One of the primary goals for any business is to bring in more customers. Whether you’re a local coffee shop or a big university, you want more people to do business with you. But if you spend your time marketing to everyone in the world, you’re wasting a lot of effort. Some people are just better suited to become customers than others. The organized process of finding the best audience for your organization, targeting them, and converting them into customers is known as lead management.

 

What is Leads Management?

To start, we should first differentiate between a lead and a customer. A customer is someone who has already done business with you, while a lead is someone who might. For example, if you own a car repair shop, customers would be the people who have brought their cars in before, while you might consider anyone with a vehicle a lead.

Now, you may think that everyone is someone who might do business with your company. However, some people are more likely than others, which is where lead management comes in.

According to Freshworks, “Lead management is the process of capturing leads, tracking their activities and behavior, and qualifying and engaging with them until they are ready to be passed on to quota-carrying sales executives.”

The goal of lead management is to take more control over who your business reaches out to. Rather than marketing or selling yourself to everyone, you take a more targeted approach. This provides your business with several benefits, which we will get into below.

 

What a Leads Management System Looks Like?

Here is an example of what a lead management system might look like. Let’s say a local college wants to bring in more students. To start, they would first narrow down their audience. They decide they want to target two groups of people – recent graduates and people looking to further their careers.

After this, they come up with characteristics these people are likely to have, such as their location, income, age, etc. Now the school begins to gather in leads. Leads could come from anywhere – visits to the website, social media follows, phone calls, etc. As they take in leads, they will give each one a score based on how well it matches up to the customer profiles they created.

Once the leads are scored, the best ones are passed onto the recruitment team. These professionals then reach out to each of the leads and discuss enrolling in the school. In some cases, the lead may convert right away; in others, the school may have to nurture them a bit. A system like this is used in thousands of organizations, where you start by identifying a target audience then strategically go after them.

 

The Importance of Leads Management

Lead management is one of the best processes any business can implement. Here are a few stats gathered by Hubspot to demonstrate this:

• Companies that automate their lead management can see a 10 percent or greater increase in revenue in 6 to 9 months.
• Excelling at lead nurturing can generate 50 percent more sales-ready leads at a 33 percent lower cost.
• Nurtured leads make 47 percent larger purchases
• Companies with mature lead generation and management processes have a 9.3 percent higher sales quota achievement rate.

The stats go on and on, and all of them point to one simple fact – your business needs a lead generation and management system.

 

The Benefits of Leads Management

By implementing a leads management system within your organization, you can expect to receive the following benefits:

 

Improved Efficiency

The biggest benefit may be the improved efficiency throughout your business. By knowing which leads are the best, your sales staff will spend more time focusing on them. This means less time spent getting rejected and more time spent converting leads into customers. As a result, you’ll start to see your conversion rates rise, even as you are spending less time and money.

 

Faster Communication

By improving the efficiency of your lead management system, you are then able to respond to leads faster. This is important because, according to Velocify, responding to a lead within 1 minute has a 391% improvement on your conversion rate. Each minute you wait to respond after that significantly drops the chances of conversion. Your organization may not always be able to respond to a lead within 1 minute, but the faster you respond, the better.

 

Better Communication

Not only does lead management allow you to communicate faster, but it also allows you to communicate better. Through your lead management system, you’ll develop more information about each of your leads. You can then use this information to have better conversations and tailor your sales approach. You can also record information about past conversations so that you can quickly pick up where you left off. When interacting with a business, people want to be treated as an individual. Lead management allows you to provide the personalized experience that your audience craves.

 

Better Insights

As you begin to track and study your leads, you’ll learn more about them. You’ll find out things like which of your products they have the most interest in, which of your website pages convinced them to become a customer, what their disposable income level is, and much more.

You can then use this information to improve the other areas of your business.
For example, you could change your marketing strategy to better reflect what your leads have been telling you about your product or adjust the price point based on their feedback. The best lead management systems do more than just improve your conversion rates – they positively impact all areas of your business.

 

Happier Employees

One of the hardest parts about working in sales is the number of rejections. It’s draining to spend your entire day pitching to leads only to have most of them turn you down. By implementing lead management into your business, your sales team won’t have to face this level of rejection. Instead, they’ll get to close more sales, which will improve their overall mood. Keeping your employees happy is a key ingredient towards success, and lead management can help you do that.

 

Happier Customers

Finally, everyone knows how frustrating it can be when organizations fill your email inbox with useless messages or when you keep getting phone calls from businesses you have no interest in. However, when a business you do like emails you with a special discount, it brightens your day a little. When you have a great lead management system in place, it will not only make your employees happier but your customers as well. This is because you’ll spend less time reaching out to the people who don’t want to hear from you and instead focus on those who do.

 

Get Started with Lead Management

To receive all the benefits mentioned above, it’s time to get started with lead management. If you’re a school or organization that provides courses to students, this is easy to do with Steams Online. Our advanced lead management tool will help you target your ideal audience and keep track of all the relevant information. With this tool, you can target the people who are most likely to enroll in your courses and convert them into students.

For more information on how Steams Online can help your lead management efforts, please contact us today.