September 11, 2018 | By RGR Marketing Blog

Getting the Most out of Your Leads

For many sales professionals, lead management is a secondary consideration, often left for another time when things around the office aren’t quite so hectic. While the flow of leads is heavy, it can be tempting to put little to no thought into effective lead management, electing instead to do that which is in front of you. But this is a mistake.

While it may feel like lead management is something that can wait for when you don’t have so many leads to follow up on, effectively managing the leads you have—no matter how numerous—will streamline your workflow, improve your conversion rate, and drive your company’s overall success.

Managing the flow of leads in your funnel and pipeline is the key to efficiently maximizing the potential of those leads, and to getting your conversion rates working smarter, not harder. In this article, we trace the life of a lead from acquisition through the pipeline, examining the ideal management of leads at each step in the sales process.

The Importance of Process When It Comes to Acquiring More Business

We all know the generic statistic—as much as 50% of business goes to the vendor that contacts first. What many of us may not know is that having a mature lead management process can boost your conversion rate by as much as 250%. While each business, and each industry, will by nature have somewhat unique steps in their ideal management process, the basic steps are as follows:

  • Lead Acquisition
    • Your leads come from somewhere, but are you tracking their origination? You should be.
  • Lead Qualification & Scoring
    • Lead qualification is a science and beyond the scope of an article of this size and nature. But suffice it to say that you need to have an established lead filtering process in place to help you determine which leads get the most attention and when.
  • Distribution
    • Matching leads with sales team members by specialty and priority.
  • Sales Qualification
    • The beginning of the process, when the salesperson who’s been assigned a lead begins the sales process by vetting the quality of the lead for themselves.
  • Sales Process
    • Each business model and each industry will have their own.
  • Conversion
    • Making a customer out of a lead.

This is just a generic, bare bones example of a lead management process. What goes into your lead management process will depend upon your industry and your company. But you need to have one, and it needs to be established, agreed upon, and adhered to. Or you can purchase a SaaS or PaaS solution for lead management (you still have to use it though).

What to Do When Leads Exit the Pipeline?

Lastly, it is also important to have an established protocol in place for dealing with leads that do not result in conversion. Remember: every lead costs you something. These costs are quantifiable, but they are not unavoidable.

Leads that exit your sales pipeline can be recycled, back to the funnel at some point in the future. Make sure you manage this last step in the process to fully maximize your potential conversion rate.

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