11 ways to manage leads and grow sales

Today, when the eCommerce world is pacing up every single day, it has become very important to have a track on the leads. Whether you own a small business or a large one, lead acquisition is a crucial process to grow sales. As an entrepreneur, one should be well-versed with ways to manage leads and grow sales.

Let’s break down the Lead Management Process into small chunks:

1) Lead Acquisition: One should identify the sources of lead acquisition and can track the number of leads coming in  from a particular source. What here needs to be brought into picture is the automatic incorporation of leads into your business system.

2) Lead Tracking: Once a lead becomes a part of your system, it is very important to follow the course of its journey. One needs to regularly analyse the pages they are visiting, the forms they are filling, etc.

3) Lead Distribution: Understanding the nature of a lead & analysing the available lead details makes it easy to pass on leads to various departments as per the stage a lead falls into. Lead Distribution, also, majorly depends upon the solution or the service, the lead is looking for.

4) Lead Qualification: One has to be very careful while handling leads. With the help of lead scoring method, one can rate his leads and plan on the follow-up of the same accordingly.

5) Lead Nurturing: A lead conversion depends on the experience that a lead has during its journey with your business. Pampering a lead should always be your topmost priority, no matter what. Each lead that enters your business should be treated with utmost attention & concern.

Let’s quickly introduce you to the 11 ways to manage leads & grow sales:

1) Work on the content of your website & Social Media Platforms:

Make sure that the content released on your website & Social Media Platforms caters to the leads falling in every stage of your purchase funnel:

i) Awareness: This is the stage where people are trying to discover & explore the problem they have.

ii) Interest: At this stage, the prospect is actively looking for solutions to his problems and ways to achieve his goals.

iii)Consideration: This is the stage when a prospect has been converted into a qualified lead and marketers can send more information to them regarding the products/services to convert them into happy customers.

iv) Evaluation: This is also known as the “Decision-Making” stage, wherein a lead decides whether to purchase a brand’s products/services or not. This is the stage of the purchase funnel in which, Sales & the Marketing Team have to work together, in order to win a lead.

v)  Purchase: This is the most sought-after stage of the Purchase Funnel. This is the step wherein you can call the lead, a customer. Reaching this stage qualifies you as a successful entrepreneur.

The content should be informative, simple and easy to understand.

Here are 5 simple tricks to frame a relevant content piece-

• Understand your audience’s needs: For example, if you know that most of the prospects are looking for a way to enhance their sales then you must come up with posts which offer a solution to do the same.

Neil Patel is a renowned name who has been helping marketers through his content.

• Write  well-researched content: A well-researched content is something that cannot be misleading at all. Thus, if you write to aspire people, the content should be written after actually having done a detailed study on the topic. This will help in having a perspective of that particular topic.

• Stay updated & write around the ongoing scenario: A content which is irrelevant in today’s date, will be of no use for the residents of eCommerce stage. So one needs to know the utility of the content that is being framed by him.

• Always look for feedbacks: While handling lot many things together, you may miss out on one or a few important things. In such cases, feedbacks are very beneficial. You can get the content reviewed from at least 2 or 3 people who will help to identify the important points to be added in order to increase the value of the content.

2) Update your landing pages regularly:

Landing pages are your ultimate destinations for lead conversion. Design your landing pages, keeping in mind, your goal & expectations from that particular page.

Analyse the performance of landing pages & upgrade them from time to time.

Landing pages should generate great value for your business by yielding pretty decent amount of information about the leads. You can utilise tools like hotjar & inspectlet scripts to your pages to analyse & check the performance of each component of the page.

How to make landing pages value generating-

i) Place Call To Action (CTA) button at proper place: The position of CTA button plays a very important role in having a better conversion rate.

The above image shows how HubSpot has used multiple CTAs in the beginning of its Home Page, which increases its conversion rate to manifolds.

ii) Play around with the graphics to make the page attractive: Along with the content, the page should be flexible enough to include the relevant images that reveal the entire context of the page.

iii) Provide authentic information through your page: Your page should not extend any unreliable information.

For example: Trello has mentioned all the relevant information in its banner itself so that no unnecessary information is passed on.

3) Set up a goal funnel to analyse your leads:

Initiate a goal funnel considering various stages of purchase cycle of a buyer. Goals will help to determine the Lead Retention Value.

The goals funnel should be achievable and easy to track.

Following are the benefits of setting up a goal funnel.

i) Makes the process of Lead Management hassle-free.

ii) Simplifies lead scoring.

iii) Helps you to have a clear marketing insight.

iv) Updates you about the changes to be made in your marketing system.

One can even track the goal funnel using Google Analytics.

4) Be wise with your promotional activities:

The engagements, impressions, Click Through Rates, etc. are the measures through which one can track the performance of one’s website, posts, etc. To have the maximum of the aforementioned measures of performance, you should be wise enough to decide the path of promotional journey of your content, posts, etc.

Top tricks to effectively promote your content:

i) Analyse and look for the days your post would perform best.

ii) Use captivating captions.

iii)Use top-searched hashtags.

iv)Provide Call To Actions in your posts.

v) Establish social connections worldwide and get your posts shared.

vi)Track events and release relevant posts.

vii)Share lifestyle, philosophical posts once in a while to maintain interaction.

5) Rectify your e-mail Marketing System:

Automation! Being in eCommerce arena, you must have heard of this word. E-mail Marketing is crucial for your business and its automation can help you tremendously save your time & effort.

How to make e-mail system better?

i)   Prepare an uninterrupted e-mail list.

ii) Integrate your list with your automation tool.

iii) Segment your e-mail list.

iv) Create campaigns time to time.

v)  Keep updating your e-mail list.

Importance of having an e-mail list:

The e-mail list that you create helps you to easily run marketing campaigns as you know which lead to target and for what. The e-mail list helps you to have a personalised marketing approach. The personalised approach helps to have a better Customer Relationship Management.

6) Score your leads:

To decide the eligibility of a lead, lead scoring is essential. Lead Scoring is a model that allows rating on the basis of Recency, Frequency & Monetary parameters. This helps you to pitch accordingly.

Lead Scoring Model helps in prioritizing the leads as the leads exploring your products/services and the ones wanting to buy your products/services definitely hold different places.

According to HubSpot, only 37% of companies respond to their leads with an hour. Thus, this percentage can sure be surged if Lead Scoring process is brought into practice by more and more firms.

The Lead Scoring Model helps you to acquire qualified leads easily which can further be sent to Sales Team immediately.

With the introduction of automated Lead Scoring, one can easily manage leads and entertain them according to their nature & behavior.

7)  Properly plan your Marketing Campaigns:

Marketing Campaigns are important assets for your business.

The Marketing Campaigns for any business should be directional and should cater to audience falling into each stage of the purchase funnel.

How to launch a successful Marketing Campaign?

i) Identify your goals.

ii) Brainstorm with your team.

iii)Discover the pros & cons of each idea.

iv)Outline the marketing strategy.

v) Execute the plan and track the goals reached.

8) Distribute your leads meticulously:

After  lead acquisition & qualification, it is necessary to allot leads wisely to your employees.

You can distribute the leads on the basis of the following:

i) Geographical Region: Suppose, you have your team in various countries such as U.S., U.K., Canada, etc. It will not be a wise decision to allocate a lead located in Canada, to an employee of yours in the U.S. office. Therefore, you need to distribute your leads wisely.

ii) Area of interest: There should be an appropriately placed survey form for lead collection on the landing pages of your website. The form will help you in identifying the area of interest of the lead acquired and manage the same accordingly.

Say, if someone is interested in your automation product, you can pass it on to the team that handles that specific product line.

iii) Stages of the purchase cycle: It is a basic need for you to identify the stage, your lead falls in. This helps in passing the leads to the right people. A lead may be in any of the stages of the purchase funnel. It is responsibility of the team to get lead, in any stage, converted.

9) Track your website’s performance from time to time:

It is very important to know how each page or say every single content, CTA button, etc. of your website is working.

You can track the performance of your site by inserting Hotjar or Inspectlet script.

You can make use of Google Analytics as well. Google Analytics provides a complete report of page views, demographics, goal conversions, etc.

5 Basic Measures to analyse a website’s performance.

i)   Page views: This tells the number of visitors landing upon your site within the chosen time frame.

ii) Bounce Rate: This is the single page session divided by all sessions multiplied by 100.

iii) Exit Rate: It is the percentage of people who left from your website in the chose time frame.

iv) Start Render Time: It is the initial moment in time that something is displayed on the screen.

v) Click Through Rate: It is the number of clicks divided by total number of impressions multiplied by 100.

10) Align suitable employees to manage leads:

No lead is irrelevant, so it is very important that you have members in your team that can manage your leads well. Each lead manager should know that a  conversion should be as organic as possible.

A lead Manager should possess the following qualities.

i) Great Communication Skills: Any member of a company, who takes over a lead should be able to share his ideas and values with it and at the same time understand their perspective. The manager should know when to pitch what.

ii) Problem solving approach: Whoever is involved with Lead Management, should have empathy for the leads and should find out a solution to each problem of the prospect.

iii) Broad Mental Perspective: If the Lead Manager gets stuck while administering a lead, he should have a judgement to figure out whom to go to in the company to come up with a suitable

Solution.

iv) Proper knowledge of Product & Services: Conversion is the ultimate goal while dealing with leads in any stage of the purchase cycle. To convert a lead, it is important to know what is the sole purpose of the product/service that you are pitching. One needs to have a complete insight into the products/services of its company.

11) Automate your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System:

Automating your CRM System with automation tools like HubSpot & Mautic, you can perform the following tasks without much effort:

i) Lead Scoring: The automation tools help to rate the leads on the basis of their eligibility. You can enter the lead details and get acknowledged with the lead score.

ii) RFM Segmentation: The tools help to automatically divide the customers on the basis of Recency, Frequency & Monetary parameters & manage the leads accordingly.

iii) E-mail List Management: You can enter the e-mail list collect via. Landing pages, marketing campaigns, etc and systematically arrange them to convert better.

iv) Track Leads: The tools help you to have a record of the journey of your leads. This helps to distribute the leads accordingly.

v) Manage Campaigns: The automation tools help to create campaigns and track the activity, impressions & engagements on those campaigns to have a clear picture of success rate of that particular campaign.

Final Words:

To grow sales of your business, it is very important to manage leads efficiently and the aforementioned 11 ways are crucial for having great sales.

As an aspiring businessperson, you need to be wise about your leads and sales. Manage well your employees, leads & automate your CRM System to attain a better conversion rate.