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It’s always good to follow best practices in every element of business. Following best practices in your sales lead management helps ensure you do things well and effectively to get the most out of your team, generate more sales, and give your business the best results.
Here are some best practices to keep in mind for effective sales lead management.
Define and document your processes
Making sure you know and document your sales lead management process isn’t just best practice, it makes sense. If you define and document your processes, you and your staff are more likely to make sure they follow them, know the importance of doing so, and provide a consistently high-quality service.
This includes understanding your business and sales objectives, and what you’re aiming to do to achieve those goals. It also involves defining the step-by-step process of your sales lead management strategy, from when a lead comes in, to how you manage that data, to how and when it is followed up. You could also document things such as knowing what a good lead looks like, so you and your team can quickly recognise the signs of when one is hot or going cold.
Understand your customers
Like in any business, it’s best practice to understand your customers as part of an effective sales lead management strategy. This is about understanding your customers demographic, but also going beyond that.
This could involve creating buyer personas that represent your different types of customers, to show you know things like their characteristics, triggers and motivations, as well as their desires, needs and preferences. Doing this doesn’t just help you know how to take the right approach to contact and speak to a potential customer; it also helps you to develop key messaging and sales techniques to increase engagement with a lead and build up their trust.
You shouldn’t be afraid to make any changes to your processes if certain elements aren’t working. You should also pay close attention to leads that are lost. This could include looking for patterns and trends, which might explain why customers aren’t converting and what could be done to make sure they do.
Use effective technology
Technology plays an important part in many business’ day-to-day operations, so it makes sense that it’s best practice to use it in your sales lead management processes. More importantly, the systems and software you choose need to be right for you and your business.
When thinking about this, you should consider technology that doesn’t constrain your goals or limit how effective your sales lead processes can be. This includes systems that can store the history of a lead, record key information about them, and provide automated lead-nurturing processes, such as emailing potential customers at the right time.
Assess and refine your processes
It’s best practice to assess, evaluate and refine processes in business, and doing this with your sales lead management is no different. It allows you to see what is and isn’t working, and what could work better.
It’s a good idea to make assessments a regular thing, and set a times and dates to carry them out to help you keep on top of them. For instance, you could set up a monthly evaluation or a quarterly review.
You shouldn’t be afraid to make any changes to your processes if certain elements aren’t working. You should also pay close attention to leads that are lost. This could include looking for patterns and trends, which might explain why customers aren’t converting and what could be done to make sure they do.
Helping you with effective sales lead management
Having best practices in place can ensure that your sales lead management is as effective as possible, from defining your processes to regularly assessing and refining them.
Effective sales lead management is where FLG can help. We provide a tool set that can:
- Use powerful workflows to automate your sales processes
- Efficiently process your leads to close more sales and increase customer conversion
- Integrate with key software platforms, including Campaign Monitor and MailChimp
Find out more about our core sales lead management system – just one of our key products that could help your business today – by looking at how our CRM software can help your business.
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