Best Ways to Utilize Lead Management to Improve ROI

Did you know there is a way to manage leads seamlessly?

Did you know that there is an easy way to differentiate between leads that are ready to buy and leads that aren’t?

What do I mean?

Keep reading.

We’re in the 21st century if you haven’t already noticed, and technology is clever enough to track now your whole sales process; from how a prospect became a lead, what content interests them, when they are interested in your brand, and when they are ready to be passed to the sales team to close the deal.

In this blog post, I will explain what lead management is, why it can help improve ROI, how to set up a lead management system and how to measure its results.

What Is Lead Management

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In short, lead management means to track leads from when they first enter the funnel to when they have completed their funnel journey and beyond.

It is important to note that lead management doesn’t end when a lead becomes a paying customer as you need to retain that customer.

In order to retain, you must continue educating and nurturing even after they have bought.

Lead management not only helps with marketing and sales efficiency, but it also helps improve customer satisfaction leading to lower churn rates and higher ROI.

Here are four elements that amount to lead management:

Lead Intelligence

The lead management process begins when a visitor on your website has filled out a form either requesting information, requesting someone contact them or anything else.

At this point, you need to find out everything you can about that lead; what their pain points are, what content they are interested in and so on.

You will create a profile for each lead and enter this information that you will then use to tailor how you nurture leads or to determine which leads are qualified to pass through to the sales team.

For you, this might be when a prospect fills in a ClickFunnels form or a ClickPop.

Lead Scoring

Many marketers make the mistake of passing all leads through to the sales team. Your sales team should only be giving their full attention to leads that are ready to buy.

To determine this, each lead that comes through will be scored out of 100. It is up to you, your sales team and marketing team to determine what factors as a sales qualified lead such as those who have downloaded more than three eBooks or those who have signed up for a free trial.

If you’re using ClickFunnels’ Etison Suite, then Actionetics uses an ‘Action Score’ to rank leads to make life easy for you.

CRM Integration

To continue the lead management process after leads have been passed through to the sales team, integrate a client relationship management (CRM) system.

This will have the history of previous communication with leads, what content they downloaded, what their pain points are and what their goals are.

A CRM system will also notify sales team members when to make contact so that leads are never forgotten.

Lead Nurturing

After the lead scoring process and leads remain with the marketing team, it is time to nurture those leads, so they become sales qualified leads.

Nurturing those who aren’t ready to buy rather than ruling them out or forgetting about them will help towards increasing ROI.

To nurture leads effectively, send them various educational content that relates to their pain points and goals rather than pushing products on them straight away.

Why You Need Lead Management

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Lead Management can help your business identify which online marketing efforts are drawing in the most leads that result in paying customers.

It will also help to make sure your marketing team and sales team are working effectively and not wasting time on unqualified leads or letting leads drop from the funnel that will bring down your overall ROI.

A report done by Technology Advice proved that a massive 80% of marketing leads are lost, discarded or ignored.

This is a lot of revenue your business is missing out on that you have invested money in obtaining.

Define Sales Qualified Leads

It is important your marketing team understand that not all leads generated from their efforts are the same.

Many marketing teams will pass through all leads to the sales team without taking into account whether those leads are ready to buy or not.

Doing this could result in many leads dropping out of the funnel leading to a lower overall marketing ROI.

Having a lead management process will stop this from happening by scoring leads and only giving those that are sales qualified to the sales team and the rest remain with the marketing team to nurture.

You have invested money in generating these leads so don’t let any slip through the net.

How To Set Up A Lead Nurturing Campaign

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The leads that do remain with the marketing team need to be nurtured so that they eventually do become sales qualified leads.

This is the stage many businesses are ignoring and losing out on revenue. This is the stage that will improve your ROI.

There is no exact way in which to tell you how to build your lead nurturing campaign as all businesses are different and have different customers.

I can, however, give you a few pointers, so you know the fundamentals of how to set up your lead nurturing campaign.

Goal

The first thing to think about is what goal you want to achieve through lead nurturing; instigating communication with solid leads, nurturing leads into sales qualified leads or to generate leads.

The most popular goal for lead nurturing is to nurture leads into sales qualified leads.

If however you have an email list of thousands of contacts that have never been utilized then you may want to start with awakening those and get them interested in your brand again.

Buying Persona

In order to nurture leads, you need to know who they are.

You can read our blog post on how to create buying personas that will tell you their job titles, interests, pain points and goals.

You can then use this information to personalise content for each buying persona.

The more targeted and personalised your communication is, the more trust and a relationship you will build with leads.

Content

While lead nurturing sounds like the answer to all your problems, in order for it to work you are going to need a vast amount of valuable content.

Content that is very generic and doesn’t offer your leads any valuable information, your nurturing isn’t going to work.

You need to be willing to give away secrets and let them in on all your know-how.

People like to do a lot of research and understand everything before buying into something so give them what they want.

Timeline

Did you know that on average 75% of leads buy within 18 to 24 months?

This average was proven by MarketingSherpa.

If your business is the same, then you might be best sending out monthly emails to leads rather than weekly so as to not nuisance them.

Every business is different though, so it is important to test different timelines to see which works best for you and your leads.

Measure Lead Management Results

In order to know whether your lead management process is working, you will need to set benchmark numbers that you can refer to in the future.

These benchmarks can be customer acquisition cost, which marketing channels led to paying customers, whether the time from lead to sale has shortened and whether the churn rate has decreased.

What A Lead Management System Should Do

When investing in a lead management system, there are a few things you want to make sure it is capable of first before committing to it.

A good lead management system should be able to do all the following:

Different Types Of Leads

Businesses don’t just generate leads through online channels; leads also come from events you have been to, word-of-mouth referrals and more.

Make sure the lead management system you are investing will let you manually import offline leads too as well automatically adding online leads.

Sales & Marketing Alignment

Lead management is all about seeing the lead from when they first enter the funnel with the marketing team to when they are ready to buy and get passed to the sales which will the close the deal and work on retaining them.

Lead management is an alignment between both marketing and sales teams and so your lead management system must be able to integrate with CRM systems.

Lead Scoring

I have mentioned a few times of the importance of lead scoring and how it differentiates between marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads.

As every business is different and so are their customers, it is important that your lead management system will let you customise the lead scoring process.

Behaviour Based Lead Nurturing

In order to personalise how you nurture leads you will need a marketing automation system that can automatically trigger emails to leads based on their behaviour such as when they visit the website, download an eBook or sign up for a free trial.

To be able to nurture leads based on behaviours, make sure you can integrate a marketing automation system with your lead management system or whether it already has one.

What’s Your Lead Management Like?

In conclusion, having a lead management system can help improve ROI by improving the effectiveness of both your marketing and sales teams.

Your sales team will be able to focus all their attention on the leads that have a higher chance of closing while your marketing team will be able to nurture the rest to help leads travel down the sales funnel rather than forgetting them.

What does your lead management process look like?

Let us know by leaving your comments below.