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Almost every industry now runs online with websites, blogs, and social media to market its products and services. As a result, vast amounts of data are generated every day from customer interactions with sales teams. This, in turn, spikes a demand for lead management software to help manage all that information from a centralized location.
But there’s more to lead management. Currently:
- 79% of marketers say that generating more leads is their primary goal
- 61% of marketers believe that lead generation is the biggest challenge up their sleeves
- 37% of marketers find generating high-quality leads one of their biggest challenges
- 31% of marketers feel that tracking offline conversions also falls among the biggest challenges that they face.
Lead management software helps businesses organize and manage leads more efficiently. These tools enable salespeople to identify potential customers, track their progress towards becoming full-fledged customers and keep them updated on new products or services they may be interested in.
In this article, we’ll show you how to use sales lead management tools to streamline your sales process and drive more sales.
What is Lead Tracking and Management?
Lead tracking and management is the process of monitoring where your leads are in their purchase journey and making sure that they don’t drop out of the sales funnel. Salespeople use lead tracking and management software to:
- Track, categorize, and qualify leads
- Monitor interactions between your company and potential customers to determine how likely they are to purchase your product or service
- Identify who has interacted with your business on social media, website, through a blog post, or some other medium, so that you can retarget them with relevant content/offers.
Benefits of Lead Management
Lead management solutions help businesses track and analyze leads at every stage of the sales funnel. What’s more, you can capture more leads, identify opportunities for growth and segment your target audience for a more effective marketing strategy.
Other benefits include:
A More Organized Database
A lead management system organizes your data into the most relevant categories that you can easily access on a single dashboard. Whether you’re working with an existing database or collecting new leads, the system makes it easy to add contacts, view reports, and segment your data.
Provides Real-Time Analytics
Lead management software gives you insight into your marketing efforts in real-time. You can keep track of how many leads you’ve obtained from various channels, their quality, and the best-performing conversion channels for your business, etc.
Improved Customer Acquisition Process
Lead management software allows you to create targeted and personalized outreach campaigns for your contacts and track their engagement with your brand. This will help you prioritize your outreach and make connections with customers in a way that’s more relevant to their needs.
Precise Lead Scoring
As your leads interact with your brand, they’ll move through the sales funnel, and their actions will be tracked. This data will help you understand which leads are more likely to convert and be valuable to your business. You can then prioritize these leads and make sure that they receive the right amount of attention as they progress through the sales funnel.
Develop Smarter Marketing Strategies
Another advantage of lead management software is that it allows you to test and experiment with different marketing strategies. You can use your centralized database to test different types of offers, landing pages, content, and call-to-action buttons. Next, see how customers respond to these changes and make informed decisions about marketing strategies that are most effective for your brand.
What’s the Difference Between CRM and Lead Management Software?
Customer relationship management (CRM) and lead management software are both tools that businesses use to manage customer relationships. However, they serve slightly different purposes.
A CRM is a program or app that helps salespeople manage customer relationships. It’s an automated system that manages contacts and keeps a detailed record of interactions with prospective clients as well as current customers.
Lead management software offers more lead generation capabilities. For starters, it helps you identify your potential customer and gather relevant information about them in an organized dashboard. This way, your sales reps can spring to action whenever the system identifies a potential customer and focus more on closing deals.
What is Pipeline Management?
The sales pipeline is a way for sales teams to visualize the different stages of their lead generation efforts, as well as where their customers are in the sales cycle.
Sales pipeline management is the process of organizing sales leads, tracking them from initial contact through the final sale, and evaluating who is most likely to become your customer. In the end, pipeline management is all about keeping track of potential leads, when you spoke to them last, what their interests were, and what your sales team’s next step should be.
Lead Management Software Market: Types and Features
When you start to dig into the world of lead management software, you’ll quickly find there are a variety of options in the market. Each has its strengths and weaknesses in terms of features, cost, ease of use, integration capabilities with other systems, etc.
And, depending on your company’s specific needs, one solution may be more beneficial than another. Here is a brief overview of the most common lead management software features:
- Lead scoring – If a lead scores high, it means that they’re interested in your product or service and would likely buy from you. Low-scoring leads are not very likely to buy from you. Lead scoring is determined by your sales team based on various criteria. You can integrate your lead management software with customer relationship management (CRM) software to get a better understanding of your clients.
- Contact management – Contact management is one of the pillar features of lead management software. It allows you to store your leads’ contact information and organize them into various categories. You can also assign tasks to your team members and track all the activities related to your contacts. If it helps, you may also integrate your contact management software with your email marketing tools and CRM software to boost the overall performance of your marketing and sales activities.
- Lead automation – A lead management software should provide you with an option to automate your workflows, e.g., sending automatically triggered welcome emails to new leads. These emails can be sent when a lead signs up for a webinar, downloads a white paper, subscribes to your newsletter, or any other action.
- Lead discovery – Looking for leads manually can be time-consuming. A lead discovery tool allows you to search for leads on the internet and import them directly into your lead management software and save precious time.
- Import and sync data from various channels – A good lead management software should allow you to export your lead data from various channels and in different formats. You can also sync data from your sales channels such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, and more. This will allow you to manage your leads and other activities from a single dashboard.
That said, here are some of the top most effective lead management tools on the market:
- Pipedrive – Pipedrive is a cloud-based CRM and sales lead management tool that automates your sales activities and keeps track of your sales pipeline. With Pipedrive, you can import your sales data from a spreadsheet and get access to a dedicated lead inbox to store incoming leads. Pipedrive also offers built-in Live Chats and a chatbot feature to keep your leads engaged.
- Zoho CRM – Zoho is the lead tracking and management software that salespeople need to engage with customers no matter where they are. Zoho’s detailed analytics enable salespeople to see how their marketing campaigns are performing and see where they can improve.
- ClickUp – With ClickUp, you can easily organize your leads and set up automatic reminders so you never miss a critical opportunity.
How Lead Management Software can Boost Your Sales
B2B sales have a reputation for being challenging. Prospecting for new leads is time-consuming, and closing deals can be more difficult than you would expect. With the right tool, you’ll be able to build an automated lead generation machine that helps your business grow.
However, if you’re still on the fence about these tools, these few reasons may convince you why you lead management tools in your business:
- Lead management software helps you measure – There are so many metrics you can track with lead management software, including traffic sources, lead conversions, and so much more.
- Lead management software helps you automate – Most lead management tools offer workflow automation as a central feature. Rather than handling too much paperwork or creating a spreadsheet for all your lead data, the lead management tool will automate redundant tasks and makes it easier to track your prospects without having to do all of the legwork yourself.
- Better organization of customer data – Lead management and tracking tools help improve organization within your business. Since all of the data is stored in one centralized place, it becomes easier for everyone involved in selling or marketing to access important information on demand.
- Better customer service – Lead management and tracking software enable your sales, marketing, and customer service teams to collaborate and provide better customer service. You’ll be able to keep track of conversations with customers and make sure each one receives the right attention and care.
How to Choose the Best Lead Management Software
Sales managers are often burdened with tons of responsibilities, from coordinating the sales teams to managing and tracking leads throughout the sales process, and so much more.
However, blasting through every feature on each program isn’t helpful either. Instead, you need a clear understanding of which functions and features will be most beneficial to you in the long run.
Let’s take a look at some general considerations when selecting the right lead management software for your business:
- Consider your budget – How much are you willing to invest in lead management software? You don’t want to break the bank when it comes to investing in a piece of software. However, you’re also not going to want to cheap out and purchase a piece of software that’s not going to meet your needs. There are lots of different types of lead management solutions, starting from as little as $25 per month to as much as $10,000 per month.
- Consider the available features – You’ll also want to keep an eye on the available features of the lead management software you’re considering buying. For instance, automation takes over many tedious tasks related to lead management, which frees up more time for salespeople to focus on closing deals.
- Easy user interface – Lead management software should be easy to use, with a negligible learning curve. You want to be able to use the software easily and quickly so you can focus on more important tasks.
- Consider how many leads the software can handle at a time – If you’re planning on using your lead management software to generate leads and then pass them off to a sales team, you’ll want to make sure you choose a software that can handle the number of leads that you need it to.
How Can Outreachly Help You with Your Linkedin Lead Management?
While there are many ways to go about lead management and tracking, LinkedIn remains one of the most reliable sources for B2B leads. As such, you’ll want to make sure that you’re managing your leads the right way – with Outreachly.
Outreachly is the smartest LinkedIn lead generation tool, and an efficient way to generate LinkedIn leads for your business. With our done-for-you B2B LinkedIn and email lead generation services, you can target the most qualified decision-makers and get instant notifications whenever they respond to your invitation or message.
Our LinkedIn profile optimisation ensures that your company’s profile stays up to date as our AI-powered LinkedIn lead generation features seamlessly integrate your CRM to get the most out of your marketing efforts.
Ready to see how it works? Join the next demo!
Conclusion
Today’s customers are savvy, knowledgeable, and connected. They are also scattered across a variety of digital channels. It’s up to you to implement a lead management tool that helps track each lead’s movement in the sales process.
