A steady stream of high-intent leads – web and call – is the backbone of your business, whether you sell insurance, real estate, clothing, or anything else online. But leads won’t draw and convert themselves, huh?
To grow, you need to tap into your lead data to determine which marketing channels drive how many leads and how many of them eventually buy from you. A robust lead management platform like LMS Sync can unlock the full potential of your leads.
- Phonexa’s LMS Sync – an all-encompassing lead management platform for lead tracking, distribution, and analytics – will open up new revenue streams for your business by providing an in-depth understanding of your lead traffic and campaign performance.
Smart lead management is crucial for growing your business, yet very demanding.
- Managing leads is the biggest challenge for 65% of businesses.
- 68% of B2B professionals would love to increase the quality of their leads.
But you don’t have to struggle!
Read on to master lead management to get back in the driver’s seat of your business.
What Is Lead Management?
The definition of lead management is fuzzy, as there are no set-in-stone rules or procedures for managing leads. Every business does what they think works best. For example, small companies can only reduce their lead management flow to incoming calls.
But that’s not how you should operate.
- We at Phonexa see lead management as never-ending interaction with leads, from acquaintance to conversion to retention, to satisfy them at every touchpoint while collecting their data to improve. For us, lead management is about making customers happy while progressing yourself.
In a way, lead management sets your business goals and determines your marketing practices. Proper lead management must focus on satisfying customers, not growing your bottom line, with the latter being the function of the former.
The Role of Lead Management Software in Lead Management
Manual customer processing is a thing of the past. Today, online lead management software does all routine work, including:
- Tracking web and call leads
- Distributing them to the product or sales rep they seek
- Analyzing data to reveal and interpret behavioral patterns
Long story short, you must have software for lead management to stand a chance in today’s over-competitive online business. Lead management automation saves time, increases customer engagement, allows timely communication, and enables up-selling, among countless other benefits.
LMS Sync – Phonexa’s Lead Management Ecosystem
| Lead Tracking | Lead Distribution | Lead Analytics | Real-time Lead Management Reporting |
| Attribution for inbound leads and campaigns. | Utilizing Ping-Tree to connect customers to the best product, agent, or buyer | Set of lead management tools to manage your leads effectively | Real-time updates for immediate decisions |
Having a single lead management solution for all your needs is utterly essential. A unified lead management system is more convenient and effective than several different tools you must operate.
Walking Through the Lead Management Process: From Lead Tracking to Lead Analytics
Lead management isn’t rocket science – it encompasses easily understandable steps of lead capturing, tracking, distribution, and conversion. Let’s walk you through each step so you can understand how white-label lead management software works.
Step 1. Lead Capturing and Tracking
Whether they’ve found you on Google, social media, or offline marketing; you need to know how every lead made it to you. A robust lead tracking system can provide you with these details.
Phonexa’s lead generation tracker comprises:
- Performance Summary to see where your traffic comes from and where it goes.
- Customizable Dashboard to give you an overarching perspective on key performance indicators.
- Lead Details to zero in on essential lead data.
You can also track your affiliates – affiliate link tracking is part of Phonexa’s B2B lead management software – knowing which affiliates generated how many leads and how much you owe them.
- In a nutshell, lead tracking software collects actionable data on leads and sales prospects, enabling sophisticated lead distribution and advanced sales techniques. Eighty percent of marketers that use lead tracking software generate and convert more leads.
The customer journey begins when a web or call lead registers your business and makes their first contact. Luckily, you already have mounts of data to meet them effectively.
Step 2. Lead Distribution
The ever-decreasing human attention span leaves around eight seconds to win your lead’s heart, making manual distribution laughable (you simply have no time, duh). Conversely, an automated lead distribution system can qualify your leads by chosen parameters and direct them where they belong.
Here’s how a lead distribution works:
- First, leads are qualified: Web, call, shared, exclusive, and other leads must be qualified so you can understand who your leads are, how much they cost, and where they need to go.
- Second, leads are distributed: To distribute leads correctly, you can set distribution criteria matching your goals: location, price, sales rep performance, internal department, cherry-pick, etc. Distribution criteria can overlap, be mutually exclusive, and be customized however you see fit.
As a sales rep picks up the phone, they already know who’s calling, the insights they would have never had access to had it not been for a robust call management system.
Step 3. Lead Conversion and Analytics
The sales cycle may include intermediate touchpoints – for example, an interactive voice response (IVR) – but it inevitably ends with a relevant product or sales representative.
Next, whether converted or not, the customer is processed by lead analytics software, which interprets data collected throughout the customer journey into actionable insights.
Phonexa’s lead analytics software comprises:
- Lead management reports – comparison and traffic flow reports – to reveal trends and blind spots and estimate the performance of your leads and affiliate partners.
- Filter analyzer to unlock zones of hidden profits.
- Waves predictive modeling to understand your expansion potential and model various outcomes by toggling between different data sets.
Lead analytics is the climax of lead generation and one of the best lead management tools to grow your business.
Data that Lead Management Systems Collect Throughout the Customer Journey
When over 75% of Internet users are proactively looking for ways to protect their online privacy, while-label prospect tracking software can guarantee that you are on the legal side of the fence when it comes to customer data collection.
The data you can collect with Phonexa’s LMS Sync includes:
- Demographics: age, gender, education, employment, marital status, etc.
- Psychographics: motivation, goals, interests, desires, fears, etc.
- Engagement: how leads interact with your brand at every touchpoint.
- Quality: whether a lead is exclusive, shared, duplicated, fraudulent, etc.
- IVR and call data: timestamp, duration, and result of a call, new or recurrent caller, etc.
The depth of data collection largely depends on the lead. Even the best lead management software won’t be able to read the lead’s location correctly if the latter uses a VPN. But then again, the quality of data collection by top lead management systems is times higher than by any lead management expert.
10 Key Benefits of a Lead Management System
The benefits of lead management are immense, from targeting the right leads to ensuring the optimal customer journey to increasing your sales potential to retaining customers. You can’t beat the competition without effective lead management, nor can you manage sales leads property without a robust lead management system.
Below are 10 main advantages of using leads management software.
#1. Granular Segmentation
Did you know that 59% of customers would instead choose tailor-made experiences – engagement based on their previous interactions – than a one-size-fits-all approach? Segmentation is the backbone of lead management, laying the groundwork for customization. Remove segmentation from the equation; you won’t know which ads to display on your website and which leads to send to which sales reps.
#2. Precise Lead Routing
Lead routing best practices heavily rely on data. As helpful as an advanced IVR, chatbots, and other bells and whistles can be, they can only work well if they process the right leads. For that, your lead tracking software must collect data – the more, the better, but within legal boundaries – and analyze it to predict where each customer wants to go.
Take, for example, an IVR system. Integrated with call tracking, it can deliver valuable information on the caller, such as location, demographics, whether the call is new or repeated, and what ads triggered the call (web, mobile, TV, or print). This helps to qualify the caller and direct them to the right product, department, agent, or advertiser.
Advanced call routing requires a sophisticated menu system, possibly with voice recognition. But once you’ve set it up once, it improves your lead routing once and for all while requiring only minor adjustments, if any.
Contact us or schedule a consultation to learn more about IVR and other components of LMS Sync.
#3. Advanced Sales Leads Management
Making data-driven decisions is imperative for long-term success. This is what high-quality lead management software does. It minimizes the human factor in your sales lead management process, leaving you with nothing but sheer numbers and sometimes also an objective interpretation of those numbers.
#4. Automation & Scalability
Automated lead management, from tracking to an automated lead follow-up system, leads to an increase in sales productivity by 14.5%, a reduction in marketing overhead by 12.2%, and a 300% increase in the number of leads passed to sales agents.
More and more companies are taking advantage of lead management software as they grow, but the overall share of companies relying on automation is surprisingly low. Only 25% of companies use marketing automation extensively, 34% use it limitedly, 28% are planning to use it, and 13% have no such plans.
A cloud-based lead management platform can give you a decisive advantage.
#5. Enhanced Customer Journey
Happy customers are easy to convert, but it’s not easy to make customers happy.
You must smoothen every touchpoint throughout your sales cycle, from discovery to acquisition to conversion to retention and advocacy.
Take, for example, email leads. Not only can advanced lead management software distinguish them from other customers, but it can also measure their engagement, including how they react to innovations. Should you, for instance, introduce dynamic emails – or any other significant change or update – you can assess its impact on your leads.
#6. Accurate Budget Allocation
Knowing the potential of your traffic sources enables wiser resource allocation. You can double down on the most effective campaigns, eliminate unprofitable ones, reveal financial opportunities (try Phonexa’s predictive modeling for that), and more, all to get a higher return on every dollar spent on marketing.
#7. Informed Sales Agents
In-depth segmentation and live customer data transfer improve your sales lead management by sending your leads to the most suitable sales agents and equipping the latter with the data they need to convert customers.
Likewise, your sales lead management software can objectively estimate the performance of each of your agents to adjust your lead distribution criteria, provide incentives to the best sales reps, understand why some representatives underperform, and more.
#8. Establishing a Market of High-Intent Leads
One of the most effective ways to buy and sell leads is to create a market equally beneficial to advertisers (merchants, lead buyers) and publishers (affiliates, lead sellers). Leads management software like Phonexa allows you to instantly sell or buy your leads from a market.
Here’s how the lead market works:
- Leads are qualified to create a market: Web leads, live call leads, exclusive leads, shared leads, etc., make it easy to choose the type of leads you need. Different leads provide different values; for example, exclusive leads are more expensive than shared leads.
- Leads are offered to the best buyer: The buyer that matches the distribution criteria – price, number of leads to buy or sell, exclusivity, etc. – gets the leads.
- Unsold leads are offered to the next best buyer: If the best buyer refuses to buy leads – or doesn’t need as many leads as are offered – the remainder is offered to the next best buyer, and so on until all leads are sold.
Such a market benefits all three parties, as everyone is better off after the deal:
- Advertisers buy high-intent leads at a target price
- Publishers sell their leads to relevant buyers while getting the due remuneration
- Customers are connected to the product or service they seek
#9. All-around Sales Cycle Boost
From strangers to leads to sales prospects to customers to brand advocates, effective lead management systems accompany your customers at every touchpoint, moving them down the sales funnel.
Here’s an example of managing leads effectively at every sales cycle stage using enhanced lead management software like Phonexa:
- Discovery: Using leads analytics software, you can understand how many leads were drawn by what ads. Views, clicks, and other engagement parameters objectively show the performance of each of your traffic channels.
- Acquisition: Once your leads are on your website, you can measure their on-site behavior: what they search for, where they look, what they find interesting, and what they cannot find.
- Distribution: Based on the collected data, which ranges from a few basic details, such as location and gender, to the full lowdown on a lead, you can send your customers on a path that must secure a conversion.
- Conversion: Regardless of what you count as conversion – on-site purchase, email subscription, or else – an effective lead management process allows you to have the maximum data to convert the sales prospect. Your sales reps know what they need, your emails are customized, and so on.
- Retention: A lead follow-up system can help you not lose touch with your most loyal audience. Poising your customers for recurring purchases can grow your bottom line exponentially, but you must have an effective follow-up system in place.
Well-managed lead generation appeals to your leads, prospects, and customers at every step of the customer journey, trying to make them happy while collecting essential data for you.
#10. Growth in ROI
Lead nurturing benefits are immense, with the icing on the cake being an increase in your ROI. With the average B2B sales lead costs between $31 and $60, automated lead management can cut your operational costs to the ground, increasing your profit margins by times.
Draw & Convert More Leads with Phonexa
For only $100 per month; you can get Phonexa’s unique suite of software encompassing everything you need to generate and convert more web and call leads. Likewise, you can customize your plan to address your needs most effectively.
Whether you need lead management software for a small business or an enterprise lead management system, we have it all and then some for you. Complete our short quiz to find the right solution for your business, or – if you already know the ropes – go for your best package immediately.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Are Leads in Marketing?
A lead is anyone who has interacted with your brand or has the potential to become your customer. Once leads are qualified by specific criteria – location, interest, budget, gender, age, history of purchases, etc. – and move into the sales funnel, they become your sales prospects.
What Is a Lead Management System?
A lead management system generates, qualifies, distributes, and converts leads to customers.
What Is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System?
In theory, a CRM system processes customers after conversion, whereas a lead management system process leads before they convert. These two systems usually merge into a single lead management ecosystem accounting for every click and call. Therefore, lead management in CRM systems is similar to managing leads with a classic lead management platform.
What Is Lead Management Software?
Lead management software is a set of tools to automate and scale your lead management. The main lead management software features include lead tracking, distribution, and analytics, covering the entire lead management cycle.
What is a Lead Management Process?
The lead management process includes managing your leads throughout their customer journey at all touchpoints, including your website, blog, email, chat, affiliates, IVR, live calls, etc.
Why Is Lead Management Important?
Effective lead management can improve your business, from lead generation to distribution to conversion. You will have more customers and more profits. Contact us to learn how to manage leads effectively in your business realities.
Is There Any Free Lead Management Software for Small Businesses?
There is no free lead generation and management software that can cover your B2B lead management process from Z to Z. Free lead management solutions are limited in functionality or time of use, making paid lead processing systems an uncontested choice.
What is the Best Lead Management Software for Small Businesses?
Phonexa is a leading suite of software for lead management, encompassing:
- LMS Sync: lead tracking and distribution
- Call Logic: call tracking and distribution
- E-Delivery: email & SMS marketing
- Cloud PBX: cloud phone system
- Lynx: click tracking
- Opt-Intel: suppression list management
- HitMetrix: user behavior recording and analytics
- Books360: automated accounting
Phonexa’s suite of marketing automation and performance marketing solutions is available in three plans: Lite, Premium, and Enterprise. Schedule a consultation to indicate which best suits your company’s pain points.
Get in touch! We are available 24/7.
