CRM

Lead Management: Definition, Steps, and Best Practices

Liucija Adomaite
LAST UPDATED
August 2, 2024
READING TIME
7 min.

96% of website visitors aren't ready to buy.

That's why you have to generate, track, and nurture the right leads.

For that, you need successful lead management.

This article covers everything you need to know about lead management, including the definition, process, best practices, and automation. Remember that the average cost per lead in the B2B SaaS industry is $237.

So there's a lot of money hiding in plain sight.

What is lead management?

Lead management is the process of capturing, tracking, and nurturing potential customers from initial contact through to conversion.

It usually involves series of steps to analyze lead data to determine how likely they are to make a purchase. After leads make a purchase, they become customers and lead management tracks all steps along the way.

Why is lead management so important?

Lead management is the backbone of all sales processes.

Lead management is essential for a winning business strategy, because it aids in the conversion of prospects into paying customers.

It enables businesses to track lead origins, refine marketing efforts, and enhance overall return on investment.

Lead management maximizes the efficiency of sales efforts, improves customer conversion rates, and drives revenue growth.

This is how lead management benefits sales processes:

  1. Prioritization: Lead management helps sales teams focus on high-potential leads first, increasing chances of conversion.
  2. Follow-Up: Automated reminders ensure timely follow-ups, reducing the risk of losing interested prospects.
  3. Personalization: Tracking lead information allows for tailored communication, enhancing customer engagement.
  4. Analysis: Metrics and analytics from lead management systems help refine marketing and sales strategies for better outcomes.

Most importantly, businesses can better prioritize leads thanks to lead management and focus on the ones that are most likely to convert.

Lead Management: 8 most important steps

1. Lead Generation: Capturing potential customer information through various marketing channels like forms, social media, and events.

Lead generation involves collecting contact information from potential customers.

This can be done using online forms, social media campaigns, or in-person events.

The goal is to gather enough details to initiate a relationship and start them on the path to becoming paying customers.

2. Lead Tracking: Monitoring and recording lead activities and interactions with your brand.

Lead tracking involves keeping a record of all interactions and activities a lead has with your brand.

This includes actions such as website visits, email opens, and social media engagements.

Tracking this data helps you understand the lead's interests and readiness to buy.

3. Lead Qualification: Evaluating leads based on predefined criteria to determine their potential to convert.

Qualified leads are potential customers who have been vetted and meet the predefined criteria indicating they are likely to convert.

Rather than manually finding these leads, you can use the lemlist lead database. With lemlist, you can find leads, verify them before adding them to your database, and categorize these prospects so it's easy to track them in the sales pipeline.

Moreover, qualified leads should align with your buyer persona. A buyer persona is a detailed description of a person who represents your target audience.

If you are in the process of creating your buyer persona, use this free buyer persona template.

Follow the steps in our in-depth buyer persona guide that explains how to define your B2B audience.

4. Lead Distribution: Assigning qualified leads to appropriate sales representatives or teams.

Lead distribution is the process of assigning qualified leads to the appropriate sales representatives or teams.

This ensures that each lead is handled by someone best suited to address their needs.

Efficient lead distribution enhances the chances of conversion by providing timely and relevant follow-up.

5. Lead Nurturing: Engaging leads with relevant content and follow-ups to build relationships and move them through the sales funnel.

Lead nurturing involves engaging leads with relevant content and consistent follow-ups over time.

This process builds relationships and keeps your brand top-of-mind. The goal is to guide leads through the sales funnel until they are ready to make a purchase.

6. Lead Scoring: Ranking leads based on their behavior, engagement, and fit to prioritize sales efforts.

Lead scoring is the process of assigning numerical values to leads based on their behavior, engagement, and fit.

This helps prioritize which leads are most likely to convert. Sales teams can then focus their efforts on high-scoring leads for better efficiency and results.

At this step, your CRM will play a vital role.

The general procedure of lead scoring with your CRM software includes the following:

  • Your CRM assigns point values to specific information (event attendance, downloads, submitted forms, etc.)
  • Leads come into the CRM during lead gen, and the CRM scores them automatically according to your given criteria.
  • When the goal score is reached, your CRM notifies the sales team to further qualify your lead and push them further down the sales process.

If you don't have a CRM just yet, consider implementing a free crm that's powerful enough to make automations and sales management procedures.

7. Conversion: Conversion is the process of turning qualified leads into paying customers.

This is achieved through effective sales strategies and closing techniques. The goal is to finalize the transaction and secure commitment from the lead.

8. Analysis and Optimization: Analysis and optimization involve reviewing key metrics and data from the lead management process to identify what's working and what isn't.

By analyzing conversion rates, lead sources, and sales cycle length, you can pinpoint areas for improvement.

Adjustments can then be made to marketing and sales strategies to enhance future performance.

This continuous process ensures your lead management efforts remain effective and aligned with business goals.

What are the best practices for lead management?

1. Use a CRM System: Implement a robust CRM system like Salesforce or HubSpot to centralize lead information and track interactions. This provides a single source of truth for your sales team, ensuring no lead falls through the cracks. Customizable dashboards and reporting can help you monitor lead progress and sales activities in real time.

2. Qualify Leads Early: Develop a clear set of criteria for lead qualification, such as budget, company size, and decision-making authority. Use this criteria to quickly assess leads during initial interactions. This helps your sales team focus efforts on the most promising opportunities from the outset.

3. Automate Follow-Ups: Use marketing automation tools to send scheduled follow-up emails and reminders. Automation ensures each lead receives timely communication without manual intervention. Schedule follow-ups based on lead interactions to keep engagement consistent.

4. Personalize Communication: Use data collected from lead interactions to tailor your messages. Address specific pain points and preferences revealed through their behavior and previous communications. Personalized emails, offers, and content increase the likelihood of conversion.

5. Lead Scoring: Assign points to leads based on actions like website visits, email opens, and downloads. Adjust scores based on demographic information to prioritize high-value leads. Regularly review and tweak your scoring model to reflect the behaviors that lead to conversions.

6. Nurture Leads: Develop a series of nurturing emails and content targeted at different stages of the buyer's journey. Use educational content, case studies, and personalized offers to guide leads from awareness to decision. Nurturing builds trust and keeps your brand top-of-mind.

7. Integrate Marketing and Sales: Implement regular meetings between marketing and sales teams to discuss lead quality and feedback. Use shared goals and performance metrics to ensure alignment. Integration tools like Zapier can help sync data between marketing and sales platforms.

8. Track Metrics: Monitor KPIs like conversion rates, time-to-conversion, and lead source effectiveness using analytics tools. Regularly review these metrics to understand which strategies are working. Use these insights to make data-driven decisions and adjustments to your approach.

9. Optimize Channels: Analyze the performance of different lead generation channels like social media, email campaigns, and webinars. Focus more resources on channels that consistently deliver high-quality leads. Adjust your marketing spend and strategies based on channel performance data.

10. Regular Training: Keep your sales team updated with the latest lead management tools and techniques through regular training sessions. Role-playing scenarios and real-world case studies can help reinforce best practices. Continuous education ensures your team remains competitive and effective.

11. Feedback Loop: Establish regular feedback sessions between sales and marketing teams to discuss the quality and progress of leads. Use this feedback to refine targeting, messaging, and lead nurturing strategies. This continuous loop helps both teams stay aligned and improve lead-handling processes.

12. CRM data maintenance: Regularly audit your CRM database to remove duplicate, outdated, or irrelevant lead information. Implement data-cleaning tools to automate this process and maintain data accuracy. Clean data ensures your team is working with up-to-date, relevant information, enhancing overall efficiency.

How to choose a lead management system?

First, you have to define your business requirements, such as lead volume, team size, and specific features like lead scoring, automation, and reporting capabilities. This ensures the system aligns with your operational needs.

It crucial to ensure the lead management system integrates seamlessly with your existing tools and platforms, such as CRM, email marketing software, and sales automation tools. Integration facilitates data flow and improves overall efficiency.

Ease of use is another important factor when choosing the best lead management system. Evaluate the user interface and overall user experience. A system that's easy to navigate and use will lead to better adoption and less training time for your team.

Another tip is to look for systems that allow for customization to fit your unique workflows and processes. This includes adaptable dashboards, reporting settings, and lead scoring criteria.

Choose a system that can scale with your business growth. Ensure it can handle increasing lead volumes and expanded functionalities as your business evolves.

Moreover, make sure you assess the available customer support and training resources. Reliable customer support and comprehensive training help ensure your team can effectively use the system.

Last but not least, take advantage of free trials or demos. This allows your team to test the system's features, usability, and compatibility with your processes before committing.

The next big step: automating your lead generation

Lead generation, especially on a large scale, is a lot of work, so you need a system that helps you find and nurture these leads.

Lead management and generation on a large scale is virtually impossible without a system that automates the processes.

The good news is that there are robust tools designed to source contact information, verify that these details are correct, reach out to these prospects, and nurture them up to conversion point.

However, paying for all of them can be quite an investment especially for small and midisize businesses who are jus starting out.

We recommend all-in-one tool to save big on your sales budget. With lemlist, you can find leads and reach out to them on multiple platforms like emails, calls, and LinkedIn.

This is the stage where you identify potential customers and assess whether a lead is a good fit for your product or service. This could be via a webinar, an ebook, cold calls and more.

Usually for B2B businesses, you might want to host an event and invest in content marketing and even social media marketing like Linkedin.

Rather than manually finding these leads, you can use the biggest B2B lead database with 450 million+ contacts.

You don't have to use any 3rd party tools, because each lead is verified in lemlist. It allows you to directly connect with key decision-makers and save time by eliminating manual tasks, complex setups, or incorrect contacts.

Lead management and CRM

Lead management involves tracking, nurturing, and converting potential customers, while a CRM system provides the tools and platform to effectively execute these tasks.

By integrating lead management with CRM, businesses can streamline their processes.

Lead management integration ensures that every lead is efficiently followed up, relevant data is recorded, and personalized communication is maintained.

Ultimately, it leads to better customer relationships and higher conversion rates.

Read more about CRM automation and what manual tasks you should automate within your core business functions like marketing, sales and support.

Key takeaways

Lead management is crucial in converting website visitors into customers, emphasizing its importance in optimizing marketing strategies and maximizing.

Lead management involves various processes, from capturing and tracking to nurturing potential customers.

Automating follow-ups, personalizing communication, and regularly tracking metrics enhance lead management effectiveness.

Liucija Adomaite
Liucija Adomaite is a viral content writer and organic traffic expert on a mission to help turn ambitious businesses into big names.
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G2 Rating
Price
Best for
Standout feature
Con
4.9
star
star
star
star
star
$30/mo
$75/mo
$2,999/mo
Large, distributed sales teams
AI evaluation precision, gamified KPIs
Lack of tracking system
4.6
star
star
star
star
star-half
Not publicly available
Sales operations and finance teams
Powerful configurability
Limited training resources and complex to navigate
4.4
star
star
star
star
star-half
Not publicly available
Mid-market and enterprise businesses
Comprehensive incentive management
Potentially high cost and steep learning curve
4.7
star
star
star
star
star-half
$15/user/mo
$40/user/mo
Enterprise: custom price
Complex sales structures and businesses of all sizes
Complex sales structures and businesses of all sizes
Steep learning curve
4.6
star
star
star
star
star-half
Not publicly available
Collaborative teams
Connected planning
Complexity and steep learning curve
4.6
star
star
star
star
star-half
Not publicly available
Companies with complex sales structures
Complex incentive compensation management (ICM) with high efficiency and accuracy
Complexity for smaller teams and potentially high costs
4.7
star
star
star
star
star-half
Not publicly available
Companies who want to automate commission calculations and payouts
Simplicity and ease of use
Lack of features like redirection
4.7
star
star
star
star
star-half
$30/user/mo
$35/user/mo
Custom: upon request
Businesses that need a comprehensive and user-friendly sales compensation management software
Ease of use and adoption
Lack of ability to configure the product based on user needs
4.8
star
star
star
star
star-half
Not publicly available
Companies with modern sales culture and businesses who want real-time insights
A built-in dispute management and real-time visibility
Users say it works slowly, customer support is slow
4.9
star
star
star
star
star
$30/user/mo
$50/user/mo
Smaller sales teams
Powerful automation
Lesser user base and average user interface
4.7
star
star
star
star
star-half
Not publicly available
Companies with scalable needs
Automated Commission Calculations
Lack of filtering by date, no mobile app
ERP vs. CRM
ERP
CRM
Summary
Backbone of a business's internal operations.
Backbone of customer-centric interactions and operations.
Goal
To centralize and streamline core business processes in a company.
To increase customer experience, satisfaction and loyalty, and boost sales.
Focus
Internal operations and processes across departments (finance, accounting, inventory, supply chain, HR, and sales).
All interactions with leads and customers.
Manages
Internal business data like financial data, inventory levels, production details, supply chain, HR info.
All customer data like contact info, purchase history, communication history, customer preferences and more.
Users
Finance, accounting, operations, supply chain, and HR departments.
Customer-facing teams like sales, marketing, and customer service.
Benefits
Streamlines operations, improves data accuracy, enhances decision-making, boosts collaboration, increases productivity.
Improves customer relationships, increases sales, strengthens customer service, personalizes marketing campaigns, provides insights.
Price
$150 per user per year on average.
$10 to $30 per user per month on average.
PRM Tool
Rating
Feature
Pro
Con
Mobile App
Integrations
Free Plan
Pricing
4.65
star
star
star
star
star-half
Org-wide alignment
User-friendly layout and database
Suboptimal as a personal CRM
square-check
Lack of tracking system
square-check
Team: $20/month
Business: $45/month
4.7
star
star
star
star
star-half
Social Media Integration
Easy contact data collection
No marketing/sales features
square-check
Lack of tracking system
square-xmark
7-day trial
$12/month
4.75
star
star
star
star
star-half
Block Functions
High customization capability
Not a dedicated CRM
square-check
Limited
square-check
Plus: €7.50/month
Business: €14/month
N/A
Open-source
Open-source flexibility
Requires extensive manual input
square-xmark
Limited
square-check
Self-hosted
$9/month or
$90/year
3.1
star
star
star
Simple iOS app
Ideal for non-tech-savvy users
iPhone only
square-check
iOS only
Limited
square-xmark
1-month trial
$1.49/month or
$14.99/month
3.6
star
star
star
star-half
Smart Contact Management
Feature-rich and flexible
Reported bugs
square-check
Rich
square-xmark
7-day trial
Premium: $13.99/month
Teams: $17.99/month
4.4
star
star
star
star
star-half
Customizable Interface
Customizable for teamwork
Pricey for personal use
square-check
Rich
square-xmark
Standard: $24/member
Premium: $39/member
4.7
star
star
star
star
star-half
Integrated Calling
Integrated Calling
Too sales-oriented & pricey
square-check
Rich
square-xmark
14-day trial
Startup: $59/user/month
Professional: $329/user/month
4.8
star
star
star
star
star
Business Card Scanning
Business Card Scanning
Mobile only
square-check
Limited
square-check
$9.99/month
4.45
star
star
star
star
star-half
160+ app integrations
Comprehensive integrations
No free app version
square-check
Rich
square-xmark
14-day trial
$29.90/month or
$24.90/month (billed annually)
Capterra Rating
Free Trial
Free Plan
Starting Price (excluding the free plan)
Maximum Price (for the most expensive plan)
Best for
4.5
star
star
star
star
star-half
square-check
14-day
square-check
€15/month/seat billed annually
€792/month/3 seats billed annually + €45/month for each extra seat
Versatility and free plan
4.2
star
star
star
star
square-check
30-day
square-xmark
But it offers reduced price to authorised nonprofit organisations
€25/user/month
€500/user/month billed annually (includes Einstein AI)
Best overall operational CRM
4.3
star
star
star
star
star-half
square-xmark
square-check
Limited to 3 users
Comprehensive incentive management
€52/user/month billed annually
Small-medium businesses and automation
4.5
star
star
star
star
star-half
square-check
14-day
square-xmark
€14/seat/month billed annually
€99/seat/month billed annually
Sales teams and ease of use
4.1
star
star
star
star
square-xmark
square-check
Limited 10 users
$9.99/user/month billed annually
$64.99/user/month billed annually
Free plan for very small teams up to 10
CRM goal
Increase the sales conversion rate for qualified leads from marketing automation campaigns by 10% in the next 6 months.
SMART Breakdown
1. Specific: It targets a specific area (conversion rate) for a defined segment (qualified leads from marketing automation).
2. Measurable: The desired increase (10%) is a clear metric, and the timeframe (6 months) allows for progress tracking.
3. Achievable: A 10% increase is possible based on historical data and potential improvements.
4. Relevant: Boosting sales from marketing efforts aligns with overall business objectives.
5. Time-bound: The 6-month timeframe creates urgency and a clear target date.
Actions
Step 1: Refine lead qualification criteria to ensure high-quality leads are nurtured through marketing automation.
Step 2: Personalize marketing automation campaigns based on lead demographics, interests, and behavior.
Step 3: Develop targeted landing pages with clear calls to action for qualified leads.
Step 4: Implement lead scoring to prioritize high-potential leads for sales follow-up.
Step 5: Track and analyze campaign performance to identify areas for optimization.
Outcomes
Increased sales and revenue
Improved marketing automation ROI
Marketing and sales alignment
Data-driven marketing optimization
Table
CDP Software
CRM Software
Approach
Data-centric
Customer-centric
Focus
Interactions across various channels and touchpoints, both online and offline.
Sales, marketing, and customer service interactions.
Functionality
Automatically collects, organizes, tags, and makes data available in real-time.
Helps businesses track customer interactions, sales pipelines, prospects, and service requests.
Goals
Personalized customer experiences across all channels.
Better customer relationships, streamlined processes, and improved profitability.
Benefits
Data integration, management, and accessibility, allowing for detailed analysis and segmentation.
Better communication within teams and with customers by organizing information about customer interactions and history.
Data Handling
Handles both identified and anonymous data, stitches together various data points.
Deals primarily with identified customer data.
Use Cases
Personalized marketing campaigns, targeted advertising, content customization across multiple channels.
Managing campaigns and leads, enhancing customer service, providing better customer support, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Examples
Insider, Bloomreach, Salesforce Marketing Cloud CDP
HubSpot, Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional, and Zoho CRM
CRM
Free plan
Best feature
Best for
Con
1. HubSpot CRM
square-check
Sales automation
Sales teams
Up to 1,000 contacts
2. Insightly
square-check
Custom fields
Basic needs
Not enough info about the free plan
3. Agile CRM
square-check
Deal and sales pipeline tracking
Small teams
Up to 10 users
4. Zoho CRM
square-check
Lead and contact management
Businesses of all sizes
Limited to 3 users
5. ClickUp
square-check
Unlimited tasks and unlimited members
Personal use
Up to 100MB storage
6. EngageBay
square-check
Live chat
Small and midsize enterprises
Up to 1,000 branded emails per month
7. Bitrix24
square-check
Unlimited users and 5 scrum teams
Big teams
Up to 5GB of cloud storage
8. FreshSales
square-check
Easy to use and simple setup
Beginners
Up to 3 users
9. Mailchimp
square-check
Very beginner friendly
Marketing teams
Send up to 500 branded emails per month
Type of Affiliate Marketing
Unattached
Related
Involved
Format
Paid advertising
Social media or YouTube channels
Dedicated website or blog
Focus
Quick income
Your niche
Your audience
Engagement with your audience
square-xmark
square-check
square-check
square-check
square-check
Very close connection with your audience
Pro
Little effort
Higher credibility thanks to your niche
Long-lasting and scalable
Con
Paid ads cost a lot
Potential for bias since you don’t use the thing you promote
Require time, effort, and dedication

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