Every business needs customers, right?
Whether you’re a small business or a large corporation, we all need customers to keep the cogs turning and help our companies grow.
But what’s the best way to convert potential leads into customers and help your business succeed?
Well, using lead and sales management software is a good place to start.
If you’re not familiar with lead management, or what lead management software is, don’t worry.
In this article, we’re going to look at what lead management is, why it’s important, and how lead management software streamlines the entire lead generation process.
So let’s start from the top.
What is lead management?
Lead management is the process of tracking and managing prospective customers to try and convert them into actual customers.
Sometimes known as contact management or customer acquisition management, lead management often involves the following steps:
- Lead generation: using various marketing tactics, businesses engage with potential customers to generate interest and encourage them into the sales pipeline.
- Lead capture: when a potential customer responds with interest to your marketing activity, their data is recorded. This is what qualifies them as a lead.
- Categorize leads: once their data has been captured, leads are sorted in order of legitimacy and priority. Each category determines how to follow up with the lead in order to get the best results.
- Lead nurturing and lead tracking: when you have a qualified lead, you’ll need to follow up with them somehow. Whether that’s contacting them directly, or using targeted campaigns, leads need to be tracked and nurtured in order to convert them into customers.
You can find out more about the process in our blog: How to create a lead generation process.
These steps are just a guideline, and it’s up to you to identify how you can refine the process to convert as many leads as possible. Which leads us nicely onto our next section.
Why is lead management important?
Managing leads isn’t a straightforward process. Especially if your business is growing and the interest from potential customers is slowly ticking away into triple figures.
As you can imagine, this makes it pretty tricky for marketers to keep on top of all their leads and provide them with the attention they need to convert into a sale.
That’s where lead management can help.
Lead management allows marketers to understand which tactics bring in the highest-quality leads, what strategies aren’t working so well, and what stages each lead needs to go through to become a customer.It helps businesses manage their leads more efficiently.
And with 54% of businesses stating that increasing their sales leads is a top priority, it’s clear that effective lead management plays an important part in business growth and development.
What is lead management software?
Lead management software provides businesses with the tools they need to manage leads efficiently in one location.
Put simply, it’s a platform that hosts all the data relating to every sales lead.
As a result, businesses can track leads at various stages of the sales funnel, categorize their leads in order of priority, and automate certain elements of the lead management process.
When you’ve got 100s of incoming leads coming in each week, a solid lead management system makes the process significantly easier to manage.
What are the features of lead management software?
Every lead management solution offers a variety of features. However, there are some core functions that you’ll need no matter what.
So let’s take a look at some of the common features found in lead management software, and why they’re important.
1. Lead automation
Lead automation is the most efficient way to put new leads in the right place at the right time.
With lead automation in place, software will quickly identify if the lead is low, medium, or high priority. With this information, they’ll assign them to the right category to start the conversion process.
Ranging from the landing pages on your website to a social media marketing campaign, lead automation covers various touchpoints.
And not only does it improve the customer experience by providing leads with relevant ads and notifications, but it also makes the lead management process more efficient for businesses.
2. Lead prioritization
We have a question for you.
If you had 100s of leads, how would you identify the ones that need your attention the most?
Sounds like a lot of work to sift through that many leads, right?
Well, that’s where lead prioritization can help.
With the ability to prioritize, businesses can identify which prospective clients require attention quicker than others, and which leads are worth investing a little extra time and money.
As a result, you’re able to provide a tailored experience to your leads and make sure that the promising leads get the attention they need to convert.
3. Track sales
Reviewing how many leads convert into sales is pretty important. With this information, you can track your sales and compare the results with your lead management process.
Failing to do this will restrict your ability to refine the process and increase your conversion rate.
Think about it like this:
If you don’t know how well your sales are doing, how do you know if your sales funnel is working?
And so, you need to use software that allows you to track your sales process alongside managing your leads. Trust us when we say this will help you get the best results.
Looking for a new lead management software? Check out monday.com
The lead management process documents the entire interaction each person has with your company. That’s a lot of information to sift through, right?
And that’s why you need a platform that allows you to manage the lead process efficiently, and keep on top of where every customer is in the sales funnel.
You need monday.com.
Unlike a lot of platforms out there, monday.com isn’t just focused on the lead management process.
As a work operating system, we provide every marketing team with the features and functions they need to maintain and provide leads and customers with the best experience possible.
So let’s take a look at some of the features we offer at monday.com that allow you to make the most out of nurturing your leads.
1. Create your own custom leads board
At monday.com, we want our users to create a lead management system that works for their business. That’s why we provide 100s of customizations for every single board, allowing all users to create the perfect workflow in a few simple clicks.
You can even customize your lead management categories, allowing you to add more structure to the lead management process.
2. Pull leads directly into monday.com
To save you having to input lead information manually, monday.com has a form functionality.
Users can embed forms on their websites for leads to provide their contact information. When a form is filled out, it creates a new item on the board.
By reducing the amount of time you’d usually spend manually inputting information into your lead management system, you can spend more time focusing on things that really matter — like how to convert your leads to sales.
3. Automate your workflow
Marketing automation is a surefire way to speed up the lead management process. And at monday.com, we’ve got a variety of custom and premade automations up for grabs.
With our software, users can create automations to assign their teams to leads automatically, to move a lead whether it is qualified or not, and to populate their CRM and Sales Pipeline board.
And once the automation is set up, you won’t have to do a thing. Leads will automatically be assigned to a certain stage in your sales funnel without you having to lift a finger.
4. Integrate third-party apps
Are you already using a lead management tool or platform to manage your leads at the moment?
Great! With monday.com, users can integrate over 50 third-party apps and tools, including platforms such as Clearbit and Twilio.
As a result, you can incorporate any third-party tools you’re already using.
Good lead management increases conversion
Lead management software comes in many shapes and sizes, and the right platform will vary from business to business.
But if you’re looking for something that’s flexible, intuitive, and easy to use, monday.com could be just what you need.
monday.com is an incredibly flexible platform that helps teams manage their leads as efficiently as possible.
If you want to see it for yourself, take a look at our lead management template and sign up for our free trial. What have you got to lose?
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