Lead Management

Lead Management is the overall process to identify, educate, engage and qualify leads. It begins at the first interaction and focuses on building a relationship with the prospect to increase their interest through education and lead nurturing. A focus on Lead Management allows the marketing department to strategically qualify leads prior to passing them on to the sales department, thus increasing revenue.

Lead Management solutions are tools designed to help marketing and sales departments maximize their effectiveness with leads. Most Lead Management solutions save your marketing and sales team time through better organization and the automation of repetitive tasks. They also use a combination of delivery settings to ensure that leads are responded to as quickly as possible. The following features to increase the percentage of contacted vs. non-contacted leads:

• Dialing functionality
• Automated email
• Lead validation
• Advanced filtering capabilities

Another component of Lead Management, lead scoring, allows marketers to objectively qualify leads and determine the point at which a lead is ready to be passed on to the sales department. The sales department follows up with the lead as a sales opportunity or passes it back to marketing for additional nurturing if the lead is not yet fully qualified.

The combination of the following Lead Management features allows you to build rapport with leads through more consistent, effective follow-ups:

• Single Database: All lead and client information exists in one location.
• Email Dropbox: Store all email conversations in a leads file.
• Task Reminders: Setting up task reminders allows follow-ups to be proactive.
• Dialing Functionality: This varies among solutions as follows:
  1. Click-to-Dial: Click on a lead to automatically place a call.
  2. Power Dialer: Quickly dials through a list of leads until a connection is made. More advanced systems also have the capability to detect and ignore voicemail.
  3. Predictive Dialer: Continuously calls a list of leads until a live connection is made. The lead is then connected to an available sales rep.
• Automated Email: Triggers initiate email responses automatically.
• Reports: One example, a funnel report, tracks the interaction at which you are losing leads. This allows you to analyze the cause of lost leads and make improvements to more effectively manage leads.