B2B lead
management is a strategy in which marketing team handles, nurtures and gives
leads to sales persons. Sounds easy, right?
Many companies
do not follow any standard for proper management of leads, thus making it
difficult to weed out potential customers from those who are only poking
around. Most of the times, sales team gets false leads, thereby results in
wastage of time and loss of revenue. Following a well-planned approach
facilitates lead generation and its conversion in an efficient way. If you are
looking for sales lead management from the scratch, let’s put some spotlight on
eight steps for adding revenue in your pocket.
1. Know Your Leads
This is
the most crucial step for identifying your target audience and their position
in the sales pipeline. The marketing team needs to find out buyer types and
their personas. This will cater a clear picture of lead for your products or
services. Dig dipper for understanding the mindset of buyers. Classify the
persona of potential buyers by
- Location: Where the customer lives? In which industry, he works? What are their demands, and problems?
- Behaviour: Is the buyer more interested in blogs, articles and white papers for getting information or he simply searches on Google.
- Lead Source: How is your target audience reaching you? Is it through the website, articles or by any other medium?
2. Rate Your Leads
Rating of
leads is an indispensable step for determining the interest of buyers in the
product or services. This scoring completely depends on the demographic data
and different behaviors of prospects. This data helps in passing only qualified
leads to the sales channel. Higher the ranking, greater will be the chances of
lead conversion. Your business rating information relies on various parameters,
which should be considered for bringing quality in the sales process. Spend
some time and find out which facets are imperative from the business point of
view and rate your leads accordingly, which is an effective approach.
3. Nurture Your Leads
Make use
of the information captured in the above two steps and understand the position
of each prospect in the sale pipeline. Are the customers lying at the
mid-of-the-funnel or they are at the top of the funnel?
Leads
which are not capable of passing through the sales channel, keep them aside. It
might be possible that the some of the leads are in the research phase, try to
address their pain points through your products and services. This is the right
time to show your significance through informative content and offers, thereby
turning visitors into customers of your company.
4. Come Up With Sales Qualified Leads
Your sales
team might be complaining about the unqualified leads passed by the marketing
department. If it is true, then it will result in two problems. Sales people
need to spend more time in weeding out the wheat from the chaff. And also they
will lose trust in the marketing department and will throw out qualified leads
with the bunch of unqualified ones. Finding a solution for this is crucial for
boosting your sales procedure. Spend time with your sales team and come up with
the common definition of qualified leads. This should include whether the
customer has the budget to buy, the need of the product and the urgency of
buying. Also, you may rank the lead before giving it in the hands of the sales
team.
5. Data Which Should Be Included With
Qualified Leads
Which
information is needed by the sales team for making a conversion successful? You
may want to include title, the name of the company, industry, contact
information and social media presence like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Other
beneficial data may include the budget of customer, authority which is going to
take purchasing decision, other factors which might have an impact on sales,
how your product or services address the pain points of customers, and when the
sales will be done. Mentioning all the discussed information will save sales
team time thereby enabling them to do more sales.
6. Pass Leads To Sales Team
Make sure
that your leads are sales-ready, before handling it to the sales team. Sales
people are hungry for qualified leads, but a pre-mature lead can make them
unhappy. Ranking of each lead can help you in getting qualified leads. Transfer
the lead to the sales team in a systematic way.
- Score correctly just to make sure that the lead doesn’t require further nurturing.
- Make sure that the marketing team has gathered enough information about the lead which they got during generation and nurturing procedure.
- Make sure that the sales team also does some research work to know more about the qualified leads before contacting with the prospects.
- Include some incentive programs for your sales team which will be a kind of motivation for them.
- Keep tracking the lead at each step of the sales cycle.
- Measure the performance of leads.
- Keep an eye on the overall generation of revenue through each leads.
7. Track and Measure Leads
Track and
measure…..Track and measure……Track and measure and so on. Even if your leads
are given to sales persons, never forget to evaluate the lead with the sales
department. Refine and rank the leads as required. Keep a track of all the
leads and make sure that they are not lost while moving forward in the sale
pipeline.
8. Nurture
the Lead Nurturing Process
In the
first go, nearly half of the prospects will not say ‘NO’ to purchase any
product. However, they will buy from you or your competitors after some days.
For ensuring that you may not miss this chance, it is essential to take help
from email campaign and other mediums, which is a decent way of sending your
tempting content to the prospects. While communicating, you can solve their
pain points, and mention some attractive offers which will make them buy.
Inventive SMi is a B2B lead generation company that helps corporate sales and marketing teams drive more revenue and better understand their market through database building, custom marketing campaigns & B2B appointment setting.
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