4 Ways to Practice Profitable Lead Management

Are you trying to collect more information about your contacts and develop more personalized communication between you and your leads?

The best way for your company to collect more data about your leads is through developing a successful lead management campaign.

By using a set of corresponding tools that will help your company filter out any unqualified leads and gain a better understand of the buying cycle of your good leads.

When a successful lead management strategy is executed, you will effectively deliver more qualified lead to your sales team while also offering your leads a more enjoyable, targeted experience.

How Your Company Can Practice Successful Lead Management

Lead Nurturing

So someone just became a lead on your site. Not sure what you should do next to keep engaging with your leads?

Unfortunately, most leads aren't immediately ready to buy. Rather than forcing those leads into a pushy sales process, lead nurturing enables you to send them a series of customized emails that eases leads through the decision-making process, improving your lead-to-customer conversion ratio.

When you're first setting up a lead nurturing campaign, it's important to identify the buying cycle of your leads. Knowing what information and offers are relevant to your leads can help you develop a specific set of automated emails through workflows to help push your leads through the various stages of your sales funnel.

When developing your lead nurturing campaign, ask yourself the following questions:

• Do you have various offers that fit into the different stages of your customers buying cycle?

• Are you going to need to create different emails to target leads based on interests and level of activity?

• How often should you be scheduling your workflows?

Now that your sending automated emails to your leads, are you sending the right content to the right lead?

List Segmentation

Are you sending your leads irrelevant emails? Back in the day (ya know...10 years ago), companies would simply blast email promotions to their entire contact database. Those days are in the past.

Companies can know create segmented lists based on their leads behaviors and form fills. Once you actually start utilizing list segmentation you might be wondering how you can slice and dice your contacts into various categories.

Consider segmenting yours lists by:

• Geography

• Age

• Gender

• Buyer persona

• Interests

• Actions on your site

• Stages in sales cycle

Once you've segmented your lists, you're able to send targeted emails to certain lists, helping you push those leads down the sales funnel.

It wouldn't make sense to send Paula an email about your recent ebook, 44 Incredible Social Media Statistics when she is interested in learning more about generating more inbound marketing customers. You would want to send her more targeted information that will not only provide her with more information about the area she is interested in but help her convert and eventually become a customer.

If you're still unsure about implementing list segmentation to develop a more efficient lead management campaign, consider these statistics from eMarketer, 39% of email marketers that practice list segmentation see better open rates; 28% see lower opt-out and unsubscribe rates; and 24% see better email deliverability, increased sales leads, and greater revenue.

Lead Scoring

What sales person wouldn't love to know which leads are sales ready?

As a sales person, it can sometimes be hard to distinguish the good leads from the bad, causing them to spend 75 percent of the day determining which leads are qualified and which ones are  just visiting your site.

Through lead scoring, both your sales and marketing teams can automatically assign certain scores to each lead depending on their interests, behaviors and actions through social media, email and on your site.

The main points of lead scoring is:

• To avoid harassing leads with contact from sales before they’re ready to buy and to identify leads that need to be nurtured more.

• To maximize the efficiency of your sales team so they can easily identify and work only the leads who are sales-ready.

Once you've assigned values for each lead qualification category, you can begin to assess what score would indicate a qualified lead. Whether its 100 or even 200, it is important to know that if a lead is continually engaging with your site, their score will also move up and down.

A lead that wasn't qualified on Monday could actually become a lead by Friday, through downloading various resources and engaging with your site.

Customer Relationship Management

You've finally identified your companies qualified leads. At this point, your sales team should start keeping track of any communication they have with each lead. It's important to recognize that your lead won't be ready to buy the next day, it takes time to develop a relationship. Don't just keep track of what forms your leads fill out, you should be able to identify how each lead came to your site, what pages they've viewed, where they added  to any segmented lists, what offers did they download, and at what point did they become a customer.

Identifying the various stages of each buyer personas buying cycle can help your company develop a relationship with leads. By understanding and knowing what questions your leads will ask and certain reservations they might have when it comes to buying your product or service, you can better manage your leads and develop a relationship with them.

When trying to create a more personal relationship with your leads its important to integrate your CRM software with your HubSpot account.

The importance of  integrating HubSpot with your CRM software:

• Allows you to see the connection between your marketing efforts and lead qualities.

• Able to personalize your marketing through data received from CRM software like Salesforce.

• Find out which marketing campaigns and efforts are generating the most customers with closed-loop reporting.

Once you've implemented these four ways, you can develop a more effective lead management campaign targeting each of your companies buyer personas.