1. Lead Management
How To Get More Leads Consistently
“You are out of business if you don’t have a prospect” Zig Ziglar, Author
Attracting & Converting Leads To Prospects
You recognize that you need to promote your SaaS business and get your potential customers to connect with you based on your promotions, website, events and more, and leave you their contact information.
A lead, or sales lead, is a person or organization who may become interested in your product or service and, who, with good nurturing, may become a prospect and then a customer in the long run. Note the ideal definition of a qualified lead has to be jointly define by both marketing and sales functions. From the definition it is easier to measure and score to identify those leads, based on implicit and explicit criteria.
Lead management is the process of tracking and managing prospective customers. The process includes systems and activities designed to generate and capture leads, monitor their activities and behavior, educate and engage them, and when they’re sales-ready, hand them off from marketing to the sales team.
Leveraging CRM marketing to nurture leads even further is a necessary precursor to your SaaS business’ sales management processes. If you manage your leads well, your sales team can focus on actually making sales instead of looking for qualified buyers.
The process of managing leads helps businesses understand which tactics are bringing in the best leads, so you can optimize your sales strategy to be both effective and efficient. Additionally, since lead management documents a person’s full history of interactions and experiences with your company, you can analyze exactly how a person was converted from a prospect, to a lead, to a customer.
Lead management’s potential helps to :
- Engage with the right leads – thus, maximize sales opportunities through higher close rates.
- Improve marketing – because lead management makes it easier to identify where leads are coming from. With this information, you can revisit your strategies and take advantage of the platforms that bring in the most leads.
- Improve the customer experience – with data-driven lead management, you can send timely updates or useful, informational material to help your leads in their buying decisions.
- Boost marketing and sales productivity – by prioritizing (lead scoring) which leads to pass off to sales can significantly boost your marketing and sales teams’ efficiency.
The sample results that your SaaS business will gain if you do lead management the right way according to an Active Internet Marketing study and others follows, where you lead competitors and your industry with:
- 30-50% of sales go to the one (your SaaS business) who responds first
- Only 9% (your SaaS business) touch leads on a daily basis, and 34% to so monthly
- 50% more sales (for your Saas business), 33% lower cost per Marketo studies
Continue to build into your lead management a follow-up cadence for ensuring that your leads are nurtured until they are ready to talk to sales. And – because of the nurturing – they are much better educated, making the sales person’s job a lot easier. Because you can follow up with 100% of your leads, and because your sales people can be more effective, you will turn more inquiries into sales.
Upon executing the above, you kick-start your SaaS business in the right direction of success. bEffective services can help you with the strategies and tactics. We also provide a newsletter meantime with tips and techniques.
“Every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust.” – Zig Zagler, Author
No Attention To Details, No New Leads or Customers
Your SaaS business can easily gain a competitive edge because your competition is terrible at it according to Active Internet Marketing:
- 80% of leads are lost, ignored or discarded
- 80% of marketing functions pass on leads with no qualification whatsoever
- 73% of companies have no formal process for re-engaging, managing, or nurturing leads
Of course, this is because succeeding at lead management is much easier said than done.
Why is that? Well simply put there is a tremendous lack of ‘Attention to Detail:’
- Incomplete strategy – Marketers don’t take into account all of the components needed for good execution of a lead nurturing campaign. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.
- Poor execution – We are all pressed for time, juggling many projects so we cut corners, making mistakes that lead to disappointing results.
- Analysis paralysis – We over-think each aspect of the campaign, the content, the audience, the steps, frequency. We search for the perfect campaign, but we only get wrapped around the axle and nothing gets done.
There are many more reasons. Smart marketers know that conversions are dependent on how well you engage and move forward to keep leads engaged.
Thankfully, …
Fixing lead management inclusive of nurturing leads will result in a colossal 79% increase in conversions.
So let’s get to fixin’ lead management mistakes you’al!
- Don’t skip the research phase for understanding your ideal prospect
- Don’t fail to optimize your lead magnet
- Don’t fail to implement a lead nurturing email campaign inclusive of a: goal, segmentation, the right technology, map out campaign, sequence, monitoring.
- Don’t ignore follow up
- Make sure that you have an effective sales pitch
- Ensure that you test and tweak your campaigns, which means measure as well
Take advantage of the studies stating 40-50% of leads are not followed up
bEffective is here to help you eliminate these common mistakes. But if you are not ready yet, check out our newsletter for tips and techniques for what you are ready to put in place.
Making your prospects feel like they have an exclusive membership in a club makes lead generation a positive customer experience. – Eric Bower, Marketbright
Outcome Based Lead Generation
The best marketers test and measure All the time. They learn from their mistakes faster than the rest. For example, they focus their program objectives on outcomes rather than too much on activity. While they purposely build activities to accelerate the pace leads move through the sales cycle.
What if marketers, could execute the same campaigns to many target segments with different offers, subject lines and headlines? Today marketing has the unique opportunity to hit all those “spots” (target segments) simultaneously and virtually using different types of bait (tactics and offers). Bottom line, the name of the game today is knowing exactly where to focus scarce sales and marketing resources and on the best opportunities and high return programs.
The complexity of lead management is that not all sales leads are created equal. Each customer’s buying journey is unique. Some come to you ready to purchase right off the bat, while some are in the early stages of the sales process. According to Salesforce.com, some leads may need approximately six to eight touches to qualify as a viable sales lead. Others are simply “looking around” and have no interest in buying at all.
A solid lead management system weeds out weak leads and nurtures those with strong potential to convert.
It begins with the outcome your SaaS business seeks, or what is your ideal customer. Then you work backwards to figure out how to get there.
Here’s how to manage leads in four basic steps:
Step 1: Lead generation
Lead generation is the process of creating awareness to your target market for your products or services through articles, how-to videos, website downloads, webinars/ events, and so on. It needs to resonate to your ideal customer profile (per demographics, psycho-graphics, behaviors, pain and so on). To do so you need to first identify and understand your leads, your target market.
Step 2: Lead capture
As soon as potential customers start responding to your lead generation strategies is when you start collecting vital intelligence about them. Here is where you begin to score or qualify, as well as track, analyze and gain opt-in.
Step 3: Lead scoring
To make the lead hand-off from marketing to sales as friction-less as possible, you first need an agreed upon sales ready lead definition (between marketing and sales). That way when you track and tag a lead based on an activity demo vs downloading content activity, the result scores are differently per activity. Scoring can be a simple hot or cold or more comprehensive definition.
Step 4: Lead nurturing
Lead nurturing is the process of cultivating relationships with prospective buyers who are not yet ready to buy. The objective is to educate them about your brand, products, and solutions by sending them targeted, informational content at each stage of the buying journey.
Oh Yeah! Don’t forget that your existing customers also need continued nurturing. They may be ready for some up-selling or cross selling by sales.
Note speed of qualifying is critical in lead management and throughout these steps.
Also expand connecting with leads in different ways social, email and calls through to personalizing according to their lead/customer profile.
bEffective also recommends and can help you to be diligent in tracking and measuring all of your leads.
“We do a lot of one night stands in lead generation and not enough in long term relationships.” – Mike King iPullRank
Action Step
You’ve read our promise, for the challenge you may be facing along with the ‘how to’ solve it. Stop your one night stand, we say this as a friend.
bEffective offers services to help your SaaS business establish its revenue growth methodology in whole or for the module you need help to improve upon.
Should you wish to do it for yourself, then check out our resources menu for ‘how-to’ solve the challenge mentioned above as well as others in this area of our website. Keep in mind the research and science dictates the ‘right’ revenue growth approach needs to be built in sequence, integrated and more for achieving the promise percentage, dollars through to consistent cash flow.
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