Reading Time: 6 minutes

Leads are the people who appear to be interested in your company’s products or services. Generating leads proves to be one of the most important factors in running any businesses. Regardless of whether you run a small business or a large corporation, the ability to secure as many leads as possible is vital.  Moreover, managing them in an efficient manner is equally essential to achieve business success.

Lead management is the process of receiving leads from various sources and handling them in an efficient way, so that the maximum number of leads can be successfully converted into customers. It becomes hard to manage leads when any business grows and while the number of potential customers increases. Here’s where the need for a lead management software is felt.

Lead management is the process of managing leads, constantly and equally.

What is Lead Management Software and Why is it Crucial in Modern Business ?The collective lead generation processes comprises of tracking, handling, and reviewing business leads to make them sales-ready (i.e., render them ready to purchase your product or service) is known as lead management.

It is not as simple as it sounds. When a business starts growing, there’s considerable increased growth in the number of leads flowing in. When care is not taken to make adequate provision for diligently managing their leads, it will result in delayed responses. That will again lead to loss of potential customers.

To be able to skillfully manage the leads while not losing the focus on core business activities, enterprises today rely heavily on the lead management software system. It helps them receive, process, and act upon the generated leads in the most appropriate way. As it helps businesses to have control over their prospects and avoid potential customers from slipping through their hands, thus lead management process is critical.

What are the Shocking Factors About Lead Management That Entrepreneurs Must be Aware of?

1. Website Alone is Not Sufficient to Capture Leads
Entrepreneurs are generally under the impression that having a great website is all that they require for attracting leads. It is not so in fact. Even if you have a good, effective website, until you make it known, leads will not be able to clearly notice it.

It is to be understood that having a beautiful website alone will not automatically draw leads. After all, your potential customers are not going to get a good feeling about it. It is the job of enterprises to make users be aware of the site and the presence of the business.

By making use of the various channels such as social media, content marketing, SEO, and paid marketing, you can get your business recognized effectively by prospective leads, achieved through your website. Lead management tools help in capturing leads by staying ready with the right information, that may be offered to the potential leads at the right time.

2. Not Every Lead is Sales-Ready
All leads that sign up for demos or subscribe to email lists, need not become potential buyers. When a lead undertakes to perform such activities, it is not always necessarily that a purchase activity is surely going to happen. Several leads may go away without making a purchase.

In fact, there are many unproductive leads that needs to be scraped from the list. There are also certain leads who would be truly interested in buying, but look for more information and assistance. There is a lot of this type of leads who are willing to buy and just awaiting that little nudge.

Productive leads are only a few out of the said categories, and a major portion of the leads will be always going to be present in the pipeline. It is imperative that you, as a business owner, have all the efficient features in place for lead tracking, drip campaigns, autoresponders, behavioral emails, free offers and resources, SMS campaigns, landing pages, and social media promotions. All these are made possible, thanks to the modern Lead management system.

3. Leads are Adaptive to Changes
Unlike the common presumption, leads are not against changes. Enterprises need not fret about having to make changes in their websites, landing pages, or email templates. Unless, it doesn’t confuse your leads, they are willing to move with the flow.

It is essential that while you may keep working on your fonts, email templates, and content, you must conduct A/B testing with a only handful of leads initially, rather than imposing changes on everyone at once. Lead management tools ensure that such factors are handled efficiently. They help in avoiding backlash among initial leads caused by unwanted changes as well.

4. Leads Do Not Wait When Left Unattended for Long
Gaining a commendable influx of quality leads through marketing efforts alone will not suffice to get the intended sales. Although, leads have shown interest in your business and its brand, it is crucial that you follow it up closely. In fact leads expect you to respond instantly with messages such as ‘will get back shortly’ or ‘give time until tomorrow’.

Failing to produce what you promise will cause the leads to move away further from you. Lead management application helps businesses by responding to queries and complaints automatically. It is not practical to reach out to every single lead manually. But automated lead management saves your day by efficiently handling leads.

5. Spending Hefty Sum of money is Not Required for Garnering Leads
Contrary to what a few entrepreneurs feel, obtaining quality leads doesn’t need spending a fortune on lead generation. In addition to effective SEO processes and content marketing strategies, lead management process takes care of planning the resources such as money, time, and energy necessitating for capturing, tracking, and qualifying leads.

 

6. Lead Management is not Mere Marketing Initiative

Unlike other business management strategies, lead management is not a ‘marketing-only’ approach. Effective leads management can only be achieved by a combination of marketing and sales techniques. Automation of lead management leads to getting the lead management process performed harmoniously.

 

 

7. Lead Management is Not Just Scoring and Nurturing of Lead
It will be surprising to many that lead management is not just about lead scoring and nurturing, but in fact, it involves a number of multiple factors such as lead routing, data analysis, content, mapping, lead nurturing, and blueprint creation.

Addressing just one or two components will cause failure of the entire lead management process.

8. Lead Management is not Similar to Marketing Automation
Automation has taken the business world by storm already. But marketing automation must not be confused with lead management. The innovative lead management system offers automation features for performing exclusive lead management solutions.

 

 

9. Lead Generation Cannot Replace Lead management Tools
It has to be borne in mind that lead generation is just the topmost layer of the sales funnel. Pushing the generated leads down the marketing-sales funnel requires an appropriate strategy. This enables businesses to maintain good relationships with their prospects throughout the buying cycle. Lead management system helps achieve this.

 

Conclusion
Effectively managing leads is the lifeline of any contemporary business organization. To achieve success in sales and generate revenue, effective leads and their prudent management are most essential. It is inevitable for any enterprise to have a reliable, sophisticated, and efficient lead management solution, in order to accomplish the intended business objectives. As a leading IT Consultancy Company in Chennai, We will help businesses with digital transformation solutions that will help them to grow successfully.

Related Article:
Lead Management: What is it and Why do you Need it?