There are two ways to fix a broken sales pipeline.
You could bring in more quality leads by optimizing your lead generation approaches. Or you could fix the leak by focusing on lead nurturing.
Most businesses struggle at doing the latter due to poor management of lead data, poor lead outreach, or both.
A lead management system could solve both of these issues. But only if you know how to use it effectively.
Overview
How to Use a Lead Management System to Boost Sales?
- Use the Lead Management System to Score Leads Quicker
- Automate Lead Data Collection From Multiple Sources
- Automate Lead Nurturing Workflows
- Automate Lead Distribution
- Track the Success of Marketing and Sales Efforts
How to Use a Lead Management System to Boost Sales?
Before we go into all the actionable advice, you should know that a lead management system streamlines multiple activities, including lead capture, data enrichment, qualification, distribution, and lead nurturing through automation.
Truth is – CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools can help you with all of these processes. But the key difference between a CRM and a lead management system is this. A CRM helps manage various sales and marketing activities beyond converting a lead to a customer. This includes ensuring customer retention, collecting feedback, up-selling and cross-selling, and so much more.
So, no, you needn’t invest in a new lead management system if you don’t have one. You can follow the same steps with a CRM to boost sales.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s see how you can use your lead management system or CRM tool to boost sales.
- Use the Lead Management System to Score Leads Quicker
You can’t sell your product to someone who doesn’t want to buy it. And yet sales teams do this all the time. For perspective, the 2022 State of B2B Digital Marketing Report suggests 50% of sales teams agreed that their top complaint against marketing was poor quality leads. This means 50% of marketers routinely tail leads that never convert. The same report also reveals 44% of them admit to receiving insufficient lead data to make a successful sale. The good news is that a lead scoring system can solve both of those problems. And a lead management solution can help you with it.
To begin lead scoring, ensure you have a Universal Lead Definition (ULD) agreed upon by sales and marketing teams. Next, develop an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). You can do this in some of the following ways:
- talking to your customers to understand when they buy products
- using analytics to understand the common characteristics between converted leads
- talking to your sales teams to understand common buyer patterns before conversion
Once you do this, you can devise a scoring system to sort your leads based on their match with ICP characteristics. And you can enter all these details into a lead management system. Now, the system automatically sorts leads based on the scoring system. This does two things – cuts the time spent manually sorting leads and allows you to focus on more important activities.
- Automate Lead Data Collection From Multiple Sources
The key to building a predictable pipeline is ensuring a steady stream of high-quality leads. Most businesses achieve this through data collection from social platforms, landing pages, email signups, and content downloads, and according to a report, over 51% of organizations enter all this data into a CRM manually. Of course, this wastes time. But given the large amounts of lead data marketers need to deal with regularly, it also sacrifices data quality. Fortunately, lead management solutions can help.
Once connected to your lead generation sources, these solutions automatically enter lead data into your CRM database. This ensures your lead data is always complete and has no data entry issues. Some CRM systems even remove duplicate data for you, further upping data quality.
- Automate Lead Nurturing Workflows
Although 50% of marketers agree that a good lead nurturing strategy can generate warmer, sales-ready leads, according to a DemandGen report, only 16% say that their current lead nurturing approaches allow for it. 49% of marketers believe this is because of a failure to reach out to leads at the right time and make workflows for the same.
Whether you use a lead management system or a CRM, you can automate lead-nurturing email workflows. This way, you can reach out to leads when they are more likely to respond. Not just that, many lead management systems allow you to set up personalized email templates based on the sales cycle stage.
- Automate Lead Distribution
A 2022 survey revealed that only one in three marketers believed that the leads they generated were sent to the right SDR (Sales Development Representative) for follow-up. This meant that 2 out of 3 times, leads were transferred to SDRs who didn’t understand customer concerns and were unaware of customer aims, goals, or desires. The result? Subpar sales conversions.
With a sales lead management system, marketing teams don’t need to assign leads to SDRs manually. The software automatically sifts through the leads based on their location, sales cycle stage, and interests and assigns SDRs based on their experience to them. This ensures better conversions.
- Track the Success of Marketing and Sales Efforts
One of the biggest benefits of lead management systems is the ability to track the success of marketing and sales efforts on one platform. This allows each team to understand the success of the other’s efforts and helps in better marketing-sales alignment. Organizations that want to push such alignment further can even decide on shared goals and key performance indicators, and both of these can be tracked on the lead management system. Ultimately all of these efforts boost conversion rates and increase revenue.
Get Started With Lead Management Today Using the Right Tools
While lead management tools can help streamline lead qualification, nurturing, and outreach processes, they might not be the right tool for every company. For instance, small companies that deal with a low volume of leads may not need a dedicated system for lead management. The same goes for large companies with CRM systems. The software is best suited for companies growing rapidly and wanting to create a predictable pipeline of qualified leads even without a CRM.
