How to Manage Leads

So, you have run a successful marketing campaign and you have managed to gain some leads – what do you do with them?

This article will tell you how to manage those all-important potential customers. If you don’t keep them nurtured, weeks could be wasted before they decide they are not interested.

Some useful statistics…

When captured through an implemented marketing strategy, 25% of leads are immediately qualified. But often, 50% need nurturing and another 25% will never buy. Those 50% have the potential of being completely lost. There should be a strategy in place to nurture them through the process from being a lead to a customer. This is also known as the sales funnel.

Managing your leads

Managing leads is often done using an automated Lead Nurturing Programme.

Lead Nurturing Programme’s use information captured about leads during previous marketing campaigns. The campaign would have taken them to a landing page where they shared their details. For example, when downloading a free eBook.

Potential customers share their details with you to get helpful and valuable information. What they don’t know is that these details are later used to deliver marketing messages. This will help move them down the sales funnel.

These Lead Nurturing Programmes link to the sales funnel. This predicts how many sales and what revenue will come from them.

These numbers get compared to previous data. This allows marketers to estimate the percentage of leads that will drop out of the sales funnel. These are conversion ratios. They help to measure the amount of leads that needed to meet objectives.

Technology’s role in lead management

When managing leads, the Lead Nurturing Programme tends to be an automated process.

Details given by the lead track their buying behaviour. This is then used to target them with marketing messages at the right time, on the right platform.

Mapping out their buying journey will help you to influence their buying decisions.

Automated software ensures content delivered to leads is relevant to their buying journey. This feeds in a marketing message pushing them through the sales funnel. Furthermore, this influences the buyers decision.

You are not the only one influencing the buying decision

Despite automation, leads are real people with real behaviours outside of the internet. This means that the sales journey is never an A to B practice. A lead could drop out of the funnel and reappear at stage D, or they could jump straight forward to buy. This could be for many reasons, from a financial standpoint or due to the opinion of others.

Nurturing leads takes time and effort, but the result of a sale will be worth the time invested.

If you’d like more information about how you can convert and manage leads effectively, click below to check out our latest eBook, designed to help you think about your lead process.