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What is Lead Management? Definition, Tools & Best Practices

What is Lead Management? Definition, Tools & Best Practices

When you hear the term ‘lead generation,’ a variety of channels flash in your mind.

Whether it’s the conventional television and radio advertisements or contemporary social media platforms, there are many options to choose from.

One such channel that has gained tremendous popularity (and rightly so) is CRM.

Now, you may be already aware of how a small business CRM tool can affect a business’s customer relationships.

But how does it fit into the picture when it comes to lead generation?

Lead generation is a term that encompasses all the efforts that go into capturing quality leads that can be converted into customers.

A powerful lead generation CRM solution can help businesses do so by gathering leads from multiple sources and tracking their movement through the sales funnel.

This comprehensive guide can help you discover how a CRM system can help you generate leads for your business and close more deals.

What is lead management?

By definition, lead management is the acquisition of potential customers before guiding them from the top of the sales funnel towards a purchasing decision. Lead management can be broken down into six key steps…

Lead capture
Lead enrichment
Lead qualification and lead prioritisation
Lead distribution
Lead nurturing
Lead conversion

Lead management can be considered successful after two things have occurred. That is, when you establish a robust connection with potential customers that entered your sales pipeline and when they make a purchase from you, choosing your solution over a competitor.

Why is lead management important?

Lead management has a number of benefits for any business, large or small. Here are some of the most prominent ones…

Helps to establish an immediate relationship with leads. Get in touch with leads entering the sales pipeline as quickly as possible before moving them down the funnel.
Helps stay in touch with leads all the time. Effective lead management ensures constant, relevant communication; a key influence for clients choosing a service.
Aids efficient lead tracking. Know exactly who your leads are, where they come from, what they respond best to, and how well they convert.
Saves your business time and money. Good lead management spares sales reps time and effort on unqualified leads that don’t convert. Focus on the hot leads.

How does CRM help manage leads effectively?

Effective lead management can set you apart from competition and boost sales.

Still, in an era of rapid technological advancement, manual lead management no longer suffices. To really grow your business in a modern, organic way, you should arm yourself with reliable software to take care of the lead management process. It’s easier than you think.

CRM is the perfect solution for lead management, enabling you to capture leads, enrich them, qualify them, distribute them among sales managers, and nurture them more effectively. As a result, this lead management tool means your business enjoys a higher conversion rate.

Let’s look at how CRM can help with all of these lead management processes.

CRM and lead capture

Having a lead management CRM system can improve your lead capture processes in a number of ways.

Firstly, it makes prospecting significantly more effective and successful. With a CRM system, it becomes easier to identify your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and use it to look for new leads to fill your sales pipeline.

With all your customer data in one place, structured and ready to use, you can analyse it to identify similarities among existing customers. Use CRM data to…

Spot patterns and commonalities shared by your best customers
See who you successfully upsold to
Find why deals were lost and for what reason

This information helps identify leads with the highest chance of conversion, instead of mindlessly filling the sales pipeline with leads that won’t move down the funnel.

Check out our article on how to use LinkedIn for prospecting!

Without CRM software pulling the strings of these integrated sources, the lead data you receive might sit in some faraway digital location awaiting manual addition to sales records. Given the application of an omnichannel approach to lead generation and a steadily rising inflow of leads, chances are some leads will fall through the cracks when handled manually.

Yep, CRM can help with lead capture itself.

It keeps track of incoming leads from different sources like web forms, email, and chat apps. It can even automate the process of lead capture. Every bit of lead data goes directly into your CRM database as a newly created record.

“Oas36ty’s CRM can auto-create new CRM records from incoming and outgoing emails, LinkedIn profiles, Intercom chats, and Facebook messages. Moreover, you can also set up a workflow that automatically turns web form submissions into a new customer record in the CRM database. No coding required and no steep learning curve.”

CRM and lead enrichment

Customer data is your business’s most valuable asset; the quality of your data directly affects the quality of your business offering. It’s essential to make sure that the data you collect around leads is complete, reliable, relevant, and accurate. CRM does a good job of ensuring that.

CRM improves lead data quality by automating the lead enrichment process. Modern CRMs offer numerous integrations with LinkedIn, Facebook, and email service providers to automatically extract publicly-available data from those sources and then enrich lead profiles with it.

Oas36ty’s CRM offers native integration with Google Workspace and LinkedIn. These integrations allow you to scrape publicly available data from your lead’s Google account or LinkedIn profile and enrich their profiles in the CRM with heaps of data such as company, job title, first and last name, birthday, associated social media accounts, and more in just a couple of clicks.

Another CRM function that helps to maintain your data clean is Duplicate Prevention. It’s another feature that Oas36ty’s CRM offers, helping spot any duplicate data entering the system before warning users and giving them a chance to merge or remove that data.

Finally, CRM allows you to structure your customer database. You can add and remove fields to collect only the necessary data, mark them as required to ensure customer profiles are always complete, create folders, link customer profiles to company profiles, and more.

CRM and lead qualification, scoring, and prioritisation

Even with the best application of your ICP during the prospecting process, some leads entering your sales pipeline will have lesser purchasing power and purchasing intent than others.

Lead prioritisation is an important part of lead management for driving sales. In fact, the process of identifying the most important potential customers is impossible without lead qualification and scoring acting as a basis for lead prioritisation. Your job is to spot the most valuable leads and focus on nurturing them, sometimes at the expense of less valuable ones.

Without lead prioritisation, you might lose bigger deals and decrease the volume of sales.

Manual lead qualification sucks, quite frankly. CRM does it automatically, based on a set of specific qualification rules for your particular business. All you need to do is outline these rules and customise your system to assign numerical values to all incoming leads based on your criteria.

Alternatively, if your CRM provider doesn’t offer automated lead scoring functionality, you can still use it to qualify incoming leads by adding lead scoring fields to customer records. Make sure to add a formula field for calculating the lead’s score to the contact record in the CRM.

Then, sales reps give ratings manually based on their intuition. The system will automatically put leads in one of the categories based on those ratings.

Find out more about lead scoring in our article.

CRM and lead distribution

According to stats, 50% of leads go with the vendor that responds first. Moreover, responding within the first minute increases lead conversions by 391%.

If you want a competitive advantage over other businesses in your market, make sure lead nurturing starts the second a lead enters the sales pipeline. Any stalling reduces your chances of winning the deal to rubble.

The best way to react to leads entering the pipeline quicker is to automatically assign them to a rep.

A CRM system, like Oas36ty’s CRM, distributes incoming leads among sales reps automatically. It can execute this delegation randomly, based on a set of predetermined criteria, or on a round-robin basis. Afterwards the system notifies the relevant sales rep about a new lead in the pipeline and assigned to them, signalling that they should act.

Here’s how you’d set up automated lead distribution on a round-robin basis in Oas36ty’s CRM…

Head to the Workflows tab on the left sidebar of your Oas36ty’s dashboard.
Edit or start a new Workflow for when a new lead enters the system.
We can set Workflows to create a new task for any member of our sales team.

For example, we can ask them to call the new lead. To make sure the workload is even, we can set the Edit type to Distribute among our chosen values – or, our sales team.

Set a due date and priority label for the task.
There you go: A new form submission creates a new record, assigned to Monica, and automatically creates a task for the same manager…

CRM and lead conversion

Finally, any successful lead management process must end with a conversion of the lead as a customer.

CRM improves your relationships with leads and customers, prompting them to commit to your product faster. Here are all the benefits of using CRM software to encourage lead conversion…

CRM software allows you to keep track of all the details

Sales reps can record and access every detail of every interaction they have with every lead. All of those details get stored safely in one place and are readily available for everyone involved in the sales process. Linked to the customer record, notes and communication history details comprise a more holistic view of the relationship your business has with each particular lead.

In turn, you gain an insight into their buyer journey, their pain points, their needs, and their wants.

As a result, you can tailor your subsequent communication, bring up previously discussed points, and prove that you genuinely care about your lead.

CRM software allows you to communicate with leads at the best times

Lead tracking CRM can help you keep an eye on all the leads in your sales pipeline and reach out to them when they’re prone to conversion. You could create a custom view in your CRM for leads that were acquired a certain amount of time ago, haven’t been in contact with you over some period of time, or have a special occasion coming up.

All of this information will help you be more timely and active nurturing leads.

CRM software allows you to make data-driven decisions

Great CRM solutions allow users to produce sales pipeline reports. This helps gain insights into what they’re doing well to convert leads before scaling those activities, as well as identifying the tactics that require improvement.

How does the lead management process work with CRM?

CRM software includes robust lead management tools that can increase sales and boost customer retention. Here’s how your CRM software ties into the lead management process.

Lead qualification and scoring: CRM software is crucial for properly qualifying and scoring your leads. CRM software allows you to centralize lead scores so your entire team can see them and prioritize accordingly.
Lead information: CRM software lets you pull up everything you need to know about a lead on one screen. That way, you don’t have to work from paper records or use separate documents for each sales lead.
Sales rep accountability: Even the best sales reps have room for improvement. CRM software can help improve a rep’s average response time, leading to more satisfied leads and helping you make more sales. CRM software can track response times and other statistics that keep your team accountable, as well as highlight areas for improvement.
Lead reporting: If you kept all your sales data in separate documents outside a unified system, you’d need more time and brainpower to understand your leads’ marketing demographics. CRM software stores all vital lead management data in one place and helps you generate reports on these insights in just a few clicks. The information you learn can help you develop marketing strategies that cater to various audience segments.

Oas36ty India’s No.1 Bulk Email Marketing Service Provider

Oas36ty India’s No.1 Bulk Email Marketing Service Provider

Email has always been one of the most powerful marketing tools available to businesses of all kinds and scale. Why? Because,

87% of marketers utilize email marketing for content marketing.
Effective email list segmentation yields a massive 760% increase in ROI.
Customer engagement is increased through focused email personalization, according to 74% of marketers.
Strategic email personalization leads to 50% more email open rates.

With technological advancements, email marketing has evolved to offer diverse operations and features. Despite being an older strategy, bulk email marketing remains effective when executed carefully. It saves businesses time and effort, significantly when expanding or reaching a larger audience.

Leveraging the right features of a bulk email marketing solution can streamline this process. Bulk email marketing involves more than simply sending a high volume of emails to a broad target audience. It allows businesses to manage contacts with similar needs or interests, who are already acquainted with their products or services.

By designing emails with universal appeal and utilizing bulk emailing features, businesses can effectively engage their entire contact list and analyze audience involvement to a greater extent. Bulk emailing is crucial for reaching large audiences, delivering newsletters, promotional emails, and maintaining engagement with your email contact list. However, it is essential to understand the components contributing to successful bulk email campaigns rather than simply sending emails blindly.

Email marketing made easy

A good mass email campaign doesn’t need expensive web-based solutions: it can be handled effectively on your desktop or laptop pc, keeping your own email lists private and managing every aspect of the strategy on our mass email software. It’s easier, safer, and cost effective.

Email marketing is based on a trusted relationship with your customers: Oas36ty’s bulk mailer will help you build it, keep it and improve it.

Create effective emails

With our mass mailing software, you will be able to compose beautiful emails that convert — that create real profit. How? Using our free email templates, sorted by categories to help you choose the right one. Creating a layout with Oas36ty’s embedded email editor or an external HTML editor. Purchasing a tailor-made template from our professional web designers and email marketing experts.

Build your permission-based list

The only effective (and legal) way to run a mass email campaign is to send emails only to people who allowed you to: that is, to build an opt-in permission-based list of addresses. Our bulk mail software makes it amazingly easy. You can create customizable web forms for your site to let your users subscribe in a few clicks; then record all collected data in one or more lists, to which you can send separate messages.

Analyze the results of your mailings

An effective email marketing requires a thorough data analysis. Our mass emailing software and Google Analytics will let you know if, after reading your emails, customers have purchased your products, subscribed to your website or made any other actions.

100% Free Newsletter Software for email marketing

The Email newsletter software is a software that manages a mailing list and sends mass newsletter emailing’s. An email newsletter software is used to communicate with customers and friends by creating and sending personalized bulk e-mails to the contacts held in a mailing list database.

A complete newsletter software suite is, in fact, an email marketing software: it integrates the mailing list subscription modules within a website to gather new recipients automatically. Each mass email can include an unsubscribe link, to let users cancel their newsletter subscription.

Starting your e-mail marketing campaign is a matter of minutes with Oas36ty’s newsletter software: download 100% Free Newsletter Software and:

Compose your email message or choose one of the free newsletter templates
Import .csv contact list and create an email marketing database from scratch
Send advertising newsletters and bulk emailing’s, pause and re-start
Clean the mailing list from bounce-backs and bad email addresses

Oas36ty’s program is an email newsletter software that offers a complete solution to send newsletters:

An email composer (comes with plenty of ready to send email templates)
Send to inbox your spam free emails (using the free spam check utility)
The newsletter mailing list manager that sends mass advertisement emails with embedded images .gif and .jpg
A fast SMTP bulk e-mail sender with mass email merging

Oas36ty’s software for newsletter imports mailing list prospects from Yahoo!, Gmail and MSN

send bulk emailing’s to Yahoo! exported contacts
send newsletter emails to MSN Live exported contacts
send mass emails to Google Gmail exported contacts

Bulk Email Marketing Services – FAQs

What are the pros and cons of email marketing?

If you are familiar with the word SPAM; then it’s imperative to know the pros and cons of email marketing services. To resolve the issue and overcome the predicament, email marketing is the best way to hit the INBOX straight away. Yes, many of the times it has size issues, network issues; but you can target your potential customers once you get acquainted with the advantages of it. Bulk email marketing is the Real-Time Marketing tool with effective cost and invasive advantages.

Why do we demand email marketing?

Email marketing is a single action to promote any business site, products, and services. It is a process by which the sender can directly come in contact with the reader or the specific client to promote their websites, brands & events. It is the easiest way to stay in communication with the large numbers of organizations to achieve the desired operation.

Switch to Oas36ty’s today as your email marketing service provider and witness your business touch new heights.

What are the benefits of bulk email marketing?

Email Marketing has many benefits and very great tool to generates leads. Some of its benefits are:

The Right Audience – It helps to deliver email to only right audience who is interested in your products/services.
Personalize Email: Personalize make sense to customers that company knows you and helps to interact with your customers.
Sales Tracking: You can track everything in your email campaign like, Email open, link clicked, Unsubscribe, bounced emails, Replied etc.

What is Bulk Email marketing?

Bulk Email marketing is marketing technique where you send one mail campaign to mass audience in a single go. It is very effective tool of marketing which helps to do communicate with your customers and generates good ROI as it is very cheap.

What is the best software for sending bulk emails?

Oas36ty’s provides the best software for bulk email service. It has many pre designed templates ready to use. Also, you can use Drag and Drop feature to design and also upload your HTML file and start sending the bulk emails.

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How To Use Workflow Automation To Grow Your Business

Office Process Automation for Beginners

How automated is your office? Does work flow like clockwork, independent of location and platform? Or does everything happen with paper forms and signatures floating around in those classy golden envelopes?

Every business owner loves the thought of automating office processes, but the concept can be a bit cloudy. What does automation actually look like? What office processes can be converted into automated workflows? Where do I start?

What is Office Automation?

Offices have lots of processes that follow a predictable, repetitive flow. Service requests, leave requests, purchase orders, and many other processes keep flowing on and on in any office of any size.

When you handle these things manually, each individual is responsible for receiving a set of data, acting on it, and remembering exactly what to do next with it. While it may sound simple, this creates a minefield where a single misstep along the way can cripple the entire flow of work and potentially paralyze other interdependent processes as well.

When these same office processes are handled automatically, you create a sequence of human and system tasks. Data is passed on to each task automatically without any need to follow up. This creates smooth, uninterrupted transitions between individuals, teams, and stakeholders regardless of location and function.

What Is Workflow Automation and Why Do You Need It?

Workflow Automation enables the replacement of paper-based and manual processes using digital tools (typically workflow automation software) that integrate with existing business systems and controls.

The tactical aim is to ensure that the right workers are working on the right tasks at the right time and have everything they need to complete work tasks available to them when they need it.

Workflow automation means businesses may standardize work, ensuring preset business rules and compliance policies are met, reducing or eliminating human error and deviation, and providing visibility and accountability at every stage of the automated process.

A more succinct definition of workflow automation would be:

“Workflow Automation is defined as the design, creation, deployment and automation of business processes based upon preset rules where work tasks are automatically triggered and routed between people, technology and data.”

The Primary Benefits of Workflow Automation

Automating manual tasks, workflows, and processes can provide a business with multiple benefits; with the most significant ones being:

Improved efficiency – automated workflows reduce manual and repetitive tasks that would otherwise waste time and resources;
Enhanced cost-efficacy – automated workflows can help reduce costs as they speed up business processes and optimize resources;
Increased productivity – automating workflows eliminates time-consuming and redundant tasks, ensuring employees can focus on the most significant projects, enhancing their productivity;
Increased accuracy and reduction in deviations – workflow automation reduces the risk of errors as it eliminates unnecessary inputs and ensures data and processes are updated regularly;
Increased visibility into work in almost real-time – workflow management software allows project managers and higher management to monitor business processes more accurately, providing them with real-time visibility into each project;
Granular accountability down to the individual level – through workflow automation software, businesses can automatically assign tasks to individuals enhancing accountability;
Reduction in use of assumptions/feelings and increased use of facts in decision making – workflow automation can help boost collaboration between teams and individuals, allowing everyone across company departments to share ideas and facts to make more informed decisions and work in harmony;
The ability to impose meaningful KPIs and generate real-world data for use in process improvement – workflow automation provides businesses with more detailed insight into their processes, allowing them to set more meaningful KPIs and optimize workflows;
Increased data security – workflow automation solutions, such as Oas36ty, offer business users state-of-the-art security, increasing information security across the organization.

These are not the only benefits of deploying a workflow automation platform. There are other ‘softer’ benefits, such as improved customer satisfaction (reduction in wait times, reduction in errors), improved job satisfaction (employees can demonstrate their productivity with facts), and improved vendor relations (improved communications and visibility into work outside the organization).

Why Do You Need Workflow Automation?

Many modern organizations are struggling with the digital transformation challenge. In many instances, task management tools still rely largely upon human memory, such as whiteboards, email, telephone, spreadsheets, post-it notes, etc. How to unify internal and external business communications with such tools?

A workflow automation platform allows organizations to drastically reduce reliance upon these communications and tracking tools, instead ensuring that all work task information and communications are either conducted within the platform or maintain a record of communications within the relevant work tasks.

Far less reliance is placed upon fallible human memory or task-tracking spreadsheets, which may not have been shared after being updated by a worker somewhere else in the company. Instead, the workflow platform maintains this information in a central repository which can be distributed or accessed by anyone with authority to do so (usually using Role-based Permissions).

Workflow Automation Examples

All departments within any organization can benefit from workflow automation. Some of the most significant use cases for implementing an automated workflow management system include:

Finance – finance departments can automate tasks and processes to eliminate manual data entry, manage complex reporting, facilitate approval processes, accept payments, etc;
Manufacturing – workflow automation reduces human error in the manufacturing while also reducing redundancies, increasing quality control, and enhancing overall collaboration between various teams resulting in faster and more reliable manufacturing processes;
Human resources – HR departments can use workflow automation to automate such processes as employee onboarding or document flow across the company, eliminating communication gaps;
Information security – workflow automation software uses state-of-the-art security tools to protect sensitive information across departments, as well as have notification systems in play that allow IT departments to react faster and monitor the overall company’s security ecosystem more easily.
Sales – by integrating a customer relationship management platform (CRM) with a workflow automation solution, businesses can automate and enhance customer communication, automate form completion, and internal collaboration.

The Value of Workflow Automation

In essence, you need a workflow automation system because it delivers a far more consistently positive experience for your customers, both external and internal, when it comes to finished work product.

Work is more effectively managed r while people can do more with the resources they have. Furthermore, business process automation arms your team and department heads with the data and information needed to drive better business performance using facts, not feelings. “I feel we are busy” can be replaced with, “We increased production output by x% without an increase in headcount.”

Ultimately, you need workflow automation because it allows you to create a competitive advantage over manually-driven competitors, as you achieve the ROI of workflow automation by delivering better quality work and services at a better price point while enjoying faster and better decision-making. And that is precisely what Oas36ty’s workflow software can provide you with.

How Oas36ty Can Help Automate Workflows

Automating workflows without a workflow management software platform is nearly impossible. The problem is that many technology platforms that offer workflow and process automation are complicated to use and they often lack functionality. Many of them require advanced coding knowledge, or the platforms offer workflow automation as a secondary or tertiary capability. That is not the case with Oas36ty.

Our powerful all-in-one workflow automation software platform offers a no-code process management solution designed with business users in mind. With Oas36ty’s workflow process automation system, you will be able to design, automate, and manage custom workflows without any IT or coding skills, providing you with a fast and reliable solution for full business automation.

Oas36ty’s workflow automation tools and solutions include:

A visual workflow designer for a simplified and easier-to-control business process management and automation;
Automated notifications that allow business users to react faster, meet deadlines, and collaborate easier;
A permission-based system that allows you to automatically set who can access specific data and projects, enhancing overall control over workflows;
Streamlined task routing tools that automatically ensure industry compliance across departments, teams, and individual employees;
In-depth data analytics helps access real-time data and manage documentation for faster and easier process optimization.

Learn more about our workflow automation software and schedule a consultation to see how Oas36ty can help you design, manage, and automate workflows. It’s time to shift your business to higher gear, and our platform is here to help you achieve that.

How do I get started creating office workflows?

Office automation doesn’t have to be complex. You can make it as simple as you need it. Here are three simple business applications you can automate.

Paid Time Off Request Approval

We’d all like to think that taking a vacation is as easy as dropping a line to your boss and booking your hotel. In reality, the process is much more complicated. Multiple levels of hierarchy and HR record-keeping prevent this from being as easy as it could be.

When you automate the request, an employee fills out an electronic form with all of the important details. It travels to the manager for approval and HR for documentation. No paper forms; no confusion; happier employees. Check out our full article on leave request automation.

Service Requests

How easy is it for you to add a user to your internal software? When handled manually, simple service requests like these tend to turn into long, complex email exchanges. The person you used to ask no longer works at the company. You tried using an email alias, but no one responds to that one. You finally get the information to the right person, but you didn’t give all the necessary details.

When you automate the process, you ensure that the right person gets the right data every time.

Suggestion Forms

Nothing is quite as manual as a suggestion box sitting beside the water cooler. If you have an employee who has a great idea, you don’t want that idea to die on a paper form, or in the wrong email inbox. When you create an automated process in a business process automation software, the initiator can fill out a form and the idea will automatically travel to the right department and can be followed up on immediately.