How to Make Lead Management Easy
Lead management refers to the methodologies, practices, and systems that a company uses in order to generate leads for acquiring new business and retaining current business. It is also an effective way to create better brand awareness and market visibility. It also involves the use of certain advertising and marketing techniques.
The main function and purpose of lead management are to facilitate a connection between the company advertising and marketing efforts and a potential consumer’s responses to them. As a business owner, lead management could be the difference between expanding your company or just stagnating in an unstable economy.
Lead management also serves as a precursor to customer service management and sales management. The connection that occurs between a company’s advertising and marketing efforts and the responses that it generates determines how the company will profit in the long run.
This profitability is normally generated in any one of three different ways including the acquiring of new clients or customers, creating company visibility along with market brand awareness, and selling to current clients or customers. This particular type of easy lead management is oftentimes referred to as CAM or Customer Acquisition Management.
Basic Principles
The basic principles of easy lead management involve the creation of a rigid structure so that companies who utilize these types of software applications can manage a number of inquiries resulting from the company’s an advertising and marketing efforts. These are normally referred to as leads or sales leads. The process that is employed builds an architecture that creates an architecture that helps to organize data. This data is then distributed throughout the company sales force.
With the advent of the internet and IT systems, the easy lead management process has become what is referred to as technology-centric. Based on the fact that numerous companies now use easy lead management software applications, what was originally a workload that was performed manually is now an automated process or system. This personal interaction between the advertising and the responses to it are vital to the profitability and success of the company.
Easy Lead Management Process Outline
There are four interrelated operations that comprise easy lead management – advertising, brand development, marketing, and sales. If the company has any hope of succeeding with lead management methods and techniques, it must achieve the following goals:
- Generating new revenue opportunities for the company.
- Improving the attitudes of current or potential clients or customers and the consumer for the purpose of creating business developments in the future.
- Increasing brand awareness, company visibility, and market share.
Most of the easy lead management processes and software applications operate using a basic outline that includes the following steps:
- Lead generation – participating in a number of advertising/marketing media to generate sales leads.
- Consumer inquiry – responding to advertising and marketing efforts which creates an inquiry or lead.
- Inquiry capture – the capturing of the consumer’s personal information and then putting it into a database.
- Inquiry filtering – filtering the consumer’s personal information to determine if it’s valid.
- Lead grading – grading the filtered leads and then prioritizing them based on the potential of converting them into sales.
- Lead distribution – distributing these leads to the company’s marketing personnel and sales force.
- Sales call or contact – personally contacting and prospecting each sales lead.
- Lead nurturing – placing both contracted and non-contracted leads into an automated and personal follow-up agenda.
- Sales results – gaining a new client or customer.
