lead tracking system

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.