There are many different ways that prospects progress from lead to customer. To effectively manage your leads, leaders in sales and marketing must develop a set of best practices. Look through these principles to help streamline your efforts and boost your conversion rates, with or without the need for lead management software.

Technique 1: Be Mindful of Lead Sources

Leads come from various sources and enter the pipeline at different points. A source is an original point when a customer first hears about you. These sources vary based on industry and organization, but let’s use some examples from PR 20/20 for reference:

• Website
• Blogs
• Referrals
• Events
• Email marketing
• Direct marketing
• Digital advertising
• Social media
• Digital advertising

When dealing with different lead sources, treat each accordingly. While each one has value and deserves consideration, not all leads are equal. Hold each lead source to a different standard before deciding what course to take next. The same customer can trigger multiple actions on your website, leading to more than one type of lead source.

Also, different sites can have separate pages with other interactions, leading to leads. And remember: various lead sources come with different contexts—maybe you were wearing a green shirt at an event, but it’s hard to say if that was the reason for a specific lead! Be sure to handle each source consistently as you move forward with your campaigns. Lead management software may help consolidate this data.

Technique 2: Ranking Your Lead Sources

If a company engages in lead scoring, it assigns values to each lead, usually in the form of numerical points. This lets sales teams know which leads are more urgent to follow up leads, which are more likely to yield a sale, which need a bit more nurturing, etc. Lead rankings vary from company to company, but there are some basic best practices organizations can use.

Lead scoring is a way of understanding how prospects feel about your company’s offerings and how likely they will become future customers. Several factors contribute to good lead ranking—the more information you have about them, the more accurate your model will be, which should include:

• Demographic information
• Company information
• Online behavior
• Email engagement
• Social engagement
• Spam detection

Technique 3: Focus on Good Data

Companies must have accurate data and clear communication channels between departments to create a model that accurately scores prospects. Suppose one department isn’t aware of a customer’s past interactions with another department and makes contact inappropriately. In that case, the customer is likely to be turned off and look elsewhere for services and products.

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Each interaction with a customer must be recorded, and all relevant departments must be made aware of each interaction. This ensures that employees know which department they should contact regarding each customer and that customers continue along the customer journey. Collating this manually is taxing, so it is better to utilize lead generation software, as it collects and generates all pertinent info for you.

Technique 4: Practice Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is the process of developing and reinforcing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel. As mentioned above, leads come into your pipeline at various stages or sources. The goal of your marketing and sales teams is to take the leads at their various stages and move them toward conversion. Every lead is different, and they all need to be handled based on their stage and the value they have in your pipeline.

For example, prospects who have grown accustomed to receiving promotions regularly will tolerate fewer offers over time, and those who have no idea what they want are much more likely to be distracted by a constant stream of messages. By segmenting your leads based on their stage in the sales funnel, you can create targeted messaging that moves them closer to a sale.

Lead nurturing also uses multiple channels in addition to email marketing. Social media, advertising, webinars, and conferences are all effective communication channels that encourage engagement between your leads and the company. The goal is not just engagement but conversion through nurturing.

Technique 5: Lead Management Assessment

As new lead management techniques, and processes are implemented, you must inform and re-inform your team as necessary. One example of this relates to scalability. As your organization grows, taking in more leads, your old processes may not be able to handle the influx of prospects. This is an unusal problem to have, but it can become undesirable real quick without the help of lead management software. Integrate the Software Today!

Lead management is a necessary process that must be regularly evaluated and reevaluated as your company grows and adapts. Make sure you’re always carefully considering your approach and keeping your vision clear so that sales teams can do what they do best.

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