Companies thrive thanks to their customers and their continuous purchases. But when those customers are hard to find in the first place, what can a business do to bring in more profits? Enter lead management.
As we will discuss in this article, lead management can be an excellent technique to embrace, whether you are an established company or a smaller one, though it is particularly suited to small businesses and startups struggling to get regular, good-quality leads into their pipeline.
Want to know how to master lead management to take your startup to the next level? Keep reading!
Defining lead management
When we talk about lead management, we refer to a process that businesses undertake to collect, analyse, and track leads. Ultimately, the overall process aims at identifying those leads who are more likely to become paying customers.
Once this is done, though, the work is far from over. A good lead management strategy is also crucial for keeping track of leads in the longer term, as well as nurturing them so they remain loyal to the brand. Most companies integrate their lead management workflows with either B2C or B2B lead generation software, in order to automate and speed up the different steps of the process.
5 lead management best practices
So, what are the best practices for managing your lead generation marketing funnel? Let’s take a look at five of the most effective ones.
1. Use the best possible data
Just like you would do with any other area of your marketing strategy, lead management thrives on fresh, accurate, and good-quality data. It’s no use leveraging information that’s become obsolete or irrelevant, as it won’t be able to inform your overall lead management process.
So, whether you run an AI-powered tech startup or a call center for small business, make sure you get first-party data, as this is cleaner and more legally compliant with data privacy regulations.
2. Ensure your processes are aligned
Another crucial aspect of a solid lead management plan is its alignment with your broader sales pipeline. As a startup, you likely have a shorter sales funnel, so you might want to keep your lead management as streamlined as possible in order to go hand in hand with your sales process.
Don’t have a clear pipeline yet? Rope in your salespeople to build one: it will enable you to standardise the entire process and make sure that everyone stays on the same page.
3. Keep sales and marketing in sync
Keeping your lead management strategy aligned with your sales pipeline is vital, as is keeping your sales and marketing areas in sync. Most startups have a fairly nimble workforce, which means that you might not have a large sales or marketing department. Still, you’ll need to identify who, within the business, handles what, and make sure that they are all brought together under one mission: to identify, pursue, and nurture the best leads.
To enable seamless collaboration and communication, you should also consider integrating some of your business-critical tech tools, such as your CRM, your vendor risk management software, your marketing automation software and anything else that you rely on to carry out your operations. Doing so will enable people from different areas of the business to share and pass on leads quickly and easily, thus gaining a better view and understanding of specific customers and customer segments.
4. Consider automation and technology
We’ve just touched on it, but it’s worth expanding a little: a good lead management process requires a good set of software tools. These can help your startup in a range of ways, including:
- Automating lead scoring
- Processing leads
- Analysing lead behaviours
- Organising and pursuing leads
- Tracking conversions
Effective lead management, these days, is pretty much impossible to handle without automated software, especially if your startup is experiencing rapid growth. So, start looking at some digital tools you can implement to capture, qualify, track, share, and nurture leads at scale.Look for tools that help you track your conversions as well. Invoicing solutions such as InvoiceBerry, for instance, can help. They don’t just help you send invoices to customers. They also keep track of your actual customers’ payments, giving you a bird’s eye view of the leads you managed to monetize.
5. Continue to monitor your process
Is your lead management strategy proving a success? Great, but that doesn’t mean that you can now rest on your laurels. In fact, it should be seen as an incentive to keep doing better and better – and the only way to achieve this is through constant monitoring and evaluation of your processes.
Consider measuring your lead management results by analysing all the customer touchpoints and determining what seems to be working and what should be improved upon. Even if you are a very small startup with only three or four touchpoints—such as, for example, a lead magnet, a LinkedIn profile, and a business website—there are many important things you can learn by doing this, and many insights you can uncover and use to inform your future strategy.
Key takeaways
Running a startup successfully and growing it into a profitable business is far from simple. One of the most complicated, yet essential, things you will need to do is manage leads to the best of your abilities, so your pipeline is always full of high-quality prospects who might soon turn into paying customers.
To achieve this, a lead management strategy is paramount. In this article, we explained what lead management involves, and looked at five best practices to ensure an effective process. Follow these tips and get ready to see your startup’s success soar!
