Manage leads efficiently with a powerful lead management software

Every business, big or small, depends on leads. For businesses to grow, you have to convert leads to loyal customers. And to do that right, you need to get complete visibility into sales and marketing leads in an organized manner. In this page, learn everything you need to know about lead management and how a lead management software can help convert leads into customers.

lead management software

What is lead management

 

Lead management is the process of capturing leads, tracking all touchpoints with your business like email, chat, or website behavior, and qualifying and engaging them until they purchase your product.

The Lead Management Process

A successful and efficient lead management process includes the following five steps.

Step 1: Lead capturing

During the lead generation activities, there are various means to reach potential buyers, such as email, website, social media, webinars, and paid ads. A good lead management software ensures that every lead is automatically fed into the CRM system from web forms, emails, and chat, preventing prospects from falling through the cracks.

Lead management software

Step 2: Lead enrichment & tracking

Be it sales or marketing operations; your teams shouldn't be wasting time hunting for information on each lead or manual data entry.

A software with lead management functionality automatically populates a lead's profile with publicly available information such as their job title, location, timezone, company name, and social media profiles. It can track a lead's activities on your website—pages visited, links clicked, resources downloaded—and email engagement.

These valuable insights allow salespeople to understand their intent and personalize sales efforts. It gives your marketing team the much-needed context to craft email campaigns.

Lead management software

Step 3: Lead qualification

One way to effectively qualify leads is through a contact scoring model—a model that ranks your contacts based on their interest in your product or service, demographic information, buying journey, and engagement with your company.

The predictive scoring model helps you prioritize contacts you interact with by going through historical data and assigning a score to every contact based on factors like job title, website behavior, and engagement with your company.

Your team can easily identify the right leads and invest their time in making a sale. A lead management software with AI-powered contact scoring capabilities will be highly cost-effective and beneficial for your sales and marketing teams. 

Step 4: Lead distribution

The sooner your sales reps contact leads, the more likely they are to win them over. Manually assigning a high volume of leads to the right sales reps can be time-consuming and delay lead response time.

A sound lead management system automatically assigns leads to salespeople across territories on a round-robin basis, assigns phone numbers to territories, and transfers calls to sales teams.

This way, your sales team can prioritize assigned leads instead of manually searching for new leads in the CRM system. With lead management software, you can also generate reports to identify the territories that bring in the most profit, sales reps who are meeting targets, and potential sales areas to improve.

auto-lead assignement

Step 5: Lead nurturing

Not all your leads are sales-ready. Many of them could still be in the research or awareness phase, trying to figure if your service would solve their pain points. Lead nurturing seeks to educate and demonstrate the value of your product/service. With a lead management software in place, you can send nurture campaigns to these leads—who are not quite ready yet to make a purchase. This is where you educate and demonstrate value through content and promotional offers thereby helping them in their decision-making process.

Top lead management software comparison

 

CRITERIA
G2 Rating
4.6
4.6
4.3
4.3
4.3
4.3
4.2
4.2
Pricing

$15/user/month (when billed annually)

$45/user/month (when billed annually)

$9.90/user/month (when billed annually)

$25/user/month (when billed annually)
NPS Score

82

51

50

43
Payback Period

7 months

12 months

9 months

19 months
Implementation time

0.7 months

1.3 months

.8 months

3.4 months
Webforms
Built-in phone
Auto-profile enrichment
Lead Scoring by property, website, email and in-app
Auto-lead assignment
Free email, phone and chat support

Note: Data as on 4 December 2020 | © 2020 G2, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form without G2’s prior written permission. While the information in this report has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, G2 disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness, or adequacy of such information and shall have no liability for errors, omissions, or inadequacies in such information.

Best Practices in Lead Management

Align sales process and pipeline 

One of the most important steps in lead management is to have a clear sales process and a sales pipeline in place.

Right from lead generation to lead capturing, lead assignment, engagement and nurturing, to closing the deal, all sales teams need clarity on the channels to be used, the engagement tactics, and the procedure to be followed in each stage.

lead management software sales process

Focus on clear communication between teams 

Successful lead management hinges on clear communication between various teams involved in the process. This includes marketing operations, performance marketing, inside sales, outbound sales, field sales, and sales operations.

Communication between the teams should be swift and precise while passing on, reaching out, and following up with leads.

Use a lead management software that can help the different teams in your organization get context and visibility into your pipeline and communicate better.

Lead management software team communication

Identify when leads are sales-ready 

Lead qualification determines if a lead is ready to buy or subscribe to your service or product.

There are several ways to manually qualify leads like the BANT technique that have worked wonders previously; prospects and customers have more access to technology and are quite capable of assessing their need and solving their problems. So your sales team has less control over the prospect's decision making process than ever before. Put merely; BANT is not reliable enough anymore.

Lead management software can make your job easy by ranking your leads based on their engagement and interest in your product/company and identify leads with a strong intent to purchase.

Monitor lead generation efforts 

There may be numerous lead generation campaigns across your company but the exact number of leads and revenue you get from these efforts are difficult to track. 

With lead management tools, you can easily track marketing and sales KPIs through visual reports and measure the ROI of each and every campaign in your company. 

Measuring results using reports is a sign of efficient lead management, and a good lead management software can help you achieve that.

Lead management software lead monitoring

Challenges with lack of lead management 

Manually hunting for leads, updating your database, typing out emails, and following up can get exhausting, especially if you are looking to expand your business. Without an efficient lead management system, you will find it hard to identify lead leakage. 

Lack of visibility into leads 

Customers often have poor experiences because sales and marketing teams cannot view customers as a total of their touchpoints.

Manual lead qualification

Your team doesn't have a process or methodology like ranks and scores to qualify and unqualify leads, thereby losing productivity. 

No insight into lead’s activities

You aren’t tracking the prospect’s activities on your website, product, and email; losing your potential buyers.

Difficult to convert leads 

Your sales and marketing teams miss follow-ups, send delayed responses to queries, and test prospects' patience. 

Lack of lead nurturing

Your team does not understand the prospects' requirements and hence are unable to send timely emails and build lasting relationships. 

Duplicate leads 

Your CRM or spreadsheet is filled with duplicate lead entries, which might result in essential leads slipping through the cracks. 

 

Recommended by industry experts

6 Benefits of using a lead management system

Automate lead generation and assignment

Capture leads from different sources like chat campaigns, webforms, and emails in the CRM. You can even respond to chats directly or call from the CRM and funnel quality leads. After lead tracking and capturing, a robust lead management software can automatically assign leads to salespeople across territories, based on lead-routing rules.

Learn more about event tracking 

lead capture

Improve productivity with AI

Avoid manual labor and improve your sales and marketing teams' productivity with a lead management software that automatically enriches your contacts with their social and publicly listed information. Avoid duplicate leads with an AI-powered sales assistant Freddy, who proactively detects duplicate leads or contacts in the CRM. 

Lead qualification and management just got easier with an AI-powered scoring model available in lead management software like Freshsales where leads are automatically ranked based on historic data. Understand what factors led to the contact score as well and keep leads flowing into the marketing and sales funnel.

Meet Freddy, our AI-assistant

View lead lifecycle and engage contextually

 

With an effective lead management solution, you will understand various stages your leads go through in their buying lifecycle and activity timeline. With this real-time context, your salespeople and marketers can communicate seamlessly across phone, email, chat, and SMS from within the CRM.

Get better at sales activity management

Segment and nurture leads 

Segments help you target your business's broad audience base. You can segment them based on demography, geography, and behavior, target the right set of leads and improve your marketing campaigns' outreach opportunities.

Target your niche audience with segmentation

segmentation

Measure results

Get invaluable insights into the lead funnel activities, such as the territories generating the most leads and each sales rep's response time. Identify which lead source is bringing right, quality leads, and maximize your efforts in those areas to increase your marketing and sales ROI.

Now that you have a fair idea of how lead management software can help your business, what next?

Deep dive into data with analytics

Now that you have a fair idea of how a lead management software can help your business, what next?

Get the best lead management software

Try Freshsales. It comes with built-in lead management features, where leads are automatically captured and enriched in your CRM database.

It comes with built-in lead management features, where leads are automatically captured and enriched in your CRM database.

Track lead activities, qualify them with AI-powered contact scoring, segment leads, and nurture them into customers, all from within your CRM software.

Yes, you can do all this from a single sales tool.

TRY Freshsales FOR FREE
Lead management software