As a salesperson, nothing makes you happier than hot, ready-to-buy leads who you can potentially convert into customers. But, unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Your funnel is a mix of hot, warm, and cold leads, and you can’t differentiate them until you qualify each one through the discovery process. And what frustrates salespersons is the hours of manual work that goes into cherry-picking hot leads in the sales funnel and ultimately converting them into opportunities.
Traditionally, salespersons used to manually reach out to every lead, ask questions, and make an assessment if they’re a qualified lead for business. But, in today’s world, manual lead qualification is a colossal waste of time and money, and not to forget—a big sales productivity killer. In fact, 50% of sales time is wasted on unproductive prospecting (Source: The B2B lead).
Research shows that companies which automate lead management are likely to see a 10% or more increase in revenue in 6-9 months (Strategic IC, 2017). So, it’s important that salespersons effectively manage leads through the entire sales process—capture, assign, qualify, score, prioritize, track, nurture, and convert—without manual intervention.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt, lead management is critical for your business. And that’s what a CRM like Freshsales helps you do. With end-to-end lead management capabilities built into the CRM software, salespersons are empowered to sell without a hitch.
Here are three ways in which Freshsales can help you efficiently manage your leads:
1. Assign leads to the right salesperson
Distributing leads based on their industry and territory so that they get assigned to the responsible sales reps is a major task for sales managers. If your business manually distributes leads to salespersons, a lot can go wrong in the first step of your sales process. You could, a) miss out on assigning every lead, b) assign too many leads to an individual salesperson, c) assign leads to the wrong salesperson, or d) assign the same lead to multiple salespersons. And if your business generates a high volume of leads, then the manual work is going to delay the first interaction with your leads, in turn affecting your conversions.
A recent study shows that companies that have at least one automated distribution method see an 87% higher conversion rate as opposed to companies that manually distribute leads. What’s more, by ramping up the number of automated distribution processes, the conversions increased to 107%.
With Freshsales, automatically distribute and assign leads based on predefined rules. You can create and manage unlimited territories, define each by its own combination of rules, and add salespersons you want to auto-assign leads to in round robin. By automating lead distribution using Freshsales, sales managers don’t have to spend time on admin tasks. They can instead spend their time managing their team, solving sales problems, and coaching low-performing reps. To set up lead management in Freshsales, create the territories and set rules in place.
Within each territory, you can define rules to assign leads based on their industry to a particular rep. For instance, you can assign leads who are interested in the product Bluenote Speed from the Media industry to Barbara or Peter.
In the instance that a lead belongs to multiple territories, you can reorder and prioritize territories numerically—the lead will be assigned to the territory with higher priority. For example, an incoming lead belongs to Michigan, which is a state within the United States of America. Based on the prioritization depicted below, the lead will be assigned to the territory “Michigan” because of the priority set.
2. Let the CRM qualify leads for you
As a salesperson, you may be assigned hundreds of leads every day but knowing the right ones to pursue is the challenge. All the leads you receive aren’t the same, some may have high-buying intent and require immediate action. Others may be trying out their options and have no intent to buy. As a salesperson, you need to be able to identify and prioritize hot leads over the not-so-hot leads. Without sufficient data, you end up making this decision based on a gut feeling or maybe in the order assigned. Your hot leads start cooling down while they wait to hear from you. This is where Lead Scoring by Freshsales comes in.
Lead Scoring in Freshsales is a rank-based system that prioritizes leads based on lead property and interactions—email, application, and web. You can customize the scoring model based on the properties that define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and scores are added or negated accordingly.
For instance, if you’re a salesperson working for an e-commerce business, your hottest leads are website visitors that add products to their cart. This is a clear indicator of their intent to buy, marking them as potential customers that you can pursue. You can assign points for activities like an item added to wishlist or cart. Don’t forget to assign negative points for activities like unsubscribing from the email list. Here’s an example of how you can set up a lead scoring system for an e-commerce business.
If your ICP is an authority figure in the SaaS industry, customize your lead scoring system accordingly. Improve your lead conversion rates by setting a strict scoring system that prioritizes the highest quality of leads. This makes it easier for sales reps to identify and chase hot leads instead of dedicating their time trying to warm up cold leads.
- Add points to leads from the Software or Technology industry.
- Add points to leads who are “CTO,” “Director of Product” or “VP-Engineering.”
- Add points when the “Has authority” field is set to “Yes.”
3. Know your leads better
As a salesperson, you’re keen to provide a good experience. To do this, you need to understand who your leads are and what their challenges are so as to have meaningful conversations and establish trust. If you’re able to discover their interests, it becomes easier for you to effectively communicate with them.
So, before you make the first contact you have to uncover the right information about your leads. But, what kind of information? For instance, let’s say a lead visits your website, the first touchpoint for your business. There are several ways the lead could engage with your site—visit pages, clicks, downloads, etc. But, how can you know the actions a particular lead performs on your site? Hard to tell, right?
No, not really. The Event Tracking feature in Freshsales empowers you to do just that. You can track your lead’s website activity and see it in a timeline view. With all this contextual data, you get a better idea of the lead’s interest in your services. You can communicate with the lead about the right solution for their problem, instead of monologuing about your products and services. But, it doesn’t stop there. Once a lead becomes your customer, you can even get to know how they engage with your product or app. Freshsales helps you in identifying cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
These days salespersons use social media to connect, follow, and engage with leads. Freshsales makes it easier for you to do this, without the extra steps of searching for them on every platform. With the Auto Profile Enrichment feature in Freshsales, the lead’s profile is auto-populated with their social media profiles—LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, photo, and company information like phone number and address. All you have to do is enter the lead’s email address and their company website in Freshsales, and it auto-enriches their profile with publicly listed information.
Work smarter, not harder
Lead management is the first step in your sales process, which makes it an important step. With Freshsales, setting up an automated lead management process is easy and the ROI is massive. By delegating the task to the CRM, you are now free from spending hours on manual qualification and conversion. Instead, chase the hottest leads with context on their challenges and needs. Take out the manual work from your daily schedule and improve your productivity with Freshsales.
Cover Illustration by Ashna Liza Sunny
