Give Your Sales the Lead Management Edge
Lead management has become a basic necessity for marketing purposes. B2B marketing departments, thorough as they are with their motives of accentuated investment returns, encourage the employment of an optimized lead management process. Nurturing your leads on a mass scale will not provide you with the sales figures that you have been aspiring for. Because each prospective lead’s requirements differ you need to customize your lead nurturing plans accordingly to achieve the maximum.
The lead management lifecycle is a known fact — capturing, nurturing, scoring, timing the leads when they are sales ready and evaluating. An effective lead management system helps you to identify the needs of your customers and close the sales deals efficiently. There are different sources of communication, such as the email, phone, social media, etc., where you can meet your prospective customers. Strike and build a relationship with them and nurture them by providing them with research materials and statistics so that they can come to a conclusion regarding the products they want to purchase.
Sending mass emails to your leads will make your sales endeavor end up in the trash bin. This is particularly important for B2B businesses. You need to demonstrate some amount of responsibility and accountability to your customers to make them aware that you are making special efforts to take care of their needs and provide them with solutions. In order to gain the trust of your customers you have to prove that you are serving them worthwhile tips and helping them resolve their issues.
While maintaining a trustworthy relationship with your leads you also need to ensure that lead scoring is simultaneously initiated to gauge the possibility of the leads converting into sales. Keep a close watch on the websites they visit, the email clicks and the white papers they download, etc. Make an assessment of their company size and their geographical location. With the lead scoring figures you can assess the buying pattern of your leads and will be aware when to move to the next stage.
When you are ready to hand over the responsibility to the sales team ensure that you provide the team with details, like the activities that the customer took a keen interest in. This gives an indication of the products and services that the customers are likely to buy. Prepare some questions and email templates to help the sales representatives initiate contact, and further develop the relationship with the leads. Once the sales representatives are assigned the leads, keep track of the follow-ups. If the sales rep is unsuccessful in closing the sales deal, return the leads to the marketing division for further nurturing.
You need to monitor every marketing movement to assess which marketing programs were direct sales hits, which generated the maximum leads and what the effects were. As you gradually build your relationship you will be informed about your prospective customer’s interest by studying their marketing responses. To achieve success you also need to be aware of new and anonymous visitors who have shown an interest in your products. These new visitors can be added to your list of new leads.
Lead management requires a meticulous stratagem to regulate the process and conclude on a definite and positive note. However it is not an easy task to handle the processes especially with the large number of leads. Thus you need automated lead management software with high competency levels to fulfill all the tasks efficiently and generate productive results.
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