Growth through effective lead management is an important part of running and maintaining any business, but especially small businesses. Oftentimes, they are just starting out in their chosen industry, making it essential for this business to expand and grow quickly to make any profit.
In any business, large or small, taking care of your customers well is your most important responsibility. Without happy customers, your business will not grow and ultimately fail.
Generating leads and utilizing effective lead management tools can help generate more loyal customers and over time, help your business grow.
What Is Lead Management?
“A lead is any individual, company, or corporation that can become a potential customer for your business” says Amanda Williams, a tech journalist at Britstudent and Write My X.
Therefore, when we say lead management, we are talking about tracking, nurturing, and managing your business’s potential customers. In order to sustain your business, you need to keep track of your leads buying trends and keep them engaged with your brand. Otherwise, they will lose interest and eventually go elsewhere with their business.
So, when we talk about lead management, it includes:
- Using sales tactics to generate consumer interest and leads.
- Filtering and prioritizing leads on how likely they are to become new customers.
- Lead distribution to your team members
- Nurturing your leads until they are ready to buy.
It’s important to note that lead management is only the first step of the sales process. You will still have other steps to take further on down the road, like making the sales pitch, addressing and handling objections, and follow-up after the sale is complete.
How Do You Implement A Successful Lead Management Process?
There are five steps to setting up a decent lead management process that works well for your company.
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Generate Leads
The first step is to generate leads for your business. This is done primarily in two ways: inbound and outbound marketing. Inbound marketing relies on using methods that draw the customer to you. For example, social media, your company website, an informative business blog, or high value content marketing, like an eBook or video. These all rely on the customer searching and discovering your business and products or services.
Outbound marketing relies on you bringing your company to the customer and uses your more traditional marketing methods. TV advertisements, email marketing, radio broadcasts, email campaigns, event sponsorships are all examples of outbound marketing.
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Identifying the buyer persona
It’s important to try and identify the commonalities between all of your leads. Demographics and firmographics are good ways to help identify the buyer persona. Demographics include age, gender, and income while firmographics focus on categorizing businesses and look at industry size, geographic location, and revenue.
There isn’t a fast and easy way to create this lead profile but the more attributes you can identify about your buyer persona, then the more accurate the picture of who your ideal lead will be.
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Make decisions over which leads are the most likely to buy.
A business needs to be able to identify which prospective leads are most likely to buy from them and which leads to discount. This means gaining as many insights about the leads as possible. Most of this is achieved through the use of Customer Relationship Management software, or CRM. You can also gain insights through asking your leads qualifying questions directly. Some examples of qualifying questions are:
- How did you hear about our business?
- What is your budget?
- What problem are you hoping to solve?
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Matching and distributing leads to your team
‘It’s really important that when you get leads that you choose the best team member to close the sale with that lead” advises Earl Jone, a business writer at PhD Kingdom and Australia2write. By matching the right lead with the right team member, you are more likely to close the sale than lose it.
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Nurture leads
Not all your leads are ready to buy right off the bat. Some take a little more time before diving in and buying what you are offering. That’s why it’s important to meet the potential customer where they are at and nurture the lead. If your lead is just finding out about your company or product, then it might be more appropriate to give them more information about the company and types of things you offer, rather than your sales pitch.
How Is Effective Lead Management Important To Small Businesses?
Effective lead management helps small businesses in two major ways: It frees up time and makes tracking statistics much easier.
Free up time
When you are just starting out, you need all the time you can get. There are a lot of different things to juggle, time-management wise. Having effective lead management, such as utilizing lead management software, means that you do not have to actively spend time generating leads. You can use the time that you would have negotiating with suppliers or hiring additional staff which can lead to greater cashflow in your business.
Track lead specific statistics easier with CRM
When you are using lead management software like CRM, instead of trying to manually chart and track your leads, it can do it for your company, and it can track so many different types of information that help you build a buyer profile. It also can point to emerging trends among your customers, allowing you to respond more quickly to their needs. If you can anticipate changes in your customers needs and cater to them, then they will come back again and again, and it will attract new leads, thus contributing to business growth.
Effective lead management is an essential part of successful small business growth. Capturing and tracking leads and using lead management software helps small businesses free up some precious time to handle other new business tasks, and tracking the statistics helps keep you on top of your customer’s needs. This leads to customer satisfaction, increased sales, which leads to your business growing. Here’s an article on the importance of measuring your marketing.
George J. Newton is a business development manager at Dissertation writing services and Do my coursework. He has more than 7 years of experience in Security and Business analysis, as well as a background in data analysis. He has helped many companies put together successful business development plans. Visit Assignment Help for more information.
