The lifeblood of many companies is in the ability to generate new business opportunities, convert them into leads, nurture and qualify them, and ultimately convert them into revenue. This process – attracting prospective clients to your company, identifying their needs, and nurturing them through the buying/conversion process – is what we call lead generation.

Lead generation can be an arduous process. It’s hard work finding qualified leads, keeping track of all those prospects, and then nurturing them through the sales cycle. However, a key to long-term growth for many businesses is a strong and effective lead management system.

In this post, we’ll discuss why lead management is important for businesses and how Salesforce makes it really easy to manage leads.

Also Read: Tracking Promotional Spend with Salesforce CPG Cloud

What is Lead Management?

Lead management is the process of systematically nurturing prospects, moving them through a sales pipeline, and tracking them as they become customers.

Lead management describes the process that companies use to identify and qualify potential buyers, nurture them until they are ready to buy, and then track their activities afterward. It plays a critical role in driving sales for businesses that sell complex products directly to other businesses (B2B) or that sell through intermediaries.

The goal of lead management is to facilitate the entire process from first contact through to purchase and beyond. While the term itself is straightforward enough, lead management covers a diverse range of activities. In practice, there are many different things you can do to support your lead management efforts:

1. Lead Generation Strategy – A successful lead generation strategy begins with an understanding of the customer type that you are targeting. 

2. Lead capture – Lead capture is often accomplished by using forms on landing pages and other websites, email campaigns, and social media posts to acquire contact information from prospects. The information can be collected via online subscription forms or by offering some sort of incentive for giving their contact details, such as a free trial, assessment, or consultation.

3. Nurture leads – Lead nurturing allows you to build relationships with a large pool of prospects and create a pipeline of qualified leads by providing the information and tools that help move prospects through their buying journey. 

4. Qualify leads – Any lead generation effort is a waste of time if you don’t qualify the leads generated. Indeed, spending time on unqualified leads will undermine your efforts to be efficient. You should have standards and criteria in place to determine which leads are worth your while and which ones should be disqualified.

5. Score leads – Scoring helps sales and marketing teams identify which leads are most likely to become customers, and allows them to reach out directly to those people. 

6. Convert leads into customers – The last step in the lead management process is to convert qualified leads into customers. This involves deciding on a lead conversion mode, developing a plan and then following through with implementation. The best strategies are heavily dependent on the type of product or service you’re selling and your target market demographics.

An efficient lead management system can help you by-

• Prioritize leads and focus on leads with high potential for conversions
• Makes it easy to stay in touch with leads that aren’t ready to buy right away
• Helps you close more deals because you don’t lose track of important leads
• Allows you to easily keep track of what stage of the buying process each lead is at
• Helps you forecast your sales numbers so you can plan for the future and tell your boss what to expect

Lead Management With Salesforce CRM

Salesforce is a great tool to manage your leads. With Salesforce, you can get a detailed view into all aspects of the lead management process including: lead creation, distribution and qualification, as well as follow-up and conversion.

Salesforce CRM helps businesses in managing their leads. It does so by providing the following features –

1. Auto-filling Forms and Lead Capture – This feature reduces manual data entry by automatically filling in forms with information from existing records. It also makes it easier to capture leads from web pages.

2. Lead Validation – The Lead Validation feature allows businesses to scrub bad contacts from their database, thereby ensuring that sales teams only focus on prospects who are actually interested in their products or services.

3. Assigning Leads: Salesforce CRM makes the process of assigning leads from a lead pool to sales representatives easier and more efficient. Using this feature, the system can automatically assign leads to sales reps based on various criteria such as location or industry.

4. Lead Scoring: Salesforce CRM enables businesses to assign scores to leads depending on the level of interest they show in the product or service being offered by the business. Lead scoring allows businesses to focus on those potential customers who are most likely to buy their product/service instead of wasting time and resources on those with less interest.

5. Lead Nurturing: Salesforce CRM provides tools for creating automated workflows for nurturing leads. Businesses can use this feature for sending automated emails and messages that educate potential customers and help them in their buying journey.

6. Lead Conversion: Salesforce CRM helps in tracking a lead’s journey through different stages – from a person who comes to know about your business to an actual customer. This feature helps businesses in understanding how long it takes for a lead to become a customer. This information can be used to understand what type of marketing is working and what isn’t.

7. Customizable dashboard – An easy-to-use dashboard gives you a complete view of all your leads with the complete status of each lead. The dashboard also allows you to filter leads based on specific criteria.

8. Lead management automation – Automation of repetitive tasks such as sending follow-up emails or making alerts for tasks can help you save a lot of time and effort. Moreover, it also enhances the productivity of your team by allowing them to focus on more important tasks related to generating business for your organization.

Salesforce Integrations For Lead Management

Salesforce’s applications may be integrated to manage your marketing activities, sales, and customer service, but they are not the only tools you need to run your business. That’s why Salesforce integrates with a number of third-party products to help you leverage everything you have invested in.

Some of the most popular integrations include:

1. Web analytics – Salesforce integrates with Google Analytics and other web analytics software to help you understand how visitors are using your website.

2. E-commerce platforms – If you sell online, Salesforce is compatible with Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce and others to track the progress of your sales funnel from the first touchpoint through conversion.

3. Marketing automation – Campaigns for email and social media can be managed through Salesforce integrations with Hubspot, MailChimp, Constant Contact and Hootsuite.

4. Accounting software – Connecting Salesforce to QuickBooks or Xero will allow you to better manage invoices, payments, and other financial transactions from a single dashboard.

We Can Help …

We understand that your business is unique. We know what it takes to have a strong lead management system and how to make it work for you.

We can help you with:

• Integrating your lead generation tools with Salesforce CRM.
• Setting up lead management dashboards, reports, and metrics.
• Customizing Salesforce CRM according to your organizational structure.
• Integrating the lead management system with marketing automation platforms.

Our team of certified Salesforce consultants will work hand-in-hand to understand your requirements and deliver the best services that your business requires. Feel free to contact us or mail us at sales@appshark.com