With the rising demand from consumers, CRM lead management of your CRM system seems like an essential part of any business. Without effective CRM lead management, you wouldn’t be able to comb through all of the leads that your company generates through its marketing efforts. Understanding that not every lead that you get from a campaign will not convert is the essence of CRM lead management. Instead, it lets you focus on quality leads that are most likely to convert without wasting resources on every inquiry.
What is CRM Lead Management?
CRM lead management processes your sales leads and prospects through your sales funnel. The sales funnel is designed to attract and convert leads by tracking communication with leads within the system and enables you to manage your leads based on the level of interest. A CRM sales funnel with CRM lead management automatically tracks your leads and moves them through the sales pipeline
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Is Lead Management Part of CRM?
CRM lead management is an essential subset of your customer relationships management system. Lead management can be a separate system if you wish. However, since lead management is an essential component of customer relationship management, it makes more sense to subscribe to CRM lead management from the get-go.
Think of your lead management component and your CRM solution as best friends in this scenario. Without lead management capabilities, your CRM would not be able to effectively manage prospective customers until they become paying customers. With the other functionalities of your CRM solution, you are able to manage leads better and further nurture leads that didn’t quite convert this time.
What is the Importance of CRM Lead Management?
CRM lead management allows you to convert potential customers into actual customers. CRM lead management meticulously manages new customer pursuits along with communicating with current customers and ensures that you are able to attend to all of your CRM leads.
CRM lead management is important whenever you have new marketing campaigns that are quite successful and generate a barrage of leads. Your sales staff will have a lot of new leads to pursue hence, it is important to narrow down your sales team’s focus with CRM lead management. Not every lead will convert hence lead qualification is an important step in CRM lead management. Without effective CRM lead management, you are likely to spend too much time on customers that are not serious while completely disregarding potential customers with serious intent to purchase your services.
By using CRM software for CRM lead management, you are able to narrow down serious potential customers while not wasting any more resources on bad leads.
What are the 5 Major Steps in CRM Lead Management?
Lead Capture
When you run your marketing campaigns, lead capture is the first step in your CRM lead management process. This is the process of gathering data on potential customers from your initial marketing campaigns. Your CRM system will record each potential customer as a new contact and assign how and what to do with this potential customer.
Lead Enrichment and Tracking
Lead enrichment is the part where you get to know your potential customers. You initially get the basic information about each customer when you get their contact card and lead enrichment is the process of compiling more data about the customer either through their social media, website back-end data, and email marketing endeavors.
Some CRM software solutions can scour the internet and fill in the blanks automatically for you! This information will help you understand what type of consumers are in your sales funnel and strategically help you convert the lead.
Lead Qualification
Lead qualification is the process of CRM lead management where you determine how likely a customer is to purchase your products or services with lead scoring. Lead qualification is a measure of a customer’s intent to buy in simpler terms. By comparing each lead to your target customer, you are able to assess the quality of a lead. Lead qualification can save your sales staff so much time and resources by helping to focus on serious buyers and filtering out the window shoppers.
Lead Distribution
CRM lead management systems are capable of distributing leads with the knowledge gathered in the previous steps to the best sales agents per each demographic. Sometimes your CRM is able to automatically select the right sales rep to serve potential customers by utilizing the criteria you have set. If your company is running marketing campaigns in multiple regions, CRM lead management lead distribution is able to assign each lead to your regional sales reps automatically.
Lead Nurturing
After going through all the previous steps in the CRM lead management process, you have to nurture certain leads to assure eventual conversion. This includes creating targeted content to reach each customer across many platforms with the purpose of providing them with more information to help make their purchase decisions.
You can personalize communication to entice the customers more. For example, an older customer who is not that tech savvy might respond well to receiving more information via a call center agent while a younger more tech-savvy customer was maybe partial to receiving emails or getting more information from your social media platforms. With all of the lead enrichment data gathered in the previous steps, you are able to appeal to the customers in the manner that they prefer.
CRM Lead Management for Better Marketing
With all of the data you are able to gather using CRM lead management, you have access to a wealth of knowledge about your potential customer base. With each lead that converts, you have more data about what types of customers would purchase your products and services and this CRM lead management information is key to targeting similar customers in your future marketing campaigns. You are also able to cater to different demographics using the most effective mode of communication for that specific customer base with CRM lead management. This way, you don’t have to worry about coming up with a universal marketing strategy that will work for all of the different types of customers you may want to target.
CRM lead management is the most efficient way to manage the barrage of leads you may get from sales campaigns. To learn more about selecting the best CRM lead management vendor, explore our CRM buyer’s guide and compare top CRM vendors in the market.
