I briefly talked about lead capture in a previous entry. This topic is currently of interest to me and I'm exploring the field. Here's a summary of my current understanding.
Lead management is made of 3 steps:
- The marketing team produces content that generates leads
- The lead nurturing team runs a process to qualify those leads
- The sales team turns qualified leads into customers
For each of those 3 steps, there are best practices to understand and follow in order to get achieve results.
Lead generation & lead capture
This is the realm of the marketing team. Their aim is to create content that will convince prospects that your solution can solve their problem. Their weapons of choice are the following:
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization): create great content that gets organically promoted by search engines when people search for specific bits of information. It's a tough one but it can reap hefty rewards.
- Paid search: in other words, Google AdWords. Proven way to generate leads but it can become expensive, notably on crowded markets
- Webinars: get an audience and talk to them about your solution (here's a nice article on how to do better webinars)
- Freebies and giveaways: those can be anything from a white paper to an iPod, they're basically anything that will get people to give you their email address
Whichever one you choose, the key is to keep doing it as long as it works (see point 2).
Once you've got leads, it's time to separate onlookers from potential customers.
Lead nurturing
The aim of this stage is to go from a large pool of unqualified leads to a smaller pool of hot leads. This step is actually trickier than it looks, and many organizations overlook it. Point 6 on this article gives a great outline of what should be done in order to manage leads effectively.
The best tool to handle this step is email. You basically have to create automated email campaigns based on lead segmentation. That's what a tool such as LoopFuse can be used for.
If implemented correctly, you end up with a list of prospects that you can provide your sales team so that they work their magic on them.
Lead closing
This part of the lead management process has been widely written and talked about. I'm not going to delve into details about it here.
I'll simply mention my personal favorite for now, the Sandler Selling System. It offers a lot of insight about selling and closing best practices.
I think the key takeaway here is that your company needs to have all 3 parts running smoothly together if you want to achieve wide-scale success in lead management.