Lead management doesn’t have to be frustrating. If it is, take it as a sign that something has to change. Marketing could succeed in generating as many leads as you’d like but unless you handle them with care, you could just as easily lose half of them from an inefficient handoff before any of them could convert to sales.

Don’t know where to start? Don’t worry. There are a few things you can keep in mind to manage your lead conversion more effectively.

1- A Seamless Customer Buying Journey

One of the goals when working on your company’s demand generation and lead management system:  is to provide a centralized, automated system that works.

With B2B buyers becoming largely digital, companies are expected to transform the way they approach and interact with buyers.
Creating personalized buying journeys that fit a variety of customer personas is becoming a popular solution to the transition to an increasingly digital industry.

The challenge for modern companies is to produce a system that would make the jump between disparate channels less awkward, from facilitating digital and real-world channels to branching out to the diverse customer and industry profiles.
By combining digital demand with informed sales response, companies can help customers navigate these journeys more effectively. Automated tools can also help salespeople to work smart for better productivity.

2- Complexity Management

There’s a lot of moving parts in an average B2B company. However, most of them lack a streamlined lead management process when handing off customers to channel partners. One way for you to work around this is to start by looking at the size and complexity of your organization through constant facilitation at the right places.

For example, the journey from marketing to sales could become near invisible to the customer through consistent monitoring. Identifying and gathering performance metrics at all key touchpoints in the journey could help create a common data strategy across separate channels, which could then shape fragmented customer journeys into personalized ones and improve scalability. With the right information and insights, you can avoid falling in sales.

In order to market more efficiently, developing a marketing and sales infrastructure is the way to go. The key is to be able to integrate processes such as automated marketing platforms, content management systems, CRM, and analytics, among others into one platform so you could monitor these activities with minimal hassle.

Facilitating organizational alignment can be tricky as your company grows. However, when done well, it could lead to efficient customer engagement. Traditionally, you could do this through demand centers, but with emerging technology, you could achieve the same effect in-house with the right tools.

3- A Data-Driven System

While it may seem like an obvious necessity, businesses have been slow to transition to a data-driven approach. In a 2019 survey by Deloitte, insight-driven organizations have been shown to be in the minority despite buzzwords such as big data and analytics being thrown around the B2B sector for years. 

The report, however, shows that this is less due to the availability of the technology and more due to its utilization (or lack thereof). While it’s easy to buy and use tools for analytics, employees have to be educated on the best ways to actually use it, especially for those who find themselves rooted in older business models.

One way to resolve this problem is by providing mentorship while reducing the learning curve. While actively engaging and rewarding your team for the correct insight-driven behaviors can definitely lay down the foundations for a forward-facing team, it wouldn’t hurt to look for tools that provide a more intuitive interface for them to use.

With the boom of SaaS technology for lead management software, there are several vendors that offer as many bells and whistles as would look good on a pricing list. When choosing a product, make sure to keep your company’s needs in mind. While a long list of lead management system features and add-ons could sound enticing, the question of whether you would be able to utilize and apply these is still only answerable relative to the maturity of your company. As a rule of thumb, going all-out right off the bat is neither necessary nor advisable. 

Managing the change that comes with integrating new techniques and technology is important to help your business find its footing. Without it, the shift in cultural norms and procedures could account for a lot of frustration and wasted time. Start by keeping track of your businesses’ current capabilities and what it needs; use tools that would support and nourish current tasks rather than create a barrier, then work your way up. With where your company is positioned at present, think of the milestones you would like to achieve over the course of the transition and work on investing in talent, technology, and data.

4- Are You Managing Your Leads Effectively?

Lead management can be a complicated mess for your company to navigate. From generating more channels for leads to grow in to successfully turning them to increased B2B sales leads, knowing how to manage your leads, analytics, and customer touchpoints efficiently can either make or break your company with a few key points to keep in mind. If you’re finding yourself a little out of depth, take a look at where your company is and ask yourself what you could change to keep up with the times. Brush up your tools and add more of what would make your tasks easier, like a lead management platform or FinancesOnline free marketing templates.

Reach your ideal future customers.

The top sales teams use Peakslead to locate accurate B2B contact and company details.

Written By: Nestor Gilbert