 

   Lead generation tactics are crafted to prove your credibility and win trust so that your prospects give you their information for the lead capture stage. This step helps you gain much-needed traffic and high-quality leads eventually. Remember, the more targeted your lead-generation efforts, the higher your sales.

2. Lead Capture

   Once you have a lead generation process in place, it’s time to capture lead information in your database to move prospects down the funnel. As leads are usually generated in abundance, you must automate database creation for better control.

   Ensure your lead management software is good enough to pick up the lead information from web forms, etc. But the software’s job doesn’t end here. It should also feed the data into your CRM Software

   This not only prevents leads from slipping away through the cracks but also manages them better.

   91% of businesses with ten or more employees now resort to CRM software for better customer relationships and to streamline data. So, if your company lacks a CRM, you’re probably missing out on tons of leads and losing business.

3. Lead Scoring

   Lead scoring is when you rate your leads based on how willing they are to buy your products or avail of your services. Demographics, buyer behavior, and online engagement are some factors to consider while scoring your lead. Lead scoring is subjective and is different for different businesses. So, feel free to choose the basis to rank your leads.

   Here are some compelling insights about lead scoring:

   • If a lead achieves a high score, they are more likely to become a buyer. 
   • Prospects that do not take action or click on the CTAs are not ready to buy and need extensive nurturing. 
   • If a lead is following all your content and filling out opt-in forms, your sales and marketing teams may make a sales call as they are a warm lead.

   Lead scoring will help you determine whether your leads still need nurturing or are ready to enter the sales process

4. Lead Qualification

   After capturing your leads, comes lead qualification. Here you have to identify the leads that are likely to buy from you. Qualifying your leads ensures that you don’t waste your resources on someone who isn’t a marketing-qualified lead. Applying the same marketing strategies to all the leads you capture will result in unwarranted losses.

   Businesses often focus on bringing in more leads but forget that determining the ones that matter is equally important. Someone casually visiting your website doesn’t necessarily mean they are a sales-ready lead. Your marketing team must first check if they fit into your buyer persona or look like your ideal customer. 

   As 80% of leads never enter the sales process, it’s better to filter them out beforehand to increase your chances of sales and profit. It isn’t a risk you take but a move that saves you from falling prey to the wrong prospects.

5. Lead Nurturing

   Initially, most leads aren’t willing to invest in you. Why? Simply because they aren’t aware of your credibility. Here’s when lead nurturing comes to play. Lead nurturing via custom marketing strategies based on who your prospects are and their position in the buying process helps you remain on top of their mind. This builds loyalty even before they buy from you and ensures that they come to you when they are ready to buy.

   Here are some of the top tips to ace your lead nurturing campaign:

   • Segment your leads and modulate your interaction with each lead type.
   • Stick to personalized interaction across all social media platforms to strengthen the relationship with your lead. 
   • Remember to add effective and relevant CTAs to every content. 
   • Engage and support them from the start until they are ready to buy. 

   Lead nurturing educates prospects to make informed decisions and accelerates the sales process. It constantly hits the right pain points, convincing prospects to make a purchase over time.

6. Lead Conversion

   Lead conversion is the process of converting your sales-qualified leads into buyers. Your sales rep is said to convert a lead when prospects who interact with your business and show interest finally execute the purchase. 

   Lead Conversion Rate = (Total number of conversions/Total number of leads) X 100

   Tracking Lead Conversion Rate is immensely beneficial for your business; here’s how:

   • It determines the ROI, which helps sales and marketing teams to optimize the usage of business resources.
   • Gives your sales and marketing team an insight into the kind of campaign, lead source, or sales method that brings in the most conversions. 
   • Allows you to compare and improve different marketing campaigns.
   • Introduces you to the customer’s purchasing journey, which you can use to move leads further into the sales pipeline.
   • Alerts you in case of lead leakages so you can improve well in time.

7. Lead Tracking

   Diligently observing your potential buyer’s activities can give information that is nowhere to be found. Lead tracking involves identifying the lead’s source, tracking all the steps the leads take after they enter your sales cycle, and recording the same for further modulations to trigger sales.

   Also, by tracing the buyer’s actions, it becomes easier to separate inbound and outbound leads. This lets you focus efforts on organic reach, campaigns, or both as per your goals. 

   If you crack the code of bringing one good lead, you open your doors for many. So, lead tracking allows your marketing and sales team to record what your target group responds to the most. Is it a blog post, a paid ad, or your content on socials? Doing this can direct your marketing and sales team to the right path of making your business a lead magnet. 

   Lead tracking also furnishes data for the sales teams to prepare an undeniable sales pitch that persuades the target group. This can shoot up your sales to heights.

8. Lead Management Optimization

   Setting up a lead management process is great, but will it reap profits if you don’t monitor and tweak it wherever necessary? Absolutely not! For best results, analyze the friction point where leads are leaving, the probable reasons for it, the progress you’ve made every month, and so on.

   Optimizing your lead management process is highly profitable for your business. Here’s why:  

   • You’ll know whether all the stages of the sales cycle and lead management process are in place.  
   • Gives you a chance to work on funnel stages that show maximum leakages to convert leads better.
   • Makes it easier to gauge whether you’re correctly targeting your cold, warm, and hot leads. 
   • Helps your sales rep monitor whether all the leads are correctly segregated according to their place in the sales funnel.
   • Saves you from incurring losses for a longer period owing to an issue in the lead management process.

How To Automate A Lead Management Process?

50% of leads are lost to businesses that respond instantly. Yes! But leads are often in large numbers, and manually catering to all their needs is practically impossible for your entire sales team. That’s one of the many reasons for automating your lead management process; using lead management tools is the wisest choice.

Now, you can use different lead management tools to automate the various stages of lead management separately or automate the entire lead lifecycle using an all-in-one lead management software.

For the former option, your sales team can use lead capture forms to capture leads, lead scoring software to rate your leads, email marketing software to send personalized emails and nurture leads, and so on.

But working on multiple systems might lead to confusion, delayed actions, decreased efficiency, and increased cost. That’s where all-in-one marketing automation or lead management software comes into play. There are many free marketing automation software and free open-source lead management software available in the market, but you must choose wisely.

Lead management software truly simplifies and organizes your processes using automation. Here’s how:

1. An all-in-one lead management software tracks all your ads/forms and captures the information of the generated leads.
2. Then, it adds the newly qualified lead to the email marketing tool.
3. Next, the lead management software starts sending targeted emails according to the position of the lead in the lead lifecycle.
4. Post lead nurturing, the lead management software automatically assigns the nurtured leads to the sales team. 
5. When the sales team makes a sale, the lead management software digitally creates and sends accurate invoices. 
6. The lead management software doesn’t stop here; it maintains post-purchase interaction–sends thank you notes and upsells to the customer.

Using a no-code lead management software for automating your lead management processes has its fair share of benefits. Here are a few of them:

• Increases efficiency and conversion rate while shooting up revenue by 58%.
• Decreases the turnaround time for leads’ queries, making them move through the sales funnel with relatively less friction. This enhances customer experience.
• A 100% automation tool leaves no space for data errors, giving you better control over processes.
• Automating your processes saves your sales team from the hectic task of curating custom messages for enhanced communication. 
• An excellent set of qualified leads are also a part of the deal. 

Conclusion

As you’ve come to the end of this extensive yet actionable guide, we’re certain you now understand lead management better. So, focus on your leads’ quality, not just quantity. Don’t rush things; gradually build your lead management workflow. You might face challenges and leakages initially, but as you move forward, you’ll have an ideal lead management process that brings you better results.

Naina Khare

Naina Khare is a full-time freelance writer who fiercely believes in the power of storytelling and primarily holds expertise in creating content for B2B SaaS brands. She’s infinitely curious and happiest when reading, writing, or exploring spirituality and self-growth.