3 Lead Management Best Practices Using CRM

Saphyte Team

4 min read

Updated: January 24th, 2021

So you’ve just spent a fortune generating leads. Now you want to allocate them to the best-fit salespeople and do everything you can to help them convert better.

But are you really allocating leads to the right salespeople? Are those leads being engaged in the right manner? And what can you do to convert these leads and generate more sales?

Well now you don’t have to worry about any of these. Using a CRM, you can allocate leads to the proper salespeople based on multiple parameters, automatically. Track what activities have happened against these leads. And intervene at the right time to improve conversions.

With a CRM software, you get increased conversions from your sales reps, increased activities per sales rep per day, and reduce turnaround time. Are you ready to nail lead management for your business? Read on to find out how.

3 Lead Management Best Practices

The two main priorities of companies are attracting or generating new leads and then closing them into customers but unfortunately, most companies are lost about the meat of the process: what happens in between a lead entering your system and then closing as a customer. And the problem is that too many leads are lost either due to marketing teams that just don’t know what to do with them or in that app or handoff from the marketing to the sales team.

That’s why it’s really important to have a well-thought-out and documented lead management process. Here are three lead management best practices to learn from if you want to grow your business:

1. Always get a deeper understanding of your market process

So essentially a lead is brought to you or to your websites from some sort of top of the funnel content. So this could go in one of the following ways:

• Your leads find you via search
• They see you through a paid advertisement
• A PR opportunity
• A referral from another site
• On social media
• On your website where they’re attracted by either a lead magnet or an offer to assist
• When they subscribe to your blog and then the lead will fill out a form on a landing page or pop-up to receive one of those offers

At this point, a new lead is added to your database and they’re actually designated as a marketing qualified lead. This lead has been segmented and then entered into one of your lead nurturing workflow.

Lead nurturing workflows are long funnels that work to get them from identifying their problems to finding possible solutions to those problems to then evaluating your company as the possible solution provider.

At the same time, you have a scoring system via your CRM (lead scoring) that is updating and it will actually trigger a team member to reach out specifically to any leads that are designated as “very hot leads” and this is not a sales reach out: this is just offering some kind of helpful content that you think that lead would find beneficial and you start a more intimate conversation with them.

Getting a deeper understanding of your market process means you know that what you’re doing at every stage of the sales process works, and they work in moving a lead towards the end of the sales funnel. If there are parts that you notice that too many leads are moving slowly, you identify that part and assess what’s taking those leads long from converting into customers.

This means that you have to gather data not just from the customers themselves (through their feedback or responses to your interactions with them) but also from your sales team themselves: are they struggling with marketing your unique selling proposition? Do they find it difficult to respond to leads’ questions because of a lack of knowledge materials? Do you have enough technical resources to let your sales team quickly spot out if a lead is moving slowly?

These questions allow you to gain a deeper understanding of your marketing process and improve it so sales cycles are cut short.

2. Always find a way to personalize your sales process

How does a lead get moved from marketing to sales? Well, if they have filled out some sort of a bottom of the funnel form— so this means they’ve made it through to one of your workflows or they have indicated on a “contact us” form that they’re interested in your marketing services.

At this point, the sales team is actually notified via automated workflows. They actually get a text message and an email that they have a new lead and then this lead enters the qualification phase. So they are actually qualified by a sales team member via phone call and vetted for fit.

At this point, if it’s determined that they could be a potential fit, they’re offered a strategy call with one of your strategists and they are changed to a sales qualified lead or SQL in the system.

They will then enter the discovery phase. So to prep them for the strategy session, they’re sent a questionnaire via email, and once they filled out that questionnaire that helps set up your strategies to deliver a very valuable session. And they’ve scheduled that strategy session, so they are then marked as an opportunity in the system.

Once they’ve had that strategy session and you’ve determined that the needs they have that their personality fits with your business’s value proposition, they are then offered or moved into the proposal phase. At this point, this is where you actually make your pitch so they’re passed on to your lead salesman and you craft a customized or semi-customized pitch for them.

So you present them all of your capabilities as a company and then the capabilities that you think or the services that you think fit best their goals and needs at this point. After the proposal has been given to them, you send them the proposal and if they start making any sort of changes or start negotiating, you enter them into the negotiation phase.

Always try to find a way to personalize your process so your leads turn into customers. This is arguably the most important and crucial part of the sales process.

3. Always find a way to upsell or cross-sell to your customers

Once your leads are designated in the system as a customer, it doesn’t end there. Your current customers are actually really great marketing opportunities.

The onboarding and remarketing phase of marketing actually presents a lot of opportunities for sales growth. So here, the sales team will send an email with the client onboarding document and an operating questionnaire to the client and also pass on any information that they have to the client services team so that that client feels like they don’t have to repeat themselves.

The client is then introduced to their team for an introductory call. The marketing team will then send these new customers a mailed gift and also they’re dripped: a series of three welcome emails.

One has a customized video that you can send to them welcome them to the family. The next one provides them with resources that are for clients only— so free trainings, ebooks, videos that are specially for them. And then the last one makes them aware of any partner services or products that you can get them at discounted rates that they might be interested in.

So here, they continue to be nurtured alongside new leads that come in so they continue to receive your newsletters which will provide useful information. And then you continue to nurse them with things like a one-year anniversary gift and email and then, of course, gifts at the holidays and other touchpoints and then you always stay in contact with the client services team to look for opportunities for upsells and cross-sells.

So if there’s anything that they might be needing, you might be able to provide the client as they mature in order to help them be better.

Saphyte: Your Lead Management CRM

Saphyte is a cloud-based CRM that you can use for your lead management processes. It is a CRM solution that helps you manage customer information and improve your customer interaction.

Using CRM tools, Saphyte’s users can implement the best practices of customer relationship management (CRM) to guarantee customer satisfaction and improve the business process of businesses— small business or not.

The CRM system uses leads and customers’ contact information for its users to increase sales and grow in the long run.

Want to know more about how Saphyte can help you generate more leads and customers? Contact our support team now.