Optimizing Lead Management In Your CRM
Lead management is the end-to-end process of tracking, managing, and nurturing a prospective customer’s engagement with your company. It includes the constant, structured process of generating, committing to, and measuring the touchpoints a lead has with your business. The information gathered throughout this process is used to gain insights to build engagement, enhance the buyer’s journey, and optimize sales processes.
Carefully thought-out lead generation and lead management processes increase the quality of leads presented to the sales team while providing the team with deeper insights and stronger calls to action.
Go-to-Market Success Depends on Sales and Marketing Alignment
When there’s a major disruption to business as usual, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters, civil unrest, or whatever else our post-2021 imaginations can conjure up, revenue teams must manage a high degree of uncertainty in pipeline and sales goals.
In today’s B2B environment, revenue teams need to allocate creative and technical resources to digital and offline channels in order to consistently reach audiences wherever they are. As prospects become leads and advance to buyers, sales and marketing teams must be coordinated to engage and nurture these opportunities, and sales teams must be empowered with valuable account intelligence to close the deal.
Approach Leads With Care
Lead management seems straightforward to many, but it’s tricky to get it right; it’s both a skill and an art. Internal challenges can turn it into a complex process. Lead management processes that neither exist nor evolve can’t protect your valuable leads or effectively deliver potential sales – and that will stunt the growth of any business.
Every team member who has interactions with leads has a different perception of said interaction and different standards for data capture. Because of this, duplicate records and inconsistent or contradictory information can be created just as easily by two people entering data as by 2,000 people entering data.
Complicating matters even more, every department across an organization may have different rules for capturing data and different guidelines for each platform in their tech stack.
And let’s not forget the sellers! They need to create guidelines to systematically qualify, analyze, and nurture leads so they can be converted into new business opportunities. This is further complicated as leads pour in from multiple channels.
Sales Operations – The Unsung Heroes of Lead Management
Sales Operations (Sales Ops) can make or break the success of your sales processes and sales team. The Sales Ops role requires strategic expertise and technical proficiency to deal with data, processes, and the inherent politics and personalities in a typical sales organization. The role also requires a deep understanding of the pains experienced by users and stakeholders, coupled with a desire to advocate for meaningful and constant evolution.
It’s more important than ever to reduce friction throughout lead management and sales processes, and this is where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems play a big role. Supplementing a lead management process with integrated tools that add additional insights can further automate filtering, qualifying, and scoring, thus making the sales process more efficient and allowing the sales team to have better-informed discussions.
Whether you are leveraging an out-of-the-box CRM solution or a custom-integrated solution, instituting best practices will increase the power of your CRM as a marketing and lead management platform and a sales and service platform. Our eBook explores the lead management process and provides best practices for lead management using your organization’s Salesforce CRM system.