Lead management: definition, advantages and strategy

Improving the customer experience

Given the growing competition in the market, the customer experience is becoming a major differentiating factor for brands. Indeed, pushing prospects to show an interest in your offer requires a lead management policy. In addition, brands can then:

• Make the buying experience simpler and more emotionally focused, as proposed by experiential marketing
• Maintain an editorial calendar provided to generate identification with the product/service: articles, podcasts, videos, and so on.

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In the case of services, do not hesitate to create enriching content without revealing all your secrets. Engaging customers/users helps brands optimize their conversion rate.

Better productivity of the sales teams

Secondly, good lead management is not only effective for the sales of a brand. It also improves the relationship between the different departments of a structure. Indeed, efficiently managing leads implies the centralization of prospects and customer data. Thanks to this, the marketing and sales teams benefit from a clear and joint vision of adopting commercial strategies. The entire staff works with the same goal, and the efforts pay off within the lead marketing funnel. Therefore, lead management is a good way to guarantee the achievement of a company’s annual objectives.

By centralizing customer data, lead management helps to set common and clearer objectives.

Acceleration of the sales process

Finally, what could be better than lead management to accelerate your sales processes? Indeed, we have already mentioned the clear vision it offers, but there is more. In addition to centralizing lead data, it also improves the quality of this data. Brands then propose better answers to latent needs. So, it encourages cross-selling, that is, additional products/services. Find the definition of this term in the video below.

Furthermore, good lead management processes specify the exact position of the prospect in the marketing funnel. It is true that more data, and better internal communication, help to get a clearer picture of the current status of your potential customers.

Generate leads

First, practicing lead management requires a good understanding of the practice. Indeed, we must maintain sight of the objective: to discover and attract new customers. So, the most important step is to generate as many leads as possible. To do so, companies can play on content-based lead generation strategies. In the case of a blog, feel free to solicit the user as many times as possible to collect data about them.

Adobe’s marketing tactics generate leads and convert them into customers through lead nurturing (Source: Shutterstock)

Organize your prospect database

Next, companies interested in lead management must focus on capturing and qualifying prospects. In concrete terms, these processes help brands identify and classify their prospects according to their propensity to become customers. In short, these two terms can be defined as follows:

• Lead capture: obtaining, then keeping the contact information of potential customers
• Qualification of prospects: assessing prospects in terms of their potential value and adherence to the company’s brand image.

Thus, qualified prospects are identified, and we communicate effectively to sell more and to more customers.

Thanks to this, companies focus their efforts on the most promising prospects! This is how the customer conversion rate improves.

Oracle’s lead management strategy stands out for its use of complex data to carry out advanced analysis. (Source: Shutterstock)

Multiplying customer relations

Finally, as leads multiply and are increasingly converted into customers, it is now the relationship phase that counts. Here, communication efforts are key. Brands are looking to increase their sales by maintaining strong customer relationships. There are several levers of action:

• Maintaining regular contact with their most qualified prospects
• Provide relevant information to promising prospects to convert them more quickly.
• Determine the typical profiles of customers
• Personalize marketing campaigns
• Reward the best customers to promote advocacy marketing

Microsoft optimizes its customer experience and multiplies its sales thanks to the marketing efforts of lead management. (Source: Pexels)