How to drive more sales with a lead management CRM?

Most businesses focus on lead generation but do not understand how to manage those leads. It is not guaranteed that a lead will turn into a sale. If a lead slips up during the sales funnel, it is not necessarily your sales team’s fault. They can have the perfect telecalling software with spotless tracking and yet the sale might not come through.

The team may not have the necessary tools to manage those leads. With a proper lead management system, your sales agents can track each lead and see which potential customer needs a follow-up. If your business uses emails to target your leads, your sales agents will forget about a few leads.

If you lose a sale opportunity, then your competitor will grab that opportunity and turn it into a successful sale. You are lucky to get a lead and must ensure that the lead turns into a sale. For this, you need a proper lead management system in place.

Your sales team needs to use a powerful CRM to handle a large number of leads. A lead management CRM ensures that none of your leads gets lost. A company spends valuable resources to gain a lead, so losing a lead is a waste of the company’s resources. Investing in a lead management CRM is a great investment for your business. A lead management CRM ensures the growth of your company’s revenue.

How to find leads?

Managing leads is another aspect of the business, but most young businesses do not even know how to find leads. Make a list of traits that define who your user is, and then your marketing team will follow this to create leads.

Knowing who your customer always benefits a business in the long run. You can use many sources to generate leads like LinkedIn, guest posts, SEM, search engine optimized content, advertising, and social media marketing. While most businesses do marketing operations on most channels, they fail to analyze the campaign’s analytics.

You should identify which source brings the most high-quality leads and focus more on those sources. If you continuously focus on the sources that bring high-quality leads to your business, you will have a constant supply of potential clients.

What is lead management?

Lead management is about tracking and managing a lead from the acquisition stage to the decision-making stage. Your staff must manage each aspect of the sales cycle until a prospect becomes a customer. The first step in lead management is generating interest in your business.

Once someone expresses interest in doing business with you, their information is stored, and they become a lead. These leads are assessed, prioritized, and then allocated to the company’s salespeople. In the next step, the prospects are educated about the products or services and how they can benefit them.

This step is called lead nurturing. In the final step, the lead is either convinced and becomes a customer or rejects the sales pitch. Lead management lets you analyze how each lead moves within your sales cycle. You will understand where you are losing leads and improve the whole cycle to increase the customer acquisition rate.

Benefits of a lead management CRM

When you are just starting in business, you can manage leads on paper or on a spreadsheet. However, as you scale up your business, it becomes difficult for your sales staff to keep track of the leads. This can lead to you missing out on opportunities of growing your business.

Customers like it when a salesperson can connect with them on a personal level. That is why you should customize your sales pitch according to the client. Your conversion rate will be low if you use the same sales pitch for each person and do not tailor it according to their needs or history.

Your sales staff needs software, where they can store details about leads. So, the next time they go on a sales meeting, they can simply brush up on the details before leaving and then deliver a killer sales pitch! A customer relationship management software helps your company build and manage customer relationships with the help of various features.

A CRM acts is a knowledge base filled with customer information. Your sales staff cannot pitch to prospects without knowing them. So when they need to know more about the prospects, they can retrieve the information from the CRM. There are multiple benefits that your business will get by using a lead management CRM.

1. Automation- With the help of this feature, sales representatives get automated reminders about a lead. This way, they do not have to rely on their memory but can depend on the software. Automation leads to timely follow-ups with prospective clients.
2. Better lead nurturing- You will have to make more than one attempt to convert a lead into a customer. CRM software keeps track of a prospect’s interaction with your company and informs you of the accurate time to engage with the prospect. It also helps you divide your leads into two categories—those who are ready for conversion and those who need more nurturing. You can use a filter and see the lead’s relationship with your organization. Data helps a salesperson know what each prospect is looking for, which is why CRM provides better lead nurturing.
3. No more lost opportunities- With the help of a lead generation CRM, you can view where each lead is in the sales cycle. You will not lose track of potential customers; you just have to tell them what they want to hear. This means that now your sales staff will not lose any opportunity. Get ready to beat the competition!
4. Saves time- Around 25% of your leads will never be converted into sales. That is why it is crucial to categorize leads into high priority and low priority. The low-priority leads are prospects who are unlikely to buy your product. The high-priority leads are people who actually need your product and will easily convert. Categorization of leads helps your staff understand which leads are worth following. It saves the time of your sales staff. Instead of pursuing dead leads, they can work on something better. With time, your company database may be filled with duplicate records. To save your time, the CRM simply eliminates the duplicate record and keeps the original record. You do not have to do this manually, but an intuitive CRM does this job for you, saving your time.
5. Enables Collaboration- Your business can only succeed if your sales staff works as one big team towards one goal. That is why they must collaborate effectively. Team members can work together effortlessly with the help of a powerful lead management CRM. Your team can share data, take notes, track tasks, and perform other activities that will make your business more effective. If one of your sales agents has already completed a sale, they can add that to the CRM so that all the other team members are informed of the same.
6. Flexible sales team- The remote access feature of a CRM means that your sales team can access the data from their mobile devices remotely. Your sales representatives can make sales on the road without having to show up at the office to get the information about the prospect first. A lead management CRM will make your sales staff more efficient and flexible. It also increases the job satisfaction that your sales representatives get.
7. Increases Responsiveness- If a potential customer raises a query and they do not get a response quickly, then they lose interest. Businesses that respond to the queries of a potential customer are more likely to close a sale. However, you need CRM to know which prospect has raised a query and on which channel. With the help of a lead management CRM, you can respond to the query of your prospects within the first half hour. This increases your chances of closing a sale and provides an extremely high ROI.

A CRM software is a small investment compared to the returns it will bring your business.

How to boost sales with a lead management CRM?

Using a lead management CRM effectively to increase sales is also a skill you can learn.

Plan your sales process- Before approaching potential clients, you should have a sales process planned. The sales pipeline involves various steps like lead generation, lead capturing, lead assignment, nurturing, and closing the deal. Having a sales pipeline means that your salespeople know which procedure they need to follow at each step.

Effective communication- You must ensure that your different teams are on the same page. A CRM is helpful for this as all the teams can communicate with the help of one platform. Your marketing team can inform your sales team about the leads that they have generated. Then the nearest field agent can reach out to the prospect to try to close the deal. A different team generates leads, and a different team generally closes sales, so a CRM is a perfect system where these teams can communicate.

Identify leads ready for the final sales pitch- A lead management CRM software can give each lead a score over readiness to make a purchase. Generally, before such software, people used the BANT method (Budget, Authority, Needs, and Timeline). However, now you do not have to waste your time doing this manually, as the software can categorize leads more effectively and quickly. By checking the readiness score of each lead, your team can target the ones more likely to buy a product.

Monitor Campaigns- Everyone knows that digital marketing has alot of promise, but how exactly can you track the success of each marketing campaign? You can track the key performing indicators of each campaign on a CRM. Besides that, you will also be able to find out the number of leads you generated and the total ROI on the campaign. Later, you will also be able to compare one campaign against the other and see which one performed better. CRM can help you get your digital marketing strategy right. If you can get that right, you will see a huge boost in sales.

How to find the right CRM for your business?

Managing leads is directly linked to the success or failure of your business. You must get incredible ROI on your marketing efforts to get those leads. To ensure that you get good ROI, you have to ensure that a good percentage of those leads convert into sales.

To make the most of your sales efforts, you should invest in a CRM tool to assist your sales staff. Multiple CRM tools are available in the market, but not all are worth your money. A CRM should be tailored for your organizational needs and scalable because your business will grow with time. Before you make a purchase take the time to identify your business needs, budget, and long-term growth objectives.

If budget is not a problem, then find the best CRM tool in the market. Your CRM software should be able to handle the data of a growing organization. If you had a hundred leads this month does not mean you will get a hundred leads each month, that number can grow by ten times in the future.

Finding a CRM tool that provides a free trial is extremely important. You and your sales team will be able to use the software, and then it will be clear whether it suits the needs of your growing business or not. It is important to take your sales team’s feedback when they are using the software during the trial period.

Because they will be the ones who will have to use it the most. If they find the CRM difficult to understand, they may lose leads because they do not have a grip on the functionality of the CRM. You can simply cancel the purchase during the free trial period if you do not like the software. As a business owner, you aim to maximize sales and a CRM with features that can lead to the results you want is the right choice for you.