Get Clients Online With the Help of a Lead Manager

A Lead Manager will help you manage your prospects and close the gap between marketing and sales. It's a process of acquiring clients which identifies potential buyers (leads=contacts), educates them, and gets involved with them. Once the contacts are qualified, they may become clients.

If your business lacks a solid system for managing leads, the following five steps will help you create and implement a successful and efficient Lead Manager process, from start to finish.

5 Steps to create and implement a successful Lead Manager Process

Step 1. Identify and understand your potential clients

It's necessary to first decide who your potential clients are. We recommend developing a process that will also allow you to identify in which part of the sales process these prospects are.

Your marketing team must identify the kinds of customers or contacts that are an option the product or service that you offer. This will help you identify the contacts interests and send them the product or service they may need. For example:

• Demography. Where do your potential customers live? What's the size of the company they work for? In which market of the industry are they located? Which are their problems, desires and needs?
• Behavior. Are they reading blogs, technical documents or just using Google in order to find the information they are looking for?
• Main source. How do your potential clients find you? Do they arrive to your website via direct traffic? What do they read?

You must also take a deep dive into the mentality of your potential clients in order to understand them better. Is he/she the business owner, the vice president, the high-tech guy? Find where he or she lives, what he/she reads, and how did he/she arrive to your site.

Step 2. Generate and collect information of your contacts

The sales cycle has been extended because the buying process now begins at commercialization. The marketing team must find what was the first contact point and its potential advantage. The key to generate leads and know your clients' source, as well as to create and track content is:

• Place the content of interest. Offer interesting information and webinars within a capturing platform in order to generate potential customers. Collect important information about them; this information can be used during the process of managing potential clients.
• Add a tracking symbol to the links that you share on social networks and e-mail marketing so you can identify the behavior and interaction your customers have towards your content.
• Use your marketing analyzes to find how people are coming to your website or blog and on what information do they click on. This will inform you about the kind of contacts your site attracts and about the content that they are viewing. It will help you understand what their interests, needs and wishes are.

Capturing this information about your potential customers is key to the fourth step: nutrition campaign.

Step 3. Your potential clients' scoring

Contact scoring is key to the potential client management process in order to find their potential interest in your product or service. Feasible factors for finding a contact's score include demographic information and behavioral activity. This information is important and useful for the efficiency of the consolidation of potential clients because:

• The higher the score, the bigger the chance to become a contact
• Timing is key, since the scores are usually determined when the articles are seen by the client.In other words, the score can be reduced due to inactivity (such as not clicking on email links or blog entries)
• It might happen that unqualified contacts arrive thank to nutrition campaigns.
• The sales team can prioritize calls.
• Spend some time finding out what factors are important to your business and create a nutrition process that is right for you.

Step 4. Nurture your contacts

Use the information you have captured in the first three steps to identify the different potential customer segments based on their interests and their likely position in the cycle to become a customer.

Those contacts who are not very willing to become customers can be placed within an appropriate prospect nutrition campaign. Many of these potential customers will continue to be in the research phase, trying to find out if your product will solve their problem or need. This is where you need to educate these potential customers and demonstrate with more valuable content, promotional offers, etc., that your product or service is right for them.

Here are some tips for creating an effective prospect nutrition campaign:

• You must provide specific and specialized content for each kind of contact.
• Personalize your communications by email and social networks, in order to continue building the relationship with the contact.
• Include call-to-action buttons with phrases such as "Call now," "Hire now," "Buy here" - in all relevant content sources.

The relationship continues from the first entry until the contact is ready to become a customer.

Step 5. Turning prospects into clients

• Make sure your contact is willing to become a client. The contact's scoring can help you achieve this and make sure that each initiative is qualified.
• Make sure that the Marketing team is providing the right, ample and deep information about the activity of the initiative which were gathered during the contact generation and approach processes.
• Make sure the Sales team investigates the contact in order to gather information and that it's used by the Marketing area in order to know as much about the contact as possible before contacting him. This may include: business structure, current products / services and the revenue model.
• Confirm that each contact has a first immediate contact in order not to repeat the approach.
• Consider offering incentives to the Sales team to encourage them pursuing better and giving contacts a more strategic follow-up.
• There should always be at least a minimum level of tracking in order to keep a prospect on the radar before the potential conversion.

Step 6. Providing a follow-up and measuring your potential clients

As all salespeople know, we have to follow-up, measure and track. So, while you may have "checked out" your potential customers, you still have to make sure that all the leads are evaluated by the sales team so you can continue to refine, score and evaluate their stage. It's key is to make sure that the communication keeps moving through the sales cycle without losing your contacts or by sending new and more enriching content.

Follow-up and assessment along the sales cycle:

• Measure the sales performance
• Measure the Marketing and Sales ROI

Last, but not least, you will continue to evaluate the entire process of identifying what works (and what doesn't) for your prospect management business process. It will take some time for your business to run at 100% but in the end, you will end up with a flawless contact management process that generates better business results.

We can help you understand more about how to generate leads for your marketing funnel through our experience making great strategies. Visit the next page to learn more.

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