Business organizations seek employees and the best CRM technologies to engage customers, improve brand loyalty, increase operational efficiency, and enhance profitability. A lead manager’s position is one such role. Typically, a lead manager has a professional and academic background in sales and marketing or public relations.
The lead manager designs and drafts marketing strategies, the business prospectus, offer documents, and statutory advertisements. The role also includes ensuring compliance with regulatory standards, industrial formalities, and stipulated requirements. This article will discuss the role of a lead manager, the importance of lead management, and its five essential steps.
What is Lead Management in CRM?
Lead management is the process of acquiring and managing leads/prospects until they are converted into buying customers. Unlike traditional advertising, lead management is a more engaging and wholesome process focusing on building customer relationships. Efficient lead management is especially critical for eCommerce businesses as it effectively provides essential information to customers and supports lead generation. Effective lead management can prevent customers from receiving redundant or irrelevant information, reduce manual work for lead managers, and enhance the overall customer experience.
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What is the Role of a Lead Manager?
The role of the lead manager in a customer experience strategy begins with configuring the client’s fund requirements and lasts until the receival of a full subscription. Book Running Lead Managers (BRLMs) are also tasked with determining the price band and catering to post-issue activities. The lead manager coordinates and intimates the allocation of refunds dispatches refunds and manages escrow accounts. The lead manager deals with the dispatch and delivery of instruments and shares with the various agencies handling the refund business.
The significance of a lead manager’s role is that he systemizes the marketing and advertising efforts directly involved in enhancing customer experience, improving sales, and generating higher business revenue. The lead manager collaborates with the registrar, guarantees the collection and processing of applications, and finalizes the terms of allotment. Furthermore, the lead manager ensures the security of dispatched certificates and the timely dispatch of refund orders. CRM is important to small and large companies looking to improve lead processes with a centralized database of leads and contacts and tools for marketing automation and lead generation.
What are the 5 Major Steps of Lead Management?
As established earlier, lead management involves capturing leads, tracking them across all contact points, qualifying leads, assigning them to the right sales reps, and nurturing them until they convert into buying customers. Therefore, an efficient lead management process has the following five significant steps.
Lead Capturing
A lead manager finds plenty of means within lead generation activities to reach prospects. This could be done via paid advertisements, emails, website content, or social media marketing. Lead managers can use good lead management software that automatically feeds every lead into the CRM system and ensure no prospects are lost.
Lead Tracking
Lead managers save time tracking leads using software with lead management functionality so that the lead's online profile is automatically tracked and populated with publicly available information. Such valuable insights enable lead managers to understand customers and offer tailored sales campaigns to maximize CRM ROI.
Lead Qualification
To effectively conduct this stage of the lead management process, some lead managers use a contact scoring model that ranks contacts based on multiple factors. These factors include the contacts’ interest in the business’s offerings, engagement with the organization’s content, demographic information, and buying journey with your company. With this historical data, lead managers prioritize contacts and score them.
Lead Distribution Among Sales Reps
The cut-throat competition in the market calls for quick but effective measures. Time is money, after all! Once the leads have been identified and qualified, lead managers proceed forward with assigning them to the best sales reps available. These reps contact leads the soonest as possible to increase the likelihood of conversion.
While manual lead distribution can be time-consuming and cause delays in lead response time, most lead managers fix this with a robust lead management system. Such a system automates assigning leads to sales reps so they can quickly and conveniently prioritize assigned leads.
Lead Nurturing
While you may have captured plenty of leads, not all are ready to convert immediately. Some tips will research for longer to be sure that your product/service is the right one for them. Lead managers send nurturing CRM email marketing campaigns to these leads at this final stage to sufficiently educate them. Lead managers share content, particularly promotional offers, regarding the value of the product/service and urge them in the direction where they are sales-ready.
Why is Lead Management Important in CRM?
Since CRM software manages all the interactions between the business and its customers and maintains a record of customers' journeys, it is significant to lead management, capture leads, and direct efforts to convert them to customers. Lead managers put the information gathered from CRM to good use by increasing the likelihood of converting prospects to loyal customers. It is vital in Customer Relationship Management as lead managers take essential, practical steps based on the data insights gathered by a CRM.
Through effective lead management, lead managers determine the regions that are generating the most and pinpoint which leads are converting more. With this actionable information, lead managers can track sources with an increased potential for conversion and focus more resources on them. Doing so prevents lead managers from wasting resources in areas with poor conversion rates, automates redundant and prolonged tasks, and drives efficiency.
Successful lead management utilizes the information gathered and maintained by the best CRM software, saving resources from wasting and focusing efforts where maximum results can be obtained. Lead managers start with identifying the leads and building a reputation that caters to their needs/wants and prepares them to engage those leads. Most lead managers utilize a lead scoring system that categorizes all charges based on their conversion potential to prioritize which tips to focus on. With a lead nurturing strategy in place and effectively assigning leads to the right sales reps, lead managers try to convert the top prospects into customers. However, lead management does not end there as lead managers analyze the results to identify bottlenecks and make the necessary amendments in their strategy based on the findings.
