Explore Strategies for Effective Lead Generation, Qualification, and Conversion
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define lead management.
- Describe the importance of personalized lead management for sales.
What’s Lead Management?
Lead management is a sales and marketing strategy that focuses on moving leads through the different phases of the conversion process–from initial contact, through sales, and after close. It helps businesses understand the source of their leads, optimize their marketing strategies, and improve their return on investment.
Lead management gives marketers the ability to provide leads with personalized, relevant communication and build trust at every step of the process. Because lead management involves tracking interactions with the lead from initial contact through close, as a marketer you can learn what worked, what didn’t work, and the areas to improve in your marketing strategy.
It’s important to remember that this process is iterative. You help your business most when you can understand the source of your leads and then focus your marketing strategies to improve your return on investment. Ideally, you build trust with your customers at the same time.
There are seven phases to the lead management cycle.
- Generate leads.
- Qualify and segment leads.
- Nurture leads.
- Score leads.
- Send leads to sales.
- Convert leads to customers.
- Track data and adjust outcomes.
Market at Each Phase of the Cycle
Each part of the lead management cycle is important because each step builds on what came before it. Let’s see how to create that momentum by marketing to your leads at each phase.
Generate Leads
The best way to do this is by targeting your prospects with custom content. Start by identifying the key accounts or organizations that are most likely to benefit from your products or services. Use your ideal customer profile to identify accounts to target. Next, create and deliver content that’s relevant to each account’s industry, role, and challenges. This helps increase engagement with your company. For more about lead generation, check out the Plan Marketing Content and Strategy with Marketing Cloud Account Engagement trail.
Segment and Qualify Leads
Once you identify your ideal leads, focus on tailoring your messaging and content to address the specific needs and pain points of each account. Consider using an account-based marketing strategy, where sales, marketing, and service teams work together to target key accounts. Next, engage with decision-makers at those targeted accounts through various channels such as email, social media, webinars, events, and more. Use Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and automation tools to help automate these interactions.
As you move through these steps, use lead scoring and grading to help you qualify leads, evaluating which prospects are most likely to become customers. Check out the Lead Scoring and Grading in Account Engagement module to learn more.
Nurture Leads
This phase gives you some great opportunities to use marketing automation. Utilize Account Engagement features to track and measure lead interactions with your company. Does a lead attend a webinar? Great! Create an automation rule that automatically follows up with the lead inviting them to another one on a similar topic. This helps you build a relationship with your lead that hopefully helps convert them to a customer down the road.
Score Leads
Focus on combining the power of lead scoring and lead grading based on engagement signals from your leads. Assign scores for different engagement activities such as downloading a white paper or attending webinars.
Send Leads to Sales
A strong collaboration between marketing and sales is crucial for success when identifying if a lead is sales-ready. Work with sales to define and refine the “sales-ready” criteria. Ultimately, this will save time for sales and build trust in the quality of leads you send them.
Convert Leads to Customers
Once a lead expresses a strong interest, you can present more tailored solutions, including project plans, cost estimates, and expected outcomes. This is also the time to address any questions or concerns the lead has.
Track and Adjust
After the deal is closed, be sure to follow up often at first to ensure issues are addressed promptly. The marketing team can continue to engage the customer with relevant content to maintain interest. As time goes on, you can begin to potentially upsell with different content.
You need to collect data on all phases to review and adjust accordingly. And maintain a close working relationship with sales so you can garner feedback from salespeople and managers. Then as you review this data and feedback, you can tweak your lead management process over time. The good news is that most of this data is automatically collected in Salesforce and Account Engagement.
As you can see, lead management is the backbone of a successful sales process. It’s all about collecting qualified leads and driving them through the sales cycle as efficiently as possible. This approach also enhances the lead’s experience because your content is tailored to their specific pain points. When you understand which leads are more likely to convert, you can focus your efforts on those leads, save your sales reps’ time, and increase ROI for your company.