Lead management is the process of moving a sales lead or prospect from one stage of your sales funnel to the next. You can manage your leads by keeping constant tabs on new inquiries, pairing leads with a company sales rep, and recording all leads’ interactions with your company. As part of lead management, your lead’s sales rep should also qualify and score the prospect and regularly reevaluate their assessments.
Role of Lead management with CRM :
CRM systems and lead management go hand in hand. The best CRM software makes it easier to harness the benefits of lead management, such as these:
Lead qualification and scoring – CRM software is crucial for properly qualifying and scoring your leads. Without CRM, you can’t centralize lead scores for your entire team to see, and this absence hampers your sales approach because your team can’t prioritize accordingly.
Lead information – With CRM software, you can pull up everything you need to know about a lead on one screen from within the same interface. This function is a big step up from creating separate documents for each sales lead or keeping paper records only.
Sales rep accountability – No sales rep is perfect; even the best ones have room for improvement. Such improvements are part of lead management since, for example, improving a rep’s average response time can lead to more satisfied leads and thus more sales. CRMs can track response times and other statistics that keep your team accountable and highlight areas where improvement is needed.
Lead reporting – If you kept all your sales data in separate documents outside a unified system, you’d need more time and brainpower to figure out that most of your leads belong to certain demographics. With CRMs, not only do you store this important lead management data in one place, but you can also generate reports on these insights in just a few clicks. You can use what you learn to plan demographic marketing strategies that cater to the groups to which your leads belong.
