Lead management is a critical piece of your sales process. Let your sales team focus on nurturing prospects who need your offerings and closing more urgent deals with lead management best practices.
If you’re looking for ways to have an effective lead management process, you’re in luck. In this blog post, we’ll discuss 8 of the most effective lead management best practices.
What is lead management?
Lead management is the process of collecting lead information and nurturing them until they convert into customers. Monitoring your leads’ interactions with your business is also part of an effective lead management process, as it helps you better understand your consumers.
8 effective lead management best practices
Now that we’ve answered the question “what is lead management,” let’s go through eight lead management best practices that you can emulate to close more deals this year:
1. Set up and document your sales process
You probably have a sales process in place. If you don’t have one, it’s time to create one to structure your sales team’s activities. A sales process shortens the sales cycle and guides your sales representatives as they close deals.
Create a live documentation of your sales process to identify inefficient efforts and duplicated tasks. Knowing these bottlenecks is half the battle. The other half is addressing them to streamline your selling process.
Make sure you keep your sales process documentation updated!
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16 sales process templates for B2B pipelines
Whether you’re building your first sales process or overhauling an existing one, these Nutshell-approved templates will give you a great head-start.
2. Make sure your leads’ data and data format are correct
Do you have a standardized and organized way of collecting lead data? If you don’t, it’s time to systematize your lead collection and ensure each lead data follows a standard data format.
A standardized and organized way to collect lead data may not impact your sales process today. As you grow your business and nurture relationships with these leads, having correct lead data and using a uniform format can save you time and avoid confusion.
Not sure how to start? Here are some tips:
Set up your form’s fields for the correct data format
Remove duplicates
Organize and clean inconsistent formatting as soon as you spot it
3. Have a secure repository of your lead data in a customer relationship management (CRM) software
To effectively manage your leads, you need a more robust tool than a spreadsheet. You can ensure your lead data and profile are always up to date with a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, as everyone on your team can access it after every lead nurturing activity.
Do you need to send follow-up emails? A CRM can help you create email drip campaigns so you don’t miss sending out follow-ups. You can avoid sending duplicate emails with a CRM, as everyone can view the most recent transactions and conversations with each lead.
4. Take advantage of your CRM’s automation tools
Manual data entry is not only inefficient, but also a possible source of error. Minimize errors and maximize efficiency with the different automation tools available in your CRM. Some of them are:
Assigning leads to sales reps: Automatically assign leads to the best suited sales rep for the job. Nutshell even helps your sales reps succeed at closing deals by enabling you to provide reminders to them.
Moving leads in your pipeline: Let your sales team focus on selling, and let your CRM help move your leads in your pipeline. Nutshell automatically advances leads from stage to stage based on the goals you’ve set. It can also update lead confidence.
Lead scoring: How likely is a lead to convert, and how soon will they do it? Let your CRM help you prioritize which leads to nurture by automating lead scoring. Nutshell has simplified this process with lead confidence.
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Marketing, sales, and customer service teams all benefit from segmentation. Persona segmentation helps marketing teams craft effective campaigns with relevant messages to different buyer personas.
Service teams can segment customers so that they can improve their support efforts for different groups of customers. Do some customers prefer email support or phone calls? Your customers will need assistance with different features or aspects of your product or service.
Meanwhile, sales teams can segment leads to customize the buying process for different prospects. Does it make sense for your team to segment leads based on products they’re interested in, their location, or the number of times they’ve purchased from you?
Organize and segment your leads according to categories that will help you improve their customer journey and make your process more efficient.
6. Nurture your leads
Have you ever purchased from a business that sent you a follow-up email about a product you added to cart but never purchased?
Keep your leads engaged with your business, so they smoothly move through your sales funnel. Send timely and personalized emails that guide your prospects to purchase from you. A cart abandonment email or an email offering a sales demo are some excellent lead nurturing examples.
7. Use insightful reporting dashboards
Do you have a healthy sales pipeline? Track and measure your lead data using insightful reports and dashboards.
These dashboards show how your team is performing. Having reports that break down the performance per stage lets you identify the stages where your sales team struggles or which are highly efficient.
8. Practice good CRM data hygiene
The average rate of data decay is 30% every year. Keep your lead data healthy by practicing good CRM data hygiene, which helps ensure that your data is as accurate as possible.
Regular CRM data cleansing is a helpful activity that removes inaccurate, incomplete, duplicate, and corrupted data. Do some of your emails go unopened? Does a lead stop engaging with your business after a certain period? It’s a good idea to let go of these leads.
Effectively manage your leads with Nutshell
Managing your leads is a crucial piece of your sales process. With the help of a robust but user-friendly CRM like Nutshell, you can nurture leads more efficiently and effectively. Nutshell has powered more than $600 million in sales per year.
In addition, our partners over at WebFX are lead management experts, having helped its customers generate more than 7.8 million leads. Together, Nutshell and WebFX can help you with your lead management process and drive results for your bottom line.
Want to see how Nutshell can help your business? Try it for free for 14 days.
