How to Better Manage Your Sales Leads

Summary:

• Effective lead management is the first step in boosting sales. It ensures that leads are assigned to the best-qualified agents and properly nurtured throughout the sales cycle.
• PhoneBurner’s LeadStream feature can automate distribution to make sure the right leads reach the right agents, while using a CRM system like Salesforce can help organize leads and track their activities to prevent missed opportunities.
• Understanding the source of each lead helps tailor each interaction so that sales teams can address specific needs and build stronger relationships.
• Lead scoring can also help prioritize prospects and determine the best strategies for advancing them through the sales process.
• Consistent nurturing through emails, webinars, and follow-up calls ensures prospects stay engaged, building trust until they are ready to make a purchase.

Improving the way you handle your leads is one of the best ways to increase sales. Good lead generation helps keep your sales pipeline full, and proper lead management makes sure leads end up going to the agents best qualified to close them.

Unfortunately, many companies lose sales by mishandling their leads. Some common oversights include:

• Having less experienced sales reps handle important prospects
• Forgetting to follow-up with warm leads
• Using the wrong messaging with potential clients

So if you want to close as many leads as possible, start with the way you manage them. Here are some specific strategies you can employ to improve the way you organize leads, make contact with more prospects, nurture relationships, and ultimately close more deals.

Ensure Leads are Efficiently Worked

Why

Good leads are costly and hard to come by. Unfortunately, too many of them simply aren’t worked in a timely fashion, or properly nurtured. Reps can take too long to reach out. Or call once and fail to try again. Or leads are haphazardly distributed to reps who don’t have the information they need to work leads properly. Don’t make these mistakes.

How to Do It

Manually going through leads and deciding how to assign them is time-consuming and impractical, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be strategic about distributing them. PhoneBurner’s LeadStream software intelligently and automatically distributes leads to agents who are ready to work them, and even re-distributes unworked leads to ensure they don’t go cold. The result is improved speed-to-lead, and a reduction in unworked or underworked leads. That means higher contact rates and better outcomes.

Use a Good Lead Management Tool

Why

You need an effective way to manage contacts and contact information across your organization, with visibility throughout each contact’s lifecycle. A good CRM system (or Customer Relationship Management tool) is the best way to accomplish this.

CRM systems organize each new lead into a platform that organizes their contact details, notes, prior communication history, and activity, including emails sent, opened, replied to, etc.. The CRM can manage any details about the prospect that you’re able to discover. This information will help you properly communicate with and nurture prospects toward a sale.

How to Do It

If you’re looking for a robust Customer Relationship Management Tool, Salesforce is a popular and highly customizable CRM solution, though many other options are available

Salesforce natively integrates with PhoneBurner, giving you the following abilities and advantages:

• Reach 4x as many contacts per hour with our power dialer technology
• Dial without leaving Salesforce
• Use workflow automations to streamline tedious but important tasks like leaving voicemail and sending email messages

PhoneBurner also has a built-in CRM if you prefer to use our platform as a one-stop-shop solution. Either way, the important thing is to make sure you have a good system for tracking leads through each step of the sales process to prevent missed opportunities.

Know the Source

Why

Leads are not created equal. You need to know which lead sources drive conversations and conversions so that you allocate resources where they are more likely to generate revenue. Tracking results by lead source can help you:

• Show your marketing team which campaigns are performing best so they can invest in the most productive efforts.
• Help your salespeople customize their communications. For example, If the lead came from your website looking for more information, the salesperson could offer to answer any further questions they have. If the lead is a small business owner who was referred by a friend, you might point out their missed sales opportunities and offer a solution that fixes the problem.

How to Do It

When importing leads into PhoneBurner you can associate them with a lead source. You can then track and report on engagement and conversion metrics for these leads, and even compare them to other sources.

• Is one lead provider better than another?
• Are purchased leads performing worse than self-sourced leads, or leads coming through your website?
• How do answer rates compare across different leads you are contacting?

Different leads require different approaches based on their needs, desires, and understanding of your product or service. By knowing the source of your leads, and tracking their engagement rates, you can optimize your processes to drive more, high quality conversations.

Score Your Leads

Why

Lead scoring measures how far your leads are along the sales cycle. This informs how you nurture them and what scripts or strategies your reps will use to move different conversations forward.

The 4 Elements of Lead Scoring

Typically, lead scoring has four elements:

Engagement

You’re trying to understand how engaged and interested your potential customer is. How many pages did they view on your website? Did they open your email, click on the link, and view your attachment (which you can measure with PhoneBurner’s SmartSender)? Their level of action helps you gauge their interest.

Behavior

Behavior is similar but more specific than engagement. Common behavior questions are: What specific pages have they visited? Which videos did they watch? Did they sign up for a free trial? How much action have they taken? Answering these questions will help you determine what the prospect is looking for, and how to best sell to them.

Velocity

Velocity is the rate your prospects are interacting with your company. How often do they open your emails? Do they open each one multiple times? How often do they go to your site? A higher velocity shows that the prospect is thinking about your company, product, or service a lot and that they’re more likely to make a purchase.

Persona

A prospect’s persona is a list of attributes that describe who they are and how they relate to your company. What industry are they in? What title do they hold? Where are they? Their persona helps you determine whether they are more or less likely to want what you have to sell.

How to Do It

An easy way to score your leads is to create a set of rules that determine what kind of score they receive for each category. For example, let’s say you use a 5-point scale to score your leads.

If a prospect visits your pricing page and signs up for a demo, they might receive a five for engagement. On the other hand, a prospect who only opens a few emails but hasn't explored your website might receive a score of two.

Once you’ve totaled the scores for each category, you’ll have a better idea of how to prioritize the leads you focus on. This can also tie into how you assign leads to agents (see “Assign the Right Leads to the Right Agents” above).

Nurture Your Leads

Why

Your sales staff know that people aren’t always ready to buy right away. Although your sales reps can show prospects how your product will improve their lives, prospects need to make the final decision themselves, and that can take time.

This means that salespeople need to nurture leads by following up when most people would give up. Implement multi-step sequences that include touchpoints across multiple channels to improve connections and engagement.

How to Do It

There are a few effective methods that can help you nurture leads. Here are a few:

Don’t Be Afraid to Send Email

Email is a great marketing tool—as long as you’re sending emails prospects will actually want to open. Send them relevant content, whitepapers, case studies, new feature updates, etc. This reminds them of the value you provide and may convince them to purchase from you.

Webinars & Demonstrations

Invite leads to a webinar or demo where they can learn more about the potential solutions to their problems. If your marketing data is solid and your product can actually help solve their pain points, there’s no better way to move them closer to a sale than to show the solution in action.

Call Them (Again)

A majority of contacts won’t answer on the first attempt. Multi-touch sequences are vital to maximize connections. And if you do connect with a contact, unless they have specifically stated that they are not interested and do not want to be bothered anymore, call them again on a schedule that makes sense. PhoneBurner lets you easily set a follow-up date for a contact so that you don’t miss these opportunities. Timing is everything. Nurture leads with information that is relevant to their situation, and many of them will raise their hands or show interest at a later date. 

Related: The Ultimate Guide to Overcome Sales Objections

Focus on Helping Them

The key to lead nurturing is to help your prospective customer. Stop trying to sell them something they may or may not need. Instead, help them achieve their dreams. Help them eliminate their problems. Figure out what your prospects are struggling with and present your product or service as a solution for achieving their goals. 

Manage Your Leads More Effectively with PhoneBurner

Generating leads is just the first step. From how you approach prospects, to how you organize their activity, to how you nurture them through your sales cycle, your sales success will reflect your lead management efforts. Effective lead and pipeline management are the tools you need to ensure your sales aren’t falling through the cracks.

PhoneBurner’s LeadStream feature makes it easy to start off on the right foot by making sure your leads get to the agents best qualified to contact, nurture, and ultimately close them. Start your free trial of PhoneBurner here and see the difference it can make for yourself.

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