The ability to capture, respond to, and manage incoming leads is the heart and soul of B2B lead generation. Marketers spend a huge amount of resources and money on carrying out the perfect campaign, so it’s only right to make sure they have the best practices in place to manage their leads during the sales lifecycle.
However, a lot of them focus on generation and tend to forget the importance of lead management.
Properly managing leads develops more educated prospects and helps you better recognize their needs, which in the end means more business. Here’s how you do it:
- Make your sales department your best friend
To set a working set of criteria in determining whether or not a lead is sales-ready, coordinate with your sales team. Let them lay down all the details in qualifying so you could decrease the chances of rejected leads. Once you’ve determined what kind of leads your sales department wants, it would be easier to pre-qualify them before passing them on.
- Reduce, reuse, recycle
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, so they say. A prospect may not meet your criteria for now, but that doesn’t mean you can dump it into a black hole. If you implement a lead recycling system, such as profiling leads to determine its potential for recycling, you can make sure that opportunities are not wasted entirely.
- Score leads using implicit behavioral data
Lead scoring determines where your prospect is in your sales funnel. The prospect’s interest level based on their actions should be the main consideration. To do this, you can track email clicks, free downloads, web page visits etc. With these data, you can score your leads and base your actions according to their interest.
- Monitor anonymous visitors and study their data
One important information is to know how new prospects are able to reach your point of contact, whether it’s a blog, a landing page, a social media account or your official business website. To do this, you can integrate a simple code to determine previous website visits of anonymous visitors and monitor other pertinent behavior.
- Consistently strive to understand your prospect’s needs
Don’t ask your prospects regarding things you probably already know. Instead, use progressive profiling and use the opportunity to find out something new, something that could help you position yourself better in terms of sales pitches and brand awareness strategies.
