6 Best Practices in Lead Management that Every Salesperson Should Know About
As a salesperson, you are constantly striving to amplify your sales numbers. Always be closing, is a common adage you hear about sales strategy in general. The very first step towards this end goal is capturing leads. No leads, no business. You want your sales funnel to be active and the conversion rate of leads to reduce with each passing day, isn’t it?
But how can you possibly do that when your cold email remains unanswered and your leads are unreachable? Moreover, a lead is never loyal to you. The lead is probably spending time on other websites to compare the product or service you’re offering. Before you can refine the finer details around the art of cold calling or get your lead to commit to you, it is imperative that you address these challenges with the right strategy in mind. Stop second-guessing your approach towards lead conversion and question your sales lead management software instead. By managing your leads in a systematic way, you can generate new leads as well as convert them with ease.
Let’s look into certain best practices that can ease out the process of lead management and eventually boost the sales funnel and let you focus on the right leads for your business:
Define your leads: The good, bad and ugly
Step one is to define clearly the difference between a good lead and an irrelevant one. Say you have an online tourism business. You need to know who your possible leads are and where you can find them. Understand and clearly define their persona and share it across all departments. Define what they do online and offline, what kind of content can be created to attract them, what are the channels where they are present. Treat this as the foundation of your sales and marketing strategy. If you don’t know your ideal lead well enough, chances are, they’ll never know you.
This will help us to track good leads. Also, leads won’t come running by themselves. You have to make yourself visible right where they are searching for you. If they are searching over LinkedIn or Instagram, you got to be present there already, to be visible to them. There’s no point being on Pinterest if your leads aren’t using that space.
Create an inbound strategy by leveraging content
Content is a great way to attract the right leads. 89% of B2B marketers use content marketing. Instead of you having to reach out to leads through a database in a ‘pushy’ way, this is pull marketing and helps the leads to come to you, provided your content is relevant and adds value to their lives. Content through blogs, social media, ebooks, and webinars not only attracts leads at the initial stage but can be used to retain customers throughout the sales funnel. If your content can answer questions that might be on their minds and your competitor can’t, you certainly have an advantage. Don’t forget, you can’t create the right content without doing thorough homework on point number one.
Contact them on time
This survey says that if the follow up with web leads is done within the first 5 minutes then you are 9 times more likely to convert them for sale. While the turn-around-time on queries is supremely important, you may also think back as a customer to a time when you hate getting calls from sales reps. Be considerate and non-intrusive. According to some studies, Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to call, and 4-6 pm is a good time, but go that extra mile to understand what works for your target lead.
Use intuitive technology
More leads mean more opportunities for your business. But handling them manually by recording, researching, etc. is a waste of your precious time. Automation tools and a robust sales tech stack can take over the mundane tasks of data entry, research and scoring so that you can focus on what you do best: sell. The right lead management software can reduce conversion time, give you insights into what works and what doesn’t, allowing you to make efficient and quick decisions and streamline your sales funnel further.
Score leads based on their interest
Lead scoring is a way to assign points to every lead that is generated. There are several criteria you can use to score your leads, but the best ones are those that come from your sales team. This is based on the persona you have defined in point one, more specifically the interest the lead has shown so far in the product or offering. If a lead visits a product page more than once, a strong interest can be inferred and the lead is given a higher score based on this behavior.
No man left behind: Set nurture journeys
We’ve talked a lot about the ideal lead and how to define them and walk them through the sales funnel. What about the ones we left behind, because they haven’t got the right lead score to move to the next level? A nurtured journey is required to ensure these leads with lower interest are not completely abandoned. According to a survey, 79% of leads never convert to sales because they are not being nurtured. Use personalized content and other ways to show them that they are important to you as well. Whenever you feel you are reaching a dead-end, try creating a new process or journey for nurturing them.
Now that you know the secret, don’t waste time and get started right away. Choose a robust lead management software, define the ideal lead persona and qualification strategy and start converting. No more excuses.