What is a Lead Management Software?

Lead management simply refers to all systems and activities revolving around acquiring and capturing leads, monitoring their activities and behavior, educating and engaging them, for the sole purpose of getting them sales-ready and converting them from leads to clients.

It involves all activities, systems, and processes put in place businesses usually by the sales and marketing team to ensure the efficient tracking of leads leading to their subsequent conversion to loyal customers over a particular period of time.

A lead is any person who indicates interest in a company’s product or service in some way, shape, or form. A potential client who is like a would-be customer in which if everything works smoothly between the two parties then this lead will be your customer. A lead is also often otherwise referred to as a sales lead. In some cases, a lead might be other businesses instead of just a person. Nonetheless, a lead, or sales lead, is a person or organization interested in your product or service and, who, with good nurturing, may become a client in the long run.

A lead management software such as Agile CRM is a software that helps to automate the processes of lead management. It is a system that clarifies the leads that you are targeting; pushes them down the conversion pipeline, and the selection criteria to qualify the lead.

Lead management software helps to nurture leads and this is a necessary precursor to both the B2C and B2B sales management processes. If leads are well managed, the sales team can focus on actually making sales and other productive activities instead of looking for qualified buyers.

In this article, you get all the deep insights you need to get to fully understand how a lead management software works, so you can strategically position your business to obtain all the benefits of making use of an excellent lead management software.

How does a lead management software work?

Considering the fact that Lead Management or Customer Acquisition Management is a collection of methods, practices, and processes to acquire new clients for a business, lead management software ensures that the automated processes with which they operate revolve around achieving this objective.

Without the use of a software, sales, and marketing teams work together through the process of lead management. A lead management software merely automates the process with little bits of modifications.
The steps followed by a lead management software can be summarized as follows:

1. Leads Identification: Making use of information such as demographics, source, and behavior, our lead management software determines whether prospects might be interested in your products allowing the sales and marketing teams of businesses to know which lead can be passed on to the sales conversion pipeline further. It is always counterproductive to go after all Tom, dick, and harry without any insights as to whether they are an ideal customer. Our lead management software ensures the marketing and sales teams are working together to forecast the likelihood that a prospect will ultimately make a purchase so that further appropriate
2. Lead progress documentation: After identification, the lead generation software monitors and documents the progress of the leads in the sales funnel for preparation for conversion. A very good lead management software such as Agile CRM, ensures that throughout the lead conversion process all adequate information necessary for efficient tracking leads as well as making important marketing projections by the decision-making body is being documented.
3. Lead generation: This Image Illustrates the research by Hubspot stating that 65% of businesses state that their major concern and marketing challenge is to generate traffic and leads. Using different campaign tactics, the lead generation software gathers contact information of prospects for use in promotional campaigns. Wayne davis, marketing executive at GE appliances further emphasizes that “The lead generation process starts by finding out where your target market ‘lives’ on the web” in this Tweet. Creating awareness for your products or services through ads, articles, how-to videos, website downloads, promotional events, PR campaigns, and various B2B and B2C marketing strategies and advertising campaigns is all possible
4. Lead scoring: Considering a lead’s interest, lead-to-product fit, lead behavior, and buying patterns, the lead generation software at this stage determines and scores the lead’s readiness to buy the product.Sometimes, there’s a discrepancy between what marketing and sales tag as a ready lead as Marketing might tag leads as anyone responding to an ad or social media campaign, while sales may categorize leads as only those who are ready to make a purchase.

   Hence, To ensure that the transfer of leads from marketing to sales is as smooth as possible, it’s a fact that the marketing and sales teams must be aligned in their definition of a sales-ready lead. There should be key indicators that determine whether such a lead is ready. Lead scoring ranks leads using scores to determine their readiness to buy. This score determines how the leads are prioritized and consequently how much importance is attached to them. Also, in situations where the lead is another business, the position which the contact person occupies in the business determines the lead score. Major decision-makers are expected to have a higher score than mere team members.

5. Lead nurturing: Employing the use of email marketing, blog posts, and the likes, sales and marketing teams work together to ensure that leads with higher scores are converted to customers in the long run. This involves cultivating relationships with prospective buyers who are not yet ready to buy with the sole objective of educating them about your brand, products, and solutions by sending them targeted, informational content at each stage of the buying journey. This guarantees conversions in most cases.

Benefits of using a lead management software.

Lead management is the backbone of a successful sales operation. Without effective leads, there’s no need for a CRM or even a sales team in the first place. Also, most times, both sales and marketing processes are treated with more seriousness and attention than the lead management process which in fact plays a somewhat middleman role in the whole process which obviously isn’t supposed to be so. This is likely as a result of the fact that the benefits of lead management and more importantly using a lead management process are a little bit unpopular. In this section, we take a deep dive into some of the major benefits of using a lead management software like Agile CRM. We open your eyes to the goodies and deliverables of a lead management software to ensure

How lead management softwares help businesses can be seen in this Image.
Making use of a lead management software like Agile CRM guarantees the following benefits :

1. Effective management of leads: Having gathered enough information along the generation process, it becomes very easy and effective to manage the leads. Via an automated process, leads are onboarded into a continuous qualification process where their relative importance is continuously ranked from one stage of the customer lifecycle to another. This is of course made possible as a result of the endless amount of data that can be gathered by the software on the various leads. Agile CRM guarantees proper management of leads for The Ultimate purpose of lead conversion.
2. Personalization of customer interaction: Adequate data makes it easy to ensure tailor-made interactions with customers. Once again, the adequate data gathered by lead management software plays a major role in customer satisfaction and overall business growth in that a very good lead management software like Agile CRM, ensures that tailor-made content unique to each customer based on their behaviors, attributes and profile is being sent to them. This sends a message of being heard as well as a feeling that they matter to the customer. Personalization is sure to be at the center stage of customer interaction in the coming years and lead management software help to build a foundation for that right from the outset. You can also store the discussions made with your leads for future reference, which can be accessed by you only.
3. Transparency: The leads are assigned to the concerned salesperson transparently because transparency in your business to ensure a cleaner and healthier work culture in your company is very essential. Hence, there are no issues of workload being divided unevenly, or the efficient leads assigned to the particular person, etc. This relates to the issue of managing workload at the workplace as well as personalization. For the purpose of record, intuition, and personal history, it is sometimes advisable for the marketer of salesperson who established first contact with a particular lead to go all the way with such a lead till the customer status is attained. Personal relationship is a very important aspect of the buying process. However, considering the fact that the job of a typical marketer involves reaching out and meeting multiple leads, contact might be lost and leads tend to exchange handlers (marketers or salespeople). With a lead management software, transparency is assured as all this can be tracked.
4. Effective lead nurturing: Leads with a high score but were unable to become customers due to lack of interest, budgets, future references, etc. can be convinced in such a manner that they are diverted in the direction of at least thinking to purchase the product. After all, isn’t that the whole point of marketing? Lead management software set strategies and automated processes in place to ensure that leads see enough reasons to buy and actually patronize the products, services, and other offerings of a business.
5. Saves time: Lead management software automates all the processes involved in the lead generation process saving a lot of time so that the salesperson or other individuals can focus on improving the productivity of the company. Starting from lead identification, lead generation through lead nurturing and scoring and down to handing down leads from the marketing team to the sales team, all these processes although can be handled manually by individuals in the sales and marketing teams have been set in motion in an automated process to follow each other sequentially at the appropriate points. This saves time affording the team members enough time to concentrate on more technical issues rather than just wasting time on mere routine. You have the facility of programming the automation of the routine tasks thereby leaving you with more time to pursue the leads and convert them into an actual business.

Conclusion

The lead generation process involves many processes that requires time and effort for implementation. Thanks to a lead generation software, all these processes can be automated for maximum efficiency. When you have the technology, you should use it to the maximum and help improve your bottom line.

Overtime, people have developed the wrong notion that the CRM Lead Management Software solution benefits the customer alone. This is not true In fact, lead management software like Agile CRM has various benefits that cuts across various both customers and company operations. One has to admit that the customers do benefit a lot as well as the business. Most of these benefits have been discussed above. In fact, in addition to customer satisfaction and retention, you see a spike in the sales revenue and an increase in cross-selling activities as a result of the use of lead management software.

Lead management software helps to gather more data to ensure adequacy in the lead generation process for the objective of business growth as seen for instance In the typical lead quality among all leads generated by respondent companies