{"id":689,"date":"2020-11-02T01:05:28","date_gmt":"2020-11-02T01:05:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tye.io\/?p=689"},"modified":"2021-01-04T13:52:32","modified_gmt":"2021-01-04T13:52:32","slug":"how-to-manage-sales-leads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tye.io\/en\/blog\/how-to-manage-sales-leads\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Manage Sales Leads From First Touch to Close (2021 Guide)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Managing sales leads is not a new thing. Due to ever-evolving email list management<\/a> and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools, the way companies manage sales leads is constantly improving.<\/p>\n

In this post, we highlight how to manage sales leads most effectively in 2020. Let’s explore the lead management process from qualifying to hand-over.<\/p>\n

The lead management process<\/h2>\n

There are stages in your lead management process. Depending on the way you work, you may want to add or remove stages to best fit your approach. The core stages we want to explore here are:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Qualify (you\u2019ve got a list of contacts, but which are leads?)<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Segment (breaking your leads down for a more targeted approach)<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Nurture (inform and engage your leads)<\/span><\/li>\n
  4. Hand over (give your warm leads to sales)<\/span><\/li>\n
  5. Rinse and repeat…<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    We created the ultimate email list management bundle for busy marketing leaders who want to make the most of their data<\/p>\n

    How to manage sales leads and where to start<\/h2>\n

    You\u2019ve got a nice long list of contacts, is it going to provide you with a healthy-looking Return on Investment (ROI)?<\/p>\n

    The good news is, if you have an existing list, the hard work is done.<\/p>\n

    But, you could risk a lot of wasted effort with your marketing campaigns by not taking the right steps to filter this list down to qualified leads.<\/p>\n

    Even worse, pass on those inefficiencies to your sales team and see drops in revenue. In fact, most companies lose 12% of revenue<\/a> as a result of bad data.<\/p>\n

    Before we get into qualifying leads, it\u2019s important to review our list health.<\/p>\n

    Turning bad data into useful data doesn\u2019t need to be a difficult task.<\/p>\n

    Gone are the days of assigning your teams days of work to churn through endless lists to weed out poor data and outdated contacts. Clunky systems or complex tools are a thing of the past.<\/strong><\/p>\n

    We wrote a guide on how to maintain pristine email hygiene<\/a> to help you.<\/p>\n

    Alternatively, you can outsource this data cleaning to tye<\/a> and let us deal with the bad data, so you can focus on the rest. We can do this directly within your CRM or ERP.<\/p>\n

    We check, clean, and analyze your list and set you up for much more powerful email marketing campaigns. There\u2019s no list too long, we\u2019ve just turned around an 85k+ list into a sparkling data set with 84% improved contacts.<\/p>\n

    \"how<\/p>\n

    \u00a01. How to categorize sales prospects (qualifying your leads)<\/h2>\n

    Your data is looking healthy and you\u2019ve cleaned your lists! You can now focus on pulling out your leads for a targeted approach. You know the difference between a lead and a contact, but your CRM tool doesn\u2019t yet.<\/p>\n

    Sorting between them is the difference between an effective lead nurture campaign and, well, just an email campaign.<\/p>\n

    The more targeted you can be, the better ROI you will have. Not to mention, avoiding damaging your brand\u2019s reputation. Or wasting resources on sending the wrong kind of email to the wrong kind of person, over and over again.<\/p>\n

    Understanding how to manage sales leads with lead qualification means you really have to get to know your customer. Find out who they are and what makes them tick, and use this to whittle down your list to a subset of qualified leads. This means the people that are interested and are ready to buy from you.<\/p>\n

    The answer to \u2018what makes a good sales lead?\u2019 will vary from company to company, and may change through time.<\/p>\n

    A good place to start is with your ideal customer profile<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    You can do this by starting with a shortlist of your most engaged customers. Conduct interviews with them to compile a set of typical characteristics. This can then inform your future approaches.<\/p>\n

    Below you can find an example of the kind of questions that will help you build a customer profile.<\/p>\n

    \"ideal<\/p>\n

    Building up a picture of your customer is a valuable exercise to undertake and will benefit teams from across the entire business, and will help your marketing team create their all-important email campaigns (more on that later…)<\/p>\n

    2. Lead management strategy and segmenting your leads<\/h2>\n

    Armed with a list of healthy leads, you can now break these down further into segmented groups. Going through this exercise means better results further down the line. Segmented email campaigns create a whopping 760% more revenue<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    Don’t miss our post on<\/em> email list segmentation<\/em><\/a>, best practices and what you need to get started.<\/em><\/p>\n

    Managing sales leads can be done in many ways. This depends on the approach you want to use later on in your email marketing campaign. Your leads will have varying levels of interest in your product. Some may have entered their email to only download content, whereas others might be ready to pull the trigger.<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n