What is lead management? This is a fairly popular concept in business recently, meaning a set of techniques and practices for attracting potential customers, subsequent work with them and analytics. How these processes look and how to apply them to a specific marketing strategy, read further in the article.
What is a lead?
Before you understand the techniques of the mentioned management, you should generally understand what a lead is. Lead is a customer who responded to a marketing message. In other words, this is your potential buyer who came to the office, answered an e-mail or phoned. Most importantly, he became interested in your offer. Based on this definition, we give the concept and lead management.
What is lead management?
Lead management is a way to manage clients from attracting them to concluding deals and further cooperation as a regular customer. How does this happen?
The first stage is lead generation
Lead Generation - attracting new customers, forming their interest in your product.
A list of criteria is being formed by which the selection will be carried out. It can be geographical, gender and age, economic (taking into account income and purchasing power) and other criteria. When a portrait of a future customer is assembled, its attraction begins, often with the help of Internet marketing leaders:
- online newsletters;
- Internet advertising (website optimization for search or SEO promotion, for example, using banner advertising);
- conferences, webinars;
- as well as through exhibitions and TV ads.
With these steps, you make yourself known in the market, and when calls from interested customers begin to arrive, the second step begins — the customer’s development towards purchase (Lead Development).
Stage Two - Lead Development
Prior to the transaction, when experienced managers will lead the client to make a purchase, it is necessary to facilitate the sales process. For this, the selling company should ideally have:
- debugged business processes that are understandable to the client - who is responsible for what, what are the production conditions, what guarantees in the event of force majeure. Everything should be in the palm of your hand, then the client's trust in you will be higher;
- a well-made, selling promotional page is the face of the company, something that the client gets to know first;
- a customer base that is correctly selected according to criteria that match what you are ready to offer;
- the product should be simple and understandable to the future consumer, more precisely, its usefulness should be obvious.
The third stage - the first sale
Lead Conversion or the first sale will be successful only if you have:
- high-quality lead generation;
- specialists have high sales skills;
- have sufficient motivation to complete successful transactions;
- Control over the quality of service is debugged
Do not forget about special offers, thanks to which the first sale will become regular.
The fourth stage - support and further cooperation
We examined what a lead is and how to work with it in the first stages of cooperation. This is an important point, but even more important - to keep the client, making him a constant.
The following tools can help with this (lead marketing):
- partnership cooperation;
- coupons, bonuses, cumulative discounts;
- sales and holiday promotions;
- conducting training courses, business seminars.
Tips for strengthening strategy at all stages of lead management
In addition to understanding what a lead is, the manager must know and apply certain tricks.
- At the stage of attracting a client using the lead-Internet marketing tool, it is possible to interest a buyer only with the help of interesting content. “Cold” calls and “cold” email newsletters have long proved their worthlessness.
- All 4 stages must work. As soon as one of them is excluded from the chain, management becomes ineffective.
- The lead management system must be adaptive and adapt to any of your clients.
- An analysis of the quality and quantity of leads is mandatory! Quality is especially important. If you noted that some channel of lead generation is inefficient, it should be replaced by a more productive one. Perhaps the analysis will show that the product is not in demand, then it should be finalized or a new one launched.
Today, lead management is not just the recommended measure to improve the business - it has become an indispensable step towards the development of the company.