Sales Lead Management is Most Important Task in Any Business!

Successful businesses may not always have the best sales people but what they definitely have is a process to take care of “Sales Lead Management”. If statistics are to be believed, as many as 35-50% of the sales are decided by how fast the vendor responds. With sales lead management playing such a vital role, let’s discuss about it in detail.

Sales lead management is essentially a set of methodologies adopted by companies to get potential clientele. These methodologies are adopted through well-tailored marketing strategies and campaigns. This field of management deals with the businesses advertising efforts and the response of potential clientele to these advertising efforts. These strategies are mainly designed for business to business (B2B) and business to consumers (B2C).  Sales lead management takes place before sales management and customer relation management. It is where the potential client first meets the business and the efforts adopted by the business to then convert the potential client to a client and then retain the loyalty of this client.

Now that the concepts of sales lead management are clear, let’s have a glance on what actually goes behind the scenes – the process and the related stages of sales lead management.

A Generic Sales Lead Management Process

Sales Lead Management is a straightforward approach, making use of some result-focused stages.

1. 1. Business adopts a range of advertising strategies to generate leads

1. 1. Once the advert has reached the recipient, they respond leading to inquiries, which is a lead

1. 1. The client’s information is taken

1. 1. This information is then cross checked for validity

1. 1. The leads that pass the validity test are organized as per priority

1. 1. After grading the leads in the previous step, the information is then passed on to the respective sales and marketing teams

1. 1. The teams then get in touch with the leads

1. 1. The information is then archived for future business correspondence

1. The client now converts to a sale

The process might be simple, what makes it tricky is the involvement of potential customer’s emotions. This subjective aspect of the process needs to be nurtured carefully so as to convert into sales and not result in a lost lead.

Implementing a Proper Sales Lead Management System

Now that you are convinced with the utility and advantages of sales management, and have further realized the need, it is important to know how to implement sales lead management in your enterprise.

The introduction to the World Wide Web and electronic media into the business, makes this process extremely technology centric. Very often most of the data and inquiries come through the internet and the same needs to be handled electronically as well.  This makes sales lead management an easy process with the software (CRMs, ERPs) available to manage large volumes of data, at the same time classifying, organizing and interpreting this data to make relevant decisions. This being said, sales lead management deals with people and the main focus of this is what the deciding factor is for them. Therefore, the importance of personal service cannot be emphasized enough.

The ultimate goal of sales lead management is to sustain revenue and widen the business reach. This also envelopes the strategies adopted to retain the clientele and make them keep coming back.

Sales lead management is the process of generating, nurturing, converting and retaining leads and is very well managed in an online Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) system. Use one which supports your business and helps you get the most out of your sales exercise.