Top 10 Best Ways to Manage Your Leads

No matter the niche or size of your company, every growing business relies heavily upon a common mission—acquiring leads and converting them into loyal, long-term customers for your particular products or services. This process is so imperative to modern business growth that many companies choose to invest in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to align sales and marketing teams with customers for a variety of purposes across key departments.

Leads are people or companies who may have an interest in your company as a customer, client, or potential partner. CRM lead management begins with names and contact information. However, if you cultivate these budding relationships well and manage them impeccably, CRM lead management possesses the power to transform them into key business growth drivers. If you don’t CRM lead management your leads efficiently and effectively, you may end up spending excess time and money with less than desirable conversion rates.

Here are ten of the best ways to CRM lead management, and ensure the growth and success of your company as you work to transform each lead into a customer.

One of the easiest ways to mismanage your CRM lead management is to lack clarity around who your leads are, and how they progress through their voyage in discovering your company. To avoid this CRM lead management confusion and waste of resources, it is important that you spend time outlining exactly what defines the transitions from prospect to lead to customer within your organization.

Once you have determined how people typically move through your CRM lead management cycle with the highest rate of retention, you can use this process as a baseline for all your leads. You should also train your sales teams and relationship managers on this CRM lead management cycle as well so that everyone in your company is on the same page on how to define and manage leads.

Once you have a strong sense of how your prospects transition into CRM lead management, and know what works to move leads into customers, you need to equip your sales team with this vital CRM lead management inside intel.

Train your sales teams on your best practices for CRM lead management conversion, and also encourage them to share any new tactics they’ve been using to successfully manage or convert the leads they are responsible for in your system.

An important part of successful CRM lead management, that often goes ignored or neglected in many companies, is researching and understanding your CRM lead management sources. If you know where you are obtaining your best-qualified leads, your efforts and your budget will stretch much further with much more impact on your business.

Gathering interesting qualified leads in large quantities is extremely exciting, and can signal a wave of growth for your company. However, just having a list of names will not further your business goals. Make sure you develop a CRM lead management nurturing sequence that keeps your leads engaged and interested without being bothersome or invasive.

As a general rule, leads tend to start cooling within 48 hours of contact, so it’s best to build in communication processes that require all CRM lead management to receive communication within 2 days of every action of interest they take. When you move to the individual communication phase, you should ideally try to tighten response times to 24 hours or less using CRM lead management.

When you first start gathering, tracking, and endeavoring to convert your leads, it may seem feasible to manage these processes manually. However, as you gain more leads and grow quickly, you’ll inevitably find that investing in an effective CRM lead management solution for your business will make sense and help you scale more quickly through better lead management.

These CRM lead management systems are typically cost-effective for businesses of every size and will help streamline your contacts and organize your communications and follow-ups much more efficiently.

Once you’ve spent some time analyzing what works the best to convert your leads to customers, it’s important to apply that CRM lead management knowledge and insight into nurturing sequences. These CRM lead management sequences can include emails, personal calls, direct mail pieces, or any combination of marketing and communication that you find works best to turn an interested lead into a loyal customer.

Test and tweak your CRM lead management sequences often, according to results and any feedback you receive, to best reach future sales leads as well.

Among the most underutilized business software tools is certainly the Marketing Automation system. You can successfully leverage the powerful and convenient features of this type of system to automate the manual, time-consuming portions of your CRM lead management conversion process.

Marketing Automation systems can easily help you automate email sequences for lead nurturing, and most will also connect with social media channels. This CRM lead management system integrates seamlessly with CRM solutions and is an affordable feature for most businesses.

As with any other integral part of your business, you need to know your numbers in order to grow and scale successfully. CRM lead management is no exception to this rule, and it is important that you measure and track all the phases of your lead cultivation, from prospect to customer.

Many companies lose leads in the beginning of the process due to hasty, delayed, or dropped communications with those who’ve expressed some type of interest in your company. You should treat your leads with the same attention and respect as you would any customer.

If CRM lead management feed into your growth plans, it is important to designate time and resources to managing leads and cultivating relationships. Make sure your teams understand the importance of CRM lead management and know how to best handle their leads.

As you continue to grow your business and cultivate lead relationships, you can improve your lead management skills even further by investing in CRM lead management software (LMS). LMS systems are packed with powerful CRM lead management tools designed specifically for lead-related growth methods involving:

• Lead Acquisition
• Lead Generation
• Lead Tracking
• Lead Scoring
• Lead Nurturing

Your leads are only as valuable as the time, effort, and resources you invest in cultivating them into loyal customers of your business and brand. Using these ten tips for excellent CRM lead management can help you get the most from your leads through effective and efficient communication methods.