Organizing your leads is a critical activity that can accelerate your company’s progress towards achieving its goals. When leads are properly organized, the marketing department can initiate campaigns that will better resonate with the prospects. Moreover, your lead conversation rate will improve.
To better organize, manage, track and distribute your sales leads, you need to define your lead management process.
What Is a Lead Management Process?
The lead management process refers to the activities you undertake to attract, engage, and close leads into loyal customers. The process begins right from defining your ideal customer to implementing strategies for attracting them to your company and products.
When leads engage with your content, you should segment them into different categories based on the factors that are be important to your business. From there, you can guide them down your sales funnels based on their activities.
Also Read: Benefits of a Lead Management System
There are various tools you can use to manage leads. If you are a small business that’s just starting up, it may work to simply use spreadsheets to manage leads. However, as you grow and develop a need to scale your business, it is necessary to have more robust lead management software.
How Should You Follow Up on Leads?
It’s important to segment your leads so that it will be easy to follow up on them. The segmentation will enable you to know what solutions the leads are looking for, which kind of content resonates with them, and where they are on your sales funnel.
Timely follow-ups are crucial to keeping leads engaged and making them more likely to convert. You can follow up on leads using different channels. For example, you can use email, phone, social media, or a combination of these options to follow up.
How Many Times Should You Follow Up with a Lead?
The right number of times to follow up on a lead will depend on your industry. However, it’s important to know that most prospects will not purchase from you the first time you contact them. This is especially the case if the lead has never been previously exposed to your company.
After segmentation, you should know how far down the sales funnel your leads progress. This information can help you determine the type of approach needed to close sales. For example, if a lead is asking about price, the chances are that they are ready to buy. You can close such a lead by offering a discount coupon.
For leads that are on top of the sales funnel, you may need to engage with them multiple times to earn their trust. One of the ways of doing this is by connecting with them using an email campaign series that features educational content. This will further nurture the lead.
How to Respond to a Lead
The way you to respond to a lead will affect your lead closing rate. You need to respond to leads fast and personalize your communication. The last thing you want is for prospects to feel they are getting an auto-response from your company.
Check the lead profile and journey to your website to know how best to reach them. For example, you can engage with the lead by talking about something they are familiar with before pitching your offers.
The goal of lead management and following-up should not be forcing the leads to buy at that time but to convince them to buy when they are ready to do so. This approach will make them feel valued, and they will connect better with your brand. That’s the best way to manage your sales leads!
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