What Is Lead Management? Definition, Process & Benefits

Marketing is like a jigsaw puzzle: lots of pieces that have to fit together perfectly. You start with your marketing campaigns, consumers, and product, then bring in your lead generation strategies,  martech stack, and partners.

But occasionally, you might feel that something is missing.

In most cases, the missing piece of the puzzle is lead management:

• Lead management is a set of methodologies designed to capture, track, and guide leads for conversion and distribution. It’s about how you manage your sales funnel, a crucial link between your marketing and sales team performance.

So, what makes lead management so important? It’s essentially the ability to follow leads through the entire customer journey.

Lead management may encompass the following:

• Lead tracking to understand the attribution for generated leads
• Lead sorting to organise leads efficiently
• Lead distribution to route leads to the right destination for conversion

A cloud-based lead management system handles all these tasks and interprets the collected data. For brands looking for the final piece of their marketing puzzle, understanding a lead management strategy and implementing lead management software is crucial.

And we at Phonexa know how to do it right.

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What Is Lead Management?

Lead management starts with capturing prospective customers through lead generation efforts. As leads are generated, businesses and affiliate marketers need to manage the lead flow with efficiency and revenue in mind. Lead management is a critical tool in guiding leads towards conversion in a manner that benefits both the consumer and business.

Inbound leads have some differences that impact how the leads are managed, which is why an advanced lead management system is important. Not all leads are created equal, and marketers need to have insights into the characteristics of the leads to make educated decisions about the lead distribution and their campaigns.

“We look at channel CAC, but you have to look at it in conjunction with one another: What campaigns am I running right now, what is my paid campaign CAC based on each campaign and each channel I’m working on, and I look three months down the line, how am I recouping those costs, and is that client expanding. That feedback loop is really important from CSN sales, who are typically on top of their accounts and keeping an eye on them through their account management experience with us. So I think you can’t really look at that blended CAC for all MQLs that enter your system – you have to look at it by channel, by campaign, and by high and low intent, and then justify your costs that way.” – Talar Malakian

How Does Lead Management Work?

Lead management is essentially the workflow for inbound leads as they move down the sales funnel and into your system for conversion or distribution. At the heart of the process are lead generation, customer acquisition, and lead distribution.

Lead Generation	Lead generation is the overall process of discovering potential leads and customers and having them engage with your content and explore your brand’s products or services. It can be in various forms, from online efforts like PPC advertising and blog posts to podcasts or TV ads to offline activities like billboards. There are also cases wherein lead generation is outsourced to third-party partners, also popularly known as affiliate marketers.
Customer Acquisition	Businesses desire to guide a lead along a path where they will eventually be customers, and lead nurturing is a large part of it. Companies must deliver content that is capable of preparing leads to convert; emails, blog posts, white papers, and direct human contact are all important in helping to do that.
Lead Distribution	While many businesses are interested in converting the leads they generate, lead generators are set up to distribute leads to companies interested in purchasing and converting them. Most companies concentrate their efforts on partnering with affiliates. The process of delivering qualified leads either to in-house salespeople or a marketplace of qualified third-party partners is known as lead distribution.

Components of Lead Management

The lead management process is defined by how inbound leads are received, reviewed, qualified, and routed to your sales team or third party. When properly executed with all the required components, lead management will set the leads you obtain up for conversion.

Lead Definition Alignment	It’s not uncommon for in-house teams to have their own opinions regarding what a lead is. For marketing, leads are considered to be any prospective customer who engages with a marketing CTA, whether by providing an email or by dialling a number. Still, sales teams may only count leads in terms of ‘qualified leads’- a person who is interested and most likely to make a conversion. These discrepancies may be cleared through lead definition alignment—a process defining what constitutes a lead. Being sensitive to lead definition alignment eliminates any misunderstanding that may exist across departments or partners.
Lead Nurturing and Scoring	The key aspects of moving leads along the lead funnel are lead scoring and lead nurturing.Lead nurturing is moving a lead along the lead funnel to conversion using marketing content.Lead scoring is giving a numerically represented value (or lead score) to a lead to determine the value of such a lead or its chances of conversion.
Lead Analytics and Reporting	With lead tracking and a set of analytics, marketers can analyse and eventually optimise their acquisition processes. For example, comparison reports offer side-by-side performance viewpoints in such a way that numbers can be assessed day-to-day, week-to-week, and even year-to-year. Other reports will show duplicate leads or offer traffic snapshots so marketers can see what’s happening with their lead efforts.

How Lead Management Can Transform Your Business

Businesses use lead management because it solves problems that would otherwise go unsolved, especially for brands that don’t take advantage of the automation that lead management software provides:

Manual Sorting of Leads	Businesses that are dependent on manual lead gathering and sorting will experience errors and thus hardly scale. With good lead management, companies can sift through high-quality and low-quality leads to streamline their efforts and campaigns.
Lost Leads	Manual lead solutions like desktop folders or Excel spreadsheets are prone to human error. Lead management software, however, ensures that all leads are monitored and revenue isn’t being lost.
Wasted Reject Leads	Organic leads can be declined if they are not up to your standards, but lead management can also open up opportunities for these “rejected leads.” These leads can be sent to potential third-party buyers with the help of automated lead management.
No Lead Nurturing	Without lead management, nurturing your leads becomes extremely challenging. Lead management software can help you automate the lead nurturing process by sending leads emails or SMS messages to advance your leads further down the funnel.
Not Optimizing Revenue	Each business wants to make choices that will allow it to optimise the return on its marketing spend. Lead management allows them to do this by presenting valuable information in fast-loading reports that can give marketers a clear indication of where they should be focusing.

What Makes Lead Management Useful?

When businesses are putting together the puzzle pieces of their lead strategy, they always get to a point where they need lead management to pull everything together. Any company that works with leads needs to have an integrated approach towards organising and managing their leads.

Companies that do not use lead management risk missing out on important attribution data from lead tracking and, as a result, will be unaware of how to adjust their lead generation and marketing efforts. On top of that, a lack of proper lead management can result in losing leads or making it difficult to turn rejected leads into an opportunity.

 

Without automation and a user-friendly interface, leads can slip through the cracks or never find their way to the right destination. This is a very serious issue because it guarantees a great deal of wasted lead generation efforts. Thus, it will be nearly impossible for a business to grow and expand without accounting for every lead.

Here’s how lead management can boost your marketing:

Targeted Efforts	Lead management helps businesses improve their marketing by allowing them to fine-tune their campaigns. With lead tracking, you can learn the attribution of your leads, pinpointing the efforts that bring in the most leads. This knowledge can be further applied to make educated decisions about where to invest more resources and energy. With a targeted, effective marketing strategy, businesses can achieve substantial return on investment (ROI).
Lead Response Time	Following up with high-intent leads can take some time if your leads are not organised. Unless leads are contacted immediately after they have taken action, brands will find it much harder to convert them. Lead management does more than just make sure new leads are organised. It provides businesses with automated tools that increase lead response time. With the automation of lead management, leads are far less likely to become lost or forgotten, improving conversion likelihood.
Redirecting Declined Leads	It’s not uncommon for lead generators to take in a certain number of leads that don’t meet their criteria. In the majority of the cases, this can cause many otherwise fine leads to go to waste. However, with the right lead management software, companies can give those leads a new life and increase the monetary value of declined leads. With lead management, businesses can access tools to redistribute the declined leads to interested buyers. They configure and personalise so that some declined organic leads can become the source of revenue after being routed elsewhere.

How Lead Management Benefits Companies

There are multiple ways for companies to take advantage of lead management software and fine-tune their marketing. With a large set of tools and untapped opportunities that lead management offers, businesses can count on the following benefits that will help them reach their goals:

Data-Driven Marketing Strategy	When brands use lead management, they get valuable lead data and a dashboard view of their campaigns. The attribution data can be easily accessed through real-time reports with side-by-side comparisons and best-performing publishers. These insights can be used to fine-tune the existing or create a new data-backed, optimised marketing strategy.
Transparent Customer Journey	Without lead tracking and lead management, companies can’t have a complete picture of the customer journey. That is critical because understanding what marketing efforts helped your business capture leads and, more importantly, what touchpoints led to a lead conversion can give you an idea of how effective your current workflow is. Lead management gives you the tools you need to see the entire customer journey.
Multi-channel Integration	One of the key benefits of lead management is that businesses can tap into multiple digital channels.

Optimise Your Lead Management with Phonexa

For any business that depends on leads, having all components of their lead processes in order can be a daunting task. Through manual lead management, leads can eventually get ignored or lost, and even if leads make their way down the lead funnel, there is no way to nurture them automatically.

This is how Phonexa creates value for marketers: bringing everything together.

Our eight-in-one performance marketing software suite gives marketers a transparent view of their lead funnel and operations.

Get Phonexa’s eight-in-one performance marketing software suite at a single price:

 

Book a free demo to learn more about Phonexa’s lead management software.