Ultimate Guide to CRM Lead Management

Running a business today can feel like training for the Marines. Consumer demands have never been higher. We want personalized experiences, answers to questions we haven’t even asked yet, quality products, flawless service … the expectations never end. In order to cope, companies turn to CRM software to help them manage the customer journey. And the first step on that journey is CRM lead management.

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Here’s what we’ll cover in this article:

• The Problem: Customer Expectations
• The Solution: Lead Management and CRM
• Lead Management vs. CRM
• Process
• Primary Benefits
• Best Practices
• The Best CRM Lead Management Systems
  • HubSpot Sales Hub
  • Zoho CRM
  • Freshsales
  • Dynamics 365 for Sales
  • Creatio

The Problem

Leads are the lifeblood of your company. Without them, revenue eventually dries up and you have to shut off the lights. But there’s a problem. Leads aren’t as easy to come by as a Starbucks latte.

Consumers move fast and make fickle decisions. There’s not always a connection between loyalty and your product’s price or your brand’s reputation. It’s influenced by location, family preferences, local trends and a whole host of other factors.

You can conduct as many surveys and make as many projections as you like, but you’ll never have complete control over your customers — or your leads for that matter.

The Solution

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. CRM systems give you the tools to capture leads and guide them through your conversion funnel. And then maintain a strong relationship once they become customers.

Combine consumer mindsets and business complexities and it’s no surprise that the market for CRM software — and lead management tools, by extension — is booming. Businesses need an efficient way to process, develop and retain as many individual leads and loyalties as possible.

With industry competition becoming fiercer and customers demanding increasingly personalized experiences, companies can’t afford to overlook the lead management opportunities of CRM if they want to stay competitive.

That brings up a question: how different are lead management and CRM solutions? More importantly, does your current CRM system already cover lead management requirements?

Let’s take a jaunt into the world of managing your leads and your customer relationships.

Lead Management vs. CRM

To understand the importance of lead management software, you have to know how and why they differ from traditional CRM software.

The easiest way to keep them straight is to picture those Venn diagrams you probably saw scribbled on a whiteboard during a college class. If CRM is the outer circle, lead management is one of several circles completely inside it. Lead management is a critical subset of customer relationship management.

In terms of the software, lead management can come as a standalone system. It helps you through the process of turning prospects into customers, but its capabilities end there.

However, since lead management is a central component of CRM, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a CRM solution that doesn’t include lead management features.

Here’s a quick breakdown of each:

Lead management is straightforward: it focuses on capturing and retaining leads until they officially become customers with a purchase, subscription or other interaction to their name.

Lead management software brings in the leads and guides them through the process of qualifying and nurturing. Then, it hands them off to your sales reps who turn leads into paying customers.

This is the point where your CRM takes over. CRM software provides a range of features and functionalities that empower you to handle everything from contact management to sales forecasting.

The two approaches, while tackling different areas, work together. Without lead management, your CRM won’t have any customers to maintain relationships with. That makes it crucial to get the first piece down — like building a solid foundation for a house.

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Process

Lead management can be a big asset for your business because it produces a clear plan of action. If you know which leads offer attainable value, you can invest more time and money on developing these particular leads. In other words, bet your marketing capital on safer candidates.

To help you better understand how the lead management process works, here’s an overview of the main steps involved:

Capturing

Lead management can’t happen unless you’re bringing people into the funnel. Inbound marketing tactics have become a favorite approach to generate leads. As the name implies, you draw prospects to your brand by offering high-level content such as blog posts, videos and information-packed downloads.

Demand generation is another common method for filling the pipeline. It uses a variety of digital ads, email marketing and in-person activities like trade shows.

After someone takes an action to become a lead, they become an entry in your system. Lead management tools provide a central database for storing this information. You’ll use this data to help categorize your leads and send them the appropriate content during the nurturing phase.

Categorizing

Once you have leads, you need to sort them based on criteria such as demographics and buyer stage. To achieve this, lead management software mines data from multiple sources. Sometimes, it uses direct mailing or email marketing lists. Other times, it extracts information from customer databases or even social media platforms. Then, it auto-populates profiles based on available details like the lead’s job title, company, location and so on.

With access to the right data, it analyzes the information, segments valuable customer identifiers and produces a set of qualified leads. Not only does it do this with more accuracy than a traditional sales team can, it also does it at speed.

Tracking

Some people like to know if the meat they’re eating is locally sourced or not. Similarly, marketing teams need to determine the source of the leads generated. Was it from the company’s website? Or through a referral? Knowing the answer to this question helps them create contextual campaigns.

The tracking functionality in lead management software enables you to track prospectors’ and leads’ activities. You can monitor the number of pages visited, minutes spent on them, links clicked and documents downloaded.

With effective lead tracking, your marketing team can uncover which campaign converts the most leads. They can then pass this information to the sales department so they can tweak their pitch accordingly and increase the likelihood of conversion.

Scoring

This method is how you determine how valuable each lead is. The objective is to try and identify the leads that match your blueprint of the ideal customer. What the ideal customer looks like will, of course, depend on your product and brand narrative, so you’ve got to integrate the software with your marketing strategies.

Nurturing

When it comes to your brand, people aren’t prone to love at first sight. It’s especially true in the B2B world, where buying cycles are growing longer. 52% of new vendors and 35% of existing suppliers said the length of their buying cycles has increased.

You have to be patient, and that’s where lead nurturing comes in. Want people to buy from you? First, you have to give them valuable, relevant content that fits their stage of awareness.

The path to purchase involves nudging your leads further down the funnel until they hit the point where they say, “All right, I’m convinced!” and pull out their credit cards.

Transferring to the Sales Team

Once the leads are primed to take the next step, you’ll need a seamless hand-off to your sales reps. This transition point from marketing to sales is known for its difficulties. Having lead management already integrated into your CRM makes this process a lot smoother.

The main goal is to make sure the lead is actually sales-ready — which is where scoring each lead comes in. And on the sales side, reps should pick up the conversation immediately to prevent the lead from slipping back to a nurturing status.

Analyzing

Built-in analytics allows you to measure a host of metrics such as lead conversion rates, sales trends, and campaign and team performance. With lead analytics and custom reports, your marketing and sales teams can derive actionable insights and see the positive impact of their strategies.

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Primary Benefits

Now that we’ve defined lead management and seen how it works, let’s take a look at some of the top advantages of putting a CRM lead management system in place.

Gain Insight and Drive ROI With Analytics

It’s never been easier to gather data. We’re practically drowning in it. But just because you can collect personal details about consumers doesn’t make it automatically useful. Without a strategy for using that data to inform better decisions and actions, you might as well be driving in the dark with your eyes blindfolded.

It’s a major waste of time if your mailing lists, web forms and social media platforms always collect and never deliver. However, with the right lead management tools, this information becomes a valuable asset that contributes to profit and conversion margins. They tell your business which leads are worth your money and attention, based on their likelihood of becoming a paying customer.

This ability to track leads greatly enhances your marketing efforts. Want to minimize waste and make sure you’re developing the right areas of the target market? Look no further.

CRM lead management software also enables you to pinpoint where prospects are entering your funnel. To illustrate, when a new lead — we’ll call him Joe King — enters the system, you can see that he got a free eBook in exchange for his info. No matter where your leads first interact, you can identify the sources.

Such insight shows you which types of content perform better and which channels are best to spend your time and energy on. By tracking these touchpoints where prospects become leads, you can optimize your funnel to enhance lead generate.

You can also use the data you’ve collected to your advantage and tailor your responses to better fit the context of each lead. For example, let’s say an HR manager downloads your guide on best practices when implementing HR software. Using that guide as a framework, you can use your lead management tool to build an automated sequence that triggers in response anytime someone downloads the guide. Now that manager will receive a 3-part email sequence that follows up with other valuable content related to HR software implementation.

Voila! Customers receive personalized content without having to wait. And that’s a key building block in creating the trust that draws them down the funnel. 66% of businesses said implementing a personalized email marketing strategy proved effective in meeting their goals.

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Reduce Costs

The ability to use data to your advantage comes with another nicely gift-wrapped result: cost savings. A robust lead management policy can end up saving you a lot of cash.

In the world of sales, there’s a big difference between “might buy” and “definitely will buy.” Once you can distinguish where each lead is on that spectrum, it dramatically cuts down on risk and leads to a higher hit rate when it comes to closing the deal.

Qualify Leads

Qualifying leads is a fundamental part of moving them through the funnel. There’s no point in spending time on leads who aren’t likely to turn into buyers at the end of the line. To aid this, lead management CRM software provides features such as lead scoring to help you rank the quality of each lead.

Some solutions use a point-based system, while others let you rank each lead on a cold to hot scale. The particulars aren’t as important as the fact that this gives you an immediate and clear view of which leads are best to pursue.

Nurture Leads

Another benefit of using data? Placing each lead into the proper nurturing campaign. If someone converted via a middle-of-the-funnel datasheet, you’ll want to send them different content than Joe King who still needs more general offerings near the top of the funnel based on his first download.

In order to win someone’s trust, you have to keep an open line of communication. You can’t expect Joe to download an eBook and then buy your product the next week. He’s testing the waters to see if your company is worthy of his business. For the leads who aren’t sales-ready, nurturing is an essential activity.

Lead management enables you to date the customer, so to speak. You can provide various types of content and show how your product or service can help them achieve their goals. This nurturing process is a key part of turning someone from a consumer into a customer.

Operate With Context

Have you ever started watching a movie in the middle? If you’ve never seen it before, you don’t have any idea of what’s going on. Now apply that concept to your sales process. Cold calls are kind of like starting the movie at the midpoint: the customers don’t know what you’re about or who you are. See the problem?

Salespeople already get a bad rap. It’s easy for people to get frustrated when some random stranger calls and tries to sell them something. Say goodbye to all those leads you worked so hard to get.

But if you execute lead management properly, you can avoid this drawback. By tracking each lead through their journey, you can provide your reps with information that makes their job easier.

Let’s return to our friend Joe. He’s finally decided he’s interested in buying your product. When your sales rep makes the call, she can look at Joe’s information to provide a personalized, relevant experience.

Respond Quickly

In a world of fast-moving social media feeds and bite-sized pieces of content, attention spans are short. Consumers want responses yesterday. If you don’t follow up in a timely manner (like, immediately), you might lose them to a competitor.

Lead management tools help you avoid such tragic situations. When someone enters the system as a new lead, you’ll see it and be able to send a response. And that impacts your bottom line.

Research has shown that the early vendor gets the sale. Conversion rates jump more than eight times if you respond within the first five minutes. Talk about some major ROI.

Save Time With Automation

If you ever watched the 1950s sitcom “I Love Lucy,” you probably remember the famous “Job Switching” episode. Lucy and her best friend, Ethel, go to work in a candy factory, where their job is to wrap chocolates as the conveyor belt glides past.

Since they’re doing it by hand and without any experience, Lucy and Ethel quickly discover how difficult it is to keep up with the conveyor belt’s speed. The task becomes a disaster as they stuff chocolates under their hats, into their mouths and anywhere else they can find, in a desperate attempt to keep pace with the never-ending rush.

It’s an amusing story, but also a good illustration of how important streamlining tasks is. If you’re trying to manage leads without software to automate the process, your pipeline can spiral out of control. Maybe a spreadsheet was sufficient when you only had 50 leads a month. But what happens when that number swells to 5,000?

A lead management tool makes the process more efficient. This removes burdensome manual entry tasks and creates the freedom to increase productivity.

Coordinate Effectively

Covering various stages of a lead funnel is a lot like riding a tandem bicycle. Converting a prospect into a customer requires a collaborative effort from your marketing and sales departments. Without proper communication, your employees might as well be pedaling in opposite directions.

Lead management CRM allows your teams to collaborate in a centralized place. Real-time alerts about user activity or document updates ensure everyone’s on the same page and decreases the likelihood of miscommunication.

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Best Practices

Like the Harry Potter books, lead management has a lot of volumes. It’s a complex process that spans multiple departments. To ensure your leads are going through the funnel smoothly, it’s imperative to have a sound strategy in place. Here’s a list of some best practices to keep in mind:

• Align sales and marketing goals to pave the way for higher ROI, shorter sales cycles and better buyer experience.
• Enrich lead profiles through lead scoring and buyer personas.
• Remove duplicate entries from your lead data.
• Assign leads to relevant sales reps based on location, product line and lead source.
• Measure critical metrics like lead acquisition, cost per acquisition, opportunity size, website traffic and customer lifetime value.

The Best CRM Lead Management Systems

Now that we’ve covered lead management 101, it’s essential to peek into top-rated CRM lead management products to give you a well-rounded perspective. According to our Jumpstart Platform, the following vendors are dominating the market currently:

HubSpot Sales Hub

HubSpot Sales Hub is a cloud-based system that streamlines sales, marketing and customer service processes. Shorten sales cycles through capabilities like sales automation, quote generation, pipeline management and omnichannel communication. It allows you to monitor and score leads, view prior communications, segment prospects, and more.

Top Benefits

• Centralized Location: You can unify lead data across sales, marketing and customer service touchpoints. View lead information like document downloads, form submissions, email opens, website visits and social media engagement in a chronological timeline. Sales reps can make calls, send emails, assign activities and take notes within the system.
• Email Tracking: Automatically collect customer information like names, work titles, contact numbers and addresses and use this information to segment leads. Get notifications when prospects open your mail, click a link or download any attachment to follow up accordingly.
• Data Enrichment: HubSpot Insights combs through third-party data to create accurate, updated customer records. It pulls information from multiple channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
• AI: Receive accurate predictions and determine the probability of deal closures through predictive machine learning algorithms.

Primary Features

• Lead Capturing: Capture leads through multiple tools like email marketing, ad campaigns, landing pages, live chat and forms. You can capture prospects and pull data from LinkedIn by integrating with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
• Lead Scoring: Identify and prioritize the most qualified leads by automatically assigning scores. Create custom lead scoring benchmarks according to business-specific variables. You can set up workflows to alert sales reps when a lead reaches a certain score. HubSpot scores a perfect 100 for this capability, according to our Jumpstart Platform data.
• Lead Nurturing: Expand your lead database by building targeted lists. Use these segmented lists to deliver personalized emails, marketing campaigns and website content.
• Lead Distribution: Create location-based workflows to assign leads to relevant sales reps automatically. You can also use custom user fields to assign additional owners. The system offers a round-robin style for the lead assignment.
• Analytics: Monitor your sales team’s performance based on parameters like deals won and lost, the average time taken to close deals, and the number of sales activities.

Limitations

• Doesn’t show at what speed sales reps respond to incoming leads.
• Doesn’t offer AI-based sales recommendations.

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Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM helps drive sales and close deals through its lead generation, nurturing, qualification and conversion capabilities. It ensures your leads flow smoothly through the sales pipeline with modules like deal, contact and account management. You can engage with prospective leads across several communication channels and track necessary information.

Automate day-to-day sales operations to focus on closing leads. You can visualize your deal pipeline through built-in dashboards.

Top Benefits

• Automated Lead Assignment: Admins can configure multiple criteria like lead source, product interest and location to assign leads to appropriate sales reps. Ensure equal lead distribution through round-robin queues.
• Detailed Contact Information: Zoho CRM’s in-house AI, Zia, scours data across the web to gather additional contact details. It does so based on preliminary information such as the lead’s name, company and website. However, this module is only available for Enterprise and Ultimate license users.
• Omnichannel Communication: Connect with leads across several channels like phone, email, live chat and social media. You can send emails, make calls and log interactions within the system. Monitor brand engagement on social media sites by searching for keywords. You can also respond to customers in real time.
• Card Scanner: Scan business cards and QR codes and turn them into contacts and leads. The platform automatically fills appropriate fields from cards and lets you scan cards in 17 languages.
• Google Ads Integration: You can track revenue generated from online ads and view total ad spend. See ads clicked by customers and keywords that brought in the most leads to personalize campaigns. Drill down into campaign data to measure performance and effectiveness.

Primary Features

• Lead Generation Forms: Capture lead information via a no-code web form builder. Use the drag-and-drop functionality to design web forms and measure their performance to optimize campaigns and improve lead quality. You can host these forms on several content management systems such as Unbounce, Joomla and Google Sites.
• Lead Distribution: Set up predefined workflows to automatically assign leads based on geography, product type and department. Sales managers can configure different variables to ensure appropriate assignment.
• Analytics: Recommend relevant offerings to customers by analyzing their behavioral patterns, past purchases and interests. Custom reports provide insights into business-specific metrics like recurring trends, campaign and team performance, and activity reports. You can visualize these insights through built-in, shareable dashboards. Trend analysis by Zia monitors sales analytics and automatically alerts about any anomaly detection.
• Lead Scoring: Prioritize leads by assigning them positive and negative scores. You can assign scores according to various demographics like industry, business size and job profile. Sales managers can predict the likelihood of conversion or the probability of losing a lead through Zia’s prediction builder.
• Social Media Integrations: Track social media interactions by adding your profiles to the system. Initiate quick follow-up by monitoring every comment, reply and mention. Use the Social tab to create posts, share content and engage with customers. You can track keywords, follow hashtags and receive alerts when someone mentions your brand. Integrate with Facebook lead ads to acquire new leads.

Limitations

• Can’t convert offline documents into web-based versions.
• Doesn’t support email tracking.

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Freshsales

Freshsales is a cloud-based solution that helps businesses close more deals, shorten sales cycles and automate day-to-day tasks. Its lead management module enables you to generate high-quality leads, nurture relationships and deliver prompt interactions across channels.

You can create, monitor and measure sales activities and campaigns. The activity timeline allows you to view customer interactions chronologically. Its built-in AI offers insights into deals, recommends next-best actions and forecasts future revenue.

Top Benefits

• Contact Enrichment: Improve your lead, contact and account database by adding publicly available details like social media profiles, display pictures and company information.
• Intelligent Routing: Automatically distribute leads to relevant sales reps according to predefined lead routing rules.
• Multichannel Communication: Manage and track interactions by connecting your email inbox, phone systems and SMS providers with Freshsales. You can make calls with a click, record conversations, log notes and message website visitors. It also integrates with WhatsApp and Apple Business Chat.
• 360-degree Customer View: Get a detailed overview of your leads and customers across various touchpoints. Only display data crucial for your business by configuring the summary section. You can highlight interactions, sales sequences and modules for easy browsing. The system updates customer activities in real time.
• Reporting: Access pre-built reports to gauge business health. Sales cycle and velocity reports help you assess how long it takes sales reps to convert leads. You can create custom reports to track organization-specific metrics.

Primary Features

• Lead Generation: Automatically capture leads through multiple sources like emails, websites and social media profiles. You can either manually add leads or bulk import them via a CSV file.
• AI: Monitor deal activities and forecast results through Freshsales’ AI-enabled sales assistant, Freddy. It recommends the ideal course of action to sales reps, provides insights, detects duplicate contacts, and reschedules appointments and follow-ups when contact is unavailable.
• Lead Scoring: Admins can create custom lead scoring rules to assign leads. Freddy AI scans historical data and scores contacts based on prior interactions. To learn more, visit our Jumpstart Platform.
• Sales Sequence: Nurture leads according to their past activities and interests by setting up activities and reminders. Automate welcome messages, follow-up emails and renewal alerts. You can use customer information to upsell and cross-sell products.

Limitations

• Doesn’t offer contact recommendations.
• You can’t set up a territory hierarchy.
• No built-in card scanner.

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Dynamics 365 for Sales

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales streamlines sales processes, forecasts revenue fluctuations and helps deliver an improved customer experience. It offers a comprehensive view of custom activities that empower you to make data-driven decisions.

The guided selling module provides real-time insights into current market trends and customer sentiments. Other functionalities include contact, pipeline and campaign management. It offers both on-premise and cloud-based deployment.

Top Benefits

• Card Scanner: Sales reps on the field can update lead records by scanning business cards. It auto-populates details like name, job title, email address and contact number.
• Intelligent Lead Distribution: Assign leads on a round-robin basis to ensure equal distribution. You can set up workflows to trigger auto-assignment based on predefined rules.
• Customer Profiles: Enrich your marketing, sales and customer service data through Leadspace. Add details like gender, birth date, location, postal code and more. You can develop account-based segmentations to deliver targeted campaigns based on industry type, business size and geography.
• Insights: Real-time insights enable sales reps to react to at-risk customers and opportunities promptly. Adaptive AI analyzes business data to forecast sales, uncover new audience segments and pinpoint changes in buyer trends.

Primary Features

• Lead Capturing: Gather leads from multiple sources like website inquiries, mailing lists, card scans, networking and email activities. You can integrate with LinkedIn Sales Navigator to pull data from the site.
• Predictive Lead Scoring: Score, qualify and prioritize leads using machine learning algorithms. You can assign a score between 0 to 100 based on lead signals. Use these scores to determine which leads have higher chances of conversion. According to our Jumpstart Platform, lead scoring is one of the highest scoring modules in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales.
• Dashboards: Visualize insights on sales data, campaign effectiveness and team performance via charts, lists and views. You can access day-to-day sales-related figures like current activities, pending tasks, open leads and sales pipeline. Use visual and global filters to find what you’re looking for quickly.
• Mobile App: Sales reps can plan their day on the go, view upcoming meetings, update records, add notes and create contacts. It’s available on iOs and Android devices.
• Collaboration: Integrations with Microsoft Teams allow your sales teams to collaborate on deals no matter where they are. Its private chat option lets you directly share documents, updates and customer details. The Enterprise edition offers native integrations with Yammer, allowing you to create posts, reply to conversations, make team groups, post lead information and edit documents.

Limitations

• Doesn’t offer a built-in caller.
• Doesn’t provide SMS analytics.

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Creatio

Creatio is a low-code sales management solution that helps businesses generate, nurture and convert leads. You can manage sales cycles of different complexities and sizes through tools like sales process automation, opportunity management and custom workflows.

It allows you to measure sales performance, schedule meetings, create quotes, track quota fulfillment and improve channel visibility. Other capabilities include intelligent goal setting, sales forecasting, dashboards and custom integrations.

Top Benefits

• Profile Enrichment: Automatically identify customer information like phone numbers, social media profiles, email addresses and job titles from open sources. You can use this data to build comprehensive customer profiles and gain insights into their buying behavior and preferences.
• Collaboration: The solution facilitates smooth communication between team members and customers. You can send emails, make calls, approve orders and create tasks. Reminders ensure you don’t miss out on any updates. It also syncs your activities and meetings with Google Calendar.
• Segmentation: Deliver personalized campaigns by categorizing customers into different fields like industry type, priority and revenue. Use dynamic segments to reach out to customers you haven’t contacted for more than a month.
• Card Scanner: You can scan business cards and automatically add card information into the system. It supports more than 25 languages.

Primary Features

• Lead and Prospect Capturing: Capture leads across several sources like websites, social media, emails and live chat. It automatically verifies the accuracy of your records and populates contact profiles. You can set up automatic lead registration on landing pages to create leads.
• Predictive Scoring: Use intelligent scoring to predict the likelihood of successful conversions. Assign values on a scale of 1 to 100.
• Lead Distribution: Assign leads according to the prospect’s requirements, location, budget and industry. Also, take into consideration your sales reps’ current workload. You can reroute disqualified leads to lead nurturing campaigns.
• Analytics: Access lead-related statistics like conversion rate, number of new leads, qualified leads and campaign performance.

Limitations

• No built-in card scanner.
• Doesn’t provide email parser capabilities.

Selecting the Right Solution

There are plenty of lead management tools to choose from, usually packaged as part of a larger CRM suite. Take your time when making a decision, ask plenty of questions, and keep your overarching goal in mind — building up a strong customer base.

If you work in a niche industry, don’t overlook slightly smaller providers. While some companies aren’t as well known, it doesn’t mean their software isn’t every bit as impeccable as a mainstream solution.

Navigating the software landscape takes time and can easily get confusing. We get it. That’s why we want to help guide you through the process so you can save time, know what your options are and choose the right system for your needs. We put together a free CRM comparison report that cuts through the noise so you can accelerate your research.

Don’t leave money on the table. Invest in CRM lead management software and take your business to the next level.

What are the most valuable elements of lead management for your company? Comment below to let us know!