Marketing is like a puzzle: it takes a lot of interconnected pieces to fit together just right. You start with the campaigns, the consumers, and your product, and then you bring in your lead generation strategies, tech stack, and partners.
But sometimes, you still can’t get the full picture.
For many, the missing piece of the puzzle is lead management:
- Lead management is capturing, tracking, and managing inbound leads for conversion or distribution. It is essentially how you manage your sales funnel, a crucial link between the performance of your marketing and sales teams.
What makes lead management so important is that it follows a lead throughout the entire customer journey.
Lead management can include the following:
- Lead tracking to learn the attribution for inbound leads
- Lead sorting so that leads are efficiently organized and accounted for
- Lead distribution so that leads can be routed to the right destination for conversion
A cloud-based lead management system handles all these tasks and makes sense of the resulting data. For businesses looking to get the final piece of their marketing puzzle, understanding and leveraging a lead management strategy and lead management software is critical.
And we at Phonexa know how to do it to the highest standards.
What is Lead Management?
Lead management begins with a business or affiliate marketer generating leads. As leads are generated, it becomes necessary to manage the influx of leads with an eye towards efficiency and earning revenue. Lead management is an important tool to make sure that leads are guided along towards conversion in a way that benefits the business and the consumer.
There are differences in inbound leads that can impact how those leads are managed, which is why it is so important to have an advanced lead management system. Not all leads are created equal, so marketers need to be able to identify how leads are characterized to make decisions about lead distribution and their campaigns.
| “We look at channel CAC, but you have to look at it in conjunction with one another: What campaigns am I running right now, what is my paid campaign CAC based on each campaign and each channel I’m working on, and I look three months down the line, how am I recouping those costs, and is that client expanding. That feedback loop is really important from CSN sales who’s typically on top of their accounts and keeping an eye on them through their account management experience with us. So I think you can’t really look at that blended CAC for all MQLs that enter your system – you have to look at it by channel, by campaign, and by high and low intent, and then justify your costs that way.” – Talar Malakian, CMO at Phonexa |
How Does Lead Management Work?
The lead management process is the workflow for leads as they move through your lead funnel and into your business for conversion or distribution. The fundamentals of the lead process are lead generation, customer acquisition, and lead distribution.
| Lead Generation | Lead generation is the broad effort to identify potential leads and customers and encourage them to engage with your content and explore your brand’s offerings. It can take many different forms, from digital efforts like PPC ads and blog content to advertisements on podcasts or television to offline methods like billboards. In some cases, lead generation can be outsourced to third-party partners, often known as affiliate marketers. |
| Customer Acquisition | Brands seek to guide a lead along a path that will eventually end with them converting into customers, with lead nurturing being a major part of it. Companies must serve content that can prime leads for conversion; emails, blog articles, white papers, and one-on-one interactions are all vital in this process. |
| Lead Distribution | While many brands are focused on converting the leads they generate, lead generators are set up to distribute their leads to businesses that would like to purchase and convert these leads. Many companies put their focus on advertising through affiliates. The process of strategically sending leads to either internal sales groups or to a marketplace of interested third-party partners is known as lead distribution. |
Lead Management Components
The process of lead management is defined by how inbound leads are received, evaluated, nurtured, and distributed to your sales team or a third party. When it works effectively, with all the right components, lead management should set up the leads you generate for conversion.
| Lead Definition Alignment | It’s not uncommon for internal departments to disagree over what constitutes a lead. In marketing, leads are seen as any prospect who engages with a marketing CTA, be it by providing an email or dialing a number, but sales departments may only think of leads as ‘qualified leads’— an individual who is truly engaged and more likely to convert. These discrepancies can be cleared up with lead definition alignment—an internal process of defining what constitutes a lead. Paying attention to lead definition alignment takes away any ambiguity that might exist between departments or partners. |
| Lead Scoring and Nurturing | A critical part of moving leads through the lead funnel comes from lead scoring and lead nurturing.
|
| Lead Analytics and Reporting | Using lead tracking and analytics, marketers can evaluate and eventually improve their acquisition strategies. For example, comparison reports offer side-by-side performance views so that numbers can be judged on a day-to-day, week-to-week, or even year-to-year basis. Other reports can show duplicate leads or give traffic snapshots so marketers get perspective on their lead efforts. |
How Lead Management Can Revolutionize Your Business
Businesses employ lead management because it helps solve problems that might otherwise persist, especially for businesses that don’t utilize automation from lead management software:
| Manual Lead Sorting | Businesses that use manual methods to collect and sort leads are going to run into errors and thus hardly scale. With proper lead management, businesses can separate high-quality and lower-quality leads to streamline their campaigns and efforts. |
| Lost Leads | Manual lead solutions like Excel spreadsheets or desktop folders are prone to human error. In contrast, lead management software ensures that every lead is accounted for and you don’t miss out on revenue. |
| Wasted Reject Leads | It’s not uncommon for organic leads to get rejected because they don’t meet your criteria, but lead management can open opportunities for this “declined traffic”. Automated lead management can help you distribute organic reject leads to interested third parties. |
| No Lead Nurturing | Without lead management, it becomes very difficult to nurture your leads. Lead management software solutions can be used to automate your lead nurturing by sending emails or SMS messages to leads to move them further through the lead funnel. |
| Not Maximizing Revenue | All businesses want to be able to make decisions that will help them increase the return on their marketing investment. Lead management makes it possible by providing key data in fast-loading reports that can give marketers a precise indication of where to focus their efforts. |
Why Use Lead Management?
As companies fit together the puzzle pieces of their lead strategy, invariably they get to the point where they need lead management to connect them all. Any business that works with leads should have a singular strategy to organize and manage their leads.
Companies that don’t use lead management won’t be getting critical attribution data from lead tracking, and as a result won’t know how to adjust their lead generation and marketing initiatives. Likewise, a lack of lead management can make it easier to lose leads or make it difficult to find new value for organic decline leads.
Without automation and an easy-to-use interface, leads can slip through the cracks or never end up at the right destination. This is an issue of great concern because it amounts to a business watching their best efforts to generate leads become wasted. As a result, it will become nearly impossible for a business to scale and grow without accounting for every lead.
Here’s how lead management can improve your marketing:
| Targeted Efforts | To start, lead management helps businesses dramatically improve their marketing by giving them a way to create more precise marketing campaigns. You can use lead tracking to learn the attribution of your leads, showing which marketing efforts drove the most leads. Then, you can leverage that data to make strategic decisions about where to invest more energy and resources. By creating a targeted marketing strategy, businesses can see major improvements in their return on investment (ROI). |
| Quick Response Time | When leads aren’t organized, it can take time to respond to interested leads. If leads don’t get contacted soon after they have taken action, brands will have a much harder time converting that lead. Lead management ensures that new leads are organized, while also providing companies with automated tools that let them quickly respond to new leads. With automation from lead management software, leads are significantly less likely to get lost or forgotten, which improves the likelihood of them being converted. |
| Redistributing Decline Lead Traffic | It’s not uncommon for lead generation businesses to take in a certain amount of leads that don’t meet their specific criteria. In many cases, this can cause a number of otherwise fine leads that had been generated to be wasted. However, a business using lead management software has an opportunity to create new value from those leads. With lead management, businesses will be able to access tools that let them redistribute declined traffic to interested buyers. They can build their own settings so that certain organic leads that they are not able to use can become additional revenue after being sent elsewhere. |
How Lead Management Benefits Businesses
There are a number of ways that companies can take advantage of lead management to improve their marketing. With these innovative advances, it becomes easy for businesses to reap the many benefits that can be directly derived from using lead management software.
| Data-driven Marketing Strategy | When companies use lead management, they get access to valuable data about their inbound leads and customers. This attribution data can be viewed in helpful reports that show side-by-side comparisons and reveal top performing publishers. All of these insights can be used to build an optimized marketing strategy based on data. |
| Transparent Customer Journey | Without lead tracking and lead management, it’s difficult for businesses to have a complete picture of each customer’s journey. This is critical because knowing what marketing efforts brought in a lead, especially what journey eventually led to a lead conversion, can tell you how well your current workflow is operating. Lead management provides the tools to see the entire customer journey. |
| Streamlined Sales Process | It’s critical that businesses get a clear view of their customer journey because this process can also see where automation can be implemented to help streamline the sales process. It might be possible to automate an email drip campaign or set up automated calls to leads that take manual work off the desk of the sales team, letting them be more productive and focused. |
| Multi-channel Integration | A key benefit of lead management is that businesses can use lead management software to tap into multiple digital channels. |
Improve Your Lead Management With Phonexa
For any business dependent on leads, pulling together all components of their lead processes can be a bewildering challenge. With traditional manual lead management, leads can be lost or ignored, and even when leads move through the lead funnel, there is no automated method to nurture them.
This is how Phonexac brings value to marketers: bringing it all together.
Our eight-in-one performance and affiliate marketing software suite gives marketers a clear vision of their lead funnel and operations. You can integrate your existing solutions with our platform to see if any puzzle pieces are missing.
Here are the eight proprietary performance marketing software products with Phonexa:
| LMS Sync | Lead tracking & distribution software |
| Call Logic | Call tracking & distribution software |
| E-Delivery | Email & SMS marketing software |
| Cloud PBX | Cloud phone system |
| Lynx | Click tracking software |
| Opt-Intel | Suppression list management software |
| HitMetrix | User behavior recording & analytics software |
| Books360 | Automated accounting software |
Book a free demo to explore Phonexa’s lead management software suite.
Get in touch! We are available 24/7.
