What Is Lead Management?

The lead management process starts with marketing activity designed to generate customer inquiries, also known as leads, and ends with sales being made. Traditionally, lead management was a fairly labor-intensive process, but with the tools built into SITE123 free website builder much of the work can be automated.

So, What Is Lead Management?

Lead management is an attempt to successfully navigate through this process to a sale without falling into the many pitfalls along the way that could result in the sale being lost.

The first part of lead management involves generating leads. Your website will be a key part of this activity. By search optimizing the content, the site should end up close to the top of potential customers' search results for whatever service or product you are trying to sell. This will result in more visitors to your site.

The design of the website will be crucial in funneling visitors towards making an inquiry about your services. Different layouts to pages can result in very different numbers of leads being generated. It's important to make sure that there is a clear call to action and that links to submit an inquiry via phone or email are immediately visible.

Once an inquiry has been made, it must be captured. This could be as simple as someone answering the phone, an answering machine recording the message or an email being received. The inquiry must then be sent on to someone who will be tasked with responding to the potential customer. SITE123 software allows this to be done automatically.

Leads require to be filtered to determine whether they are genuine or simply spam or joke emails. It can also be useful to rank leads in terms of their importance so that the ones most likely to generate sales are dealt with first.

The appropriate salesperson to deal with each lead then contacts the person who made the inquiry in order to answer any questions and hopefully close a sale. If the lead does not immediately make a purchase then there may be further opportunity to make contact and close the sale. If so, this is known as lead nurturing. The process ends when the lead either indicates that he is no longer interested in your product or a sale is made.

It is crucially important that leads are transferred on to someone who can deal with the inquiry promptly. The lead will be lost if the process of following up and nurturing the lead is not completed in a timely fashion. Traditional skills in dealing with customers are also important if the lead is not to be put off.

Lead nurturing can involve putting someone onto a mailing list so that they are kept up to date with developments in your product line or services. This has the effect of reminding a potential customer of the existence of your company, making it more likely that they will choose to buy from you when they are ready to make a purchase.