Lead Management: What is it and Why do you Need it?
Sales is undoubtedly the most crucial component of any business. It is that part of a business which attempts at getting customers into buying more, so that more revenue can be generated. The more the sales, more will be the revenue, and this translates to better profitability.
Now, having realized the paramount importance of sales in any industry, it is to be borne in mind that lead generation is the foundation upon which sales prospects can be constructed. Sales leads—the data identifying potential buyers—happens to be the lifeline of any modern business today. As is to the common practice among modern businesses today, technology plays a key role in managing this critical element. The innovative lead management technology is being extensively used by many global enterprises.
What is Lead Management Software and How Does it Help Businesses?
Lead Management Software Helps Enterprises to Efficiently Manage Leads
In the simplest form, leads are your potential customers who show interest on your product or service, but have not yet made a single purchase. With business growth comes an increased load of leads that needs to be managed efficiently, in order to channelize the flow and convert as much leads as possible among existing customers.
The process of capturing leads and tracking their behavior to qualify and engage with them, until they prove to be ready for moving to the next phase of making a sales transaction, is called lead management. It is through automating the lead qualification process to the maximum possible extent that enterprises can handle their leads, come in from varied sources efficiently. Here’s where Lead Management Applications play a key role in assisting the sales teams of modern business organizations.
How Does a Lead Management System Work?
A Lead Management Software Development Company helps enterprises by providing business-specific features that assist handling of the various stages present in the lead management process. The key features are discussed below:
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Capturing leads from multiple sources is enabled
An effective lead management software must help users easily capture leads that’s originating from various sources in real-time, securely. Lead capture automation ensures feeding each lead into the system and thus prevents lead leakage.
By capturing the source as well, it helps identify which marketing campaigns deliver and which ones don’t. It is capable of assessing automatically the sources that generates the most number of leads and revenues for the organization. Leads from different sources such as emails, chats, and web forms are captured and delivered securely for consideration.
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Lead enrichment & tracking helps the sales team
When a lead enters the lead management tool, its profile gets automatically enriched with commonly available information such as the company name, job title, social media profile, etc. This relieves the sales team from having to take the extra effort and spend time on researching and manually entering data.
Tracking website visitors helps businesses to obtain an idea about what leads are predominantly looking at the site, their position in the buying process, and the likelihood of their purchasing the product or service. Better understanding and communication with leads is enabled mainly due to the ability of identifying their buying intentions.
Factors such as links clicked, pages visited, downloads made – the lead’s general activities on the website, in addition to email and product engagement are tracked together efficiently. With these valuable insights, the sales team personnel’s will be able to understand leads’ interests and then customize the sales efforts accordingly.
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Lead scoring feature for qualifying the leads
Leads get checked for identifying their worth – to assess whether they can be pursued or not. Those qualified leads alone are considered sales-ready. Lead scoring, the methodology for ranking the leads, for determining the sales-readiness of a potential buyer, is simply employed for effectively qualifying leads.
According to the rating of their interest on the product or service, their position filled in the purchase cycle, and how they match to a specific business, leads can be scored.
Scoring is done by assigning points to leads through rankings such as A, B, and C or by making use of terms such as ‘cold’, ‘warm’, or ‘hot’. Assigning score to leads in accordance with their location, job title, their behavior on the website, and email engagement, the sales team can now quickly distinguish between qualified and unqualified leads. Making use of scoring method for qualifying the leads facilitates sales personnel to pinpoint the right sales leads and tends to invest their time optimally.
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Secure distribution of leads
When a business is small, it may be possible to manually assign leads to individual sales representatives pretty easily. With increasing number of leads and a growing sales team, this might cause delay in the lead response process or may altogether make it impossible. A reliable lead management tool has the capability of automating lead assignment to appropriate sales representatives on the basis of a few set criteria’s.
Efficient distribution of leads to the right sales personnel and territories facilitates prioritizing the leads in a better way, by the sales team themselves. Capturing leads needs to be followed by effectively passing them on to the relevant persons in the sales team. This empowers the leads to have a consistent experience, when they are required to make queries.
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Ongoing nurturing of leads and monetizing them
Although it is the expectation of every sales team, the possibility of each and every lead being converted into a paying customer is getting remote. Not all leads can be converted sales-ready. Quite a few leads may be present in the awareness or research phase, trying to figure out the suitability of your product or service. It is the responsibility of the Lead Management Apps to facilitate sending nurture campaigns to such generated leads.
With an efficient Lead Management Software in place, enterprises may educate them through demonstrating the value of their services or products. This may be performed by sending relevant contents and promotional offers to leads. They may be nudged forward in making a decision about buying.
Why is Lead Management Considered Crucial?
In order to manage the flowing leads and qualify them according to their worth quickly, an automated lead management system becomes essential. Manual processes will not suffice in the modern business settings. Furthermore, lead management software helps optimizing an organization’s sales strategy to be efficient. It also enables analyzing how a potential customer gets converted from being a prospect to a lead to a customer.
“Managing leads is one of the most important things any business needs to learn, because that’s how you help interested parties find the products they need from you.” – Brad Hodson
What are the Exclusive Benefits of Lead Management Software?
- It enables sales reps to identify and focus on only sales-ready leads. This maximizes sales opportunities
- Engaging with the right leads is enabled; sales reps are backed by essential contexts. This results in improved conversations.
- Eliminating unwanted data while providing necessary information, the lead management system improves response time exceptionally well.
- Automated tools for lead management facilitates assigning leads to the right persons and prioritizing – this helps to enhance productivity while increasing ROI.
Wrap-Up
Lead generation is the crucial part in every business that keeps your pipeline active and filled with a flow of new prospects. In the contemporary business arena, it is evident that having effective Lead Management Applications in place would definitely offer unlimited opportunities to enterprises. It helps avoid pitfalls such as lack of insight and lack of nurturing, while reducing waste and increasing conversion rates.
Such measures ensures that users do not miss out any opportunity when they are unable to tap their mobile device. Furthermore, speech-enabled apps can take requests or commands as and when needed, allowing user interaction more efficient.
Voice integration is still in nascent stage. Only a small portion of mobile apps are making use of speech recognition features as of now. It is the opportune time to enrich your mobile app with voice recognition features and stay well ahead of peers and competitors. Mentioning that your app has voice capability in app stores naturally earns it a special place.
Voice recognition app development offers the opportunity of making mobile applications accessible with just only voice and without having to use the screen or the keypad. This new level of voice UI design turns the B2B mobile app quite attractive, useful, and engaging.
The most widely understood risk cover of patent filing is that other prominent players of your business industry and most probable competitors will not be able to create minor variations in your app idea and launch it as a mobile app product in the open market. It saves you from a lot of consequences and safeguards your supremacy under all conditions. It is basically like a large cover for your idea or the intellectual property through the mobile app.
It is quite apparent that if your competitors are hitting an overlapping market with a very similar product with only a few improvements and variations, you are sure to face an undue amount of competition. Your market share, as well as profits, will be significantly compromised. Filing a patent saves you quite comprehensively.
With an immediate loss of intellectual property, innovation, and technological lead, there comes a noticeable loss of, and a lot of your money which could have been generated through the newly created revenue stream will now find the hurdles of competition hand which would rely on penetrating customer engagement.
The level of calm confidence in the company employs, and enthusiasm of product managers remains intact if they are working on a patented project. It has a precious direct impact on productivity and the quality of work produced. Filing patents gives the company, and it employs a much-required dose of security before putting in the hard work for a particular project.
If you think your start-up already has such a base of loyal customers and huge followership, you should typically go for a proper Exceptional Viable Product. It will help you manage everything and roll out a product which matches or exceed the expectations of your loyal customers.
In such a scenario, it is always advisable to go all out and put all your eggs in one basket. You should go for an impressive, comprehensive exceptional viable product that leaves no stone unturned to impress your loyal customers and also build an excellent reputation for the startup.
For instance, you may be looking to create election-dedicated news and content delivery mobile app product. Now, it becomes imperative for you to launch the product well before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in May. You should directly go for an MVP ruling out the possible choice of an EVP. This will be a great publicity incentive for your start-up.
All the technology transformations and monetary initiatives to improve the technology side are agenda based. They have a definite preset aim of increasing the degree of customer engagement for the brand and mobile application. An excellent UI design imparting a classical UX is the first and foremost requirement for building any strategy for customer engagement enhancements. It is among the major driving forces behind the volume business attracted by UI/UX design consultants in the present day.
The industry has finely propagated the importance of a great UI imparting an awesome UX. But there is a different side of the story as well. The tech fraternity is expecting blockchain to mature and also become easily usable in 2019. The distributed ledger and repeated node technology would decrease the quantum of business attracted by UI. For instance, a particular blockchain based solution will solve numerous problems in several distinct geographical locations. It will curtail the activity of UI designing as a single set of UI elements will be replicated at all notes and sidechain components of the blockchain.
Many times, we visit a specific website, browse through their service pages and maybe also use their web application. And suddenly then bounce off to other options. The unintentional move by every user is induced by an unattractive UI design which failed to create stable, impactful UX for the users. Every business which is looking to settle on the digital space has to conquer the Internet world. One of the primary links which connect the dots of success in UI based businesses is the customer engagement through your web portal. Customer engagement can only be improved by the quality of UI which welcomes the customers.
It might not have scientific or mathematical reasoning, but an impressive UI design is expected to contribute to higher sales conversion rates when the most probable customers visit your web or mobile app. A useful mobile application has all the potential to help you close down on a larger volume of business in a stipulated time. It will enable higher profits on the quarterly reports and balance sheets. It might take a little longer but is undoubtedly helpful for helping you build a brand and achieve rocketed sales growth.
The industry has experienced demonstrated effects of a great UI design on sales conversions. It has a consequent impact on a consistent business growth which is only possible under the lights of some classic business figures achieved on a continuous basis. Consistent sales reports can help you sustain business growth shortly with higher aspirations from a farsighted approach.
The UI design is not something that a brand changes every day or is revamped continuously at regular intervals. It has a straight connection with the brand Persona portrayed. The elemental traits of UI designs are consistently maintained because they become a signature trademark while one visits your portal every time. Knowingly or unknowingly a customer’s eye get habitual to a particular class of UI. The design which has helped them create a positive impression about your brand.
Consistently growing brand persona is speculated to have a great motivation and a sense of faith among the customers. According to many, a consistently maintained excellent UI design is as good as a loyalty program by a reputed company. A great UI design is one of the potential ways to make your loyal customers unknowingly fall in love with the brand persona you have created for the digital space.