Businesses need to keep converting cold leads into clients in order to expand and make more money. An Excel sheet and an office phone are usually enough to manage leads in the initial stages of a business. But once the company grows, these resources will be inadequate. Customer lead management software helps organizations of all sizes engage with leads systematically, manage them, and accelerate the process of turning them into customers.
About customer lead management software
These days, software solutions are available to help different business teams work better. A customer lead management software, for instance, is built for sales representatives. This software streamlines and automates repetitive daily tasks they perform, such as tracking the progress of ongoing deals. It also reminds them about upcoming tasks that need to be done, such as following up with cold leads, going to customer meetings, sending emails, and making phone calls to leads.
The sales representatives of a company are responsible for chasing cold leads and bringing in new clients. These are incredibly challenging tasks, but lead management software simplify things by automating and organizing them.
Features of the software
Customer lead management tools perform different tasks to simplify lead tracking and communication and boost revenue in the long run.
Cold lead handling
People who know nothing about a company’s products or services are called cold leads. They have not yet expressed interest in the company’s offerings and are likely unaware of the brand. The primary task of a sales representative is to identify such prospects and turn them into warm and hot leads—someone highly interested in the brand’s products or services. The ultimate objective is to finalize deals with such prospects and turn them into clients.
Customer lead management tools help with cold lead management in several ways. Most importantly, they create lists of prospects either by connecting to services that generate leads (such as online forms, marketing databases, and campaigns) or by importing Excel files that already list cold leads.
Scheduling
The best lead management tools help sales representatives start conversations with cold and warm leads. They may do this by recommending the best time for fruitful interactions with leads. Once the communication schedules are in place, the software provides reminders to sales representatives so that they do not overlook lead communication, even when their workloads are hectic.
Tracking conversations
Every interaction a company has with its leads contains invaluable insights and data to draw inferences from. To make the most of conversations and other kinds of lead interactions, lead management tools have a tracking feature. This feature shows how exactly a lead has interacted with the company. For example, the lead might have “liked” a social media post of the brand or called up the business’s customer support service to make an inquiry. The ability to track conversations is key to lead identification and conversion.
Reporting and analysis
Besides generating and identifying leads and communicating with them, it is necessary to track sales statistics. Analytics and reporting functions in lead management software help with this task. The tool helps companies evaluate whether the sales tactics are working and how often leads are being converted into sales. It also helps analyze the stages a given lead has moved through before becoming a customer. Further, the software helps assess the conversion cost and ROI.
Considerations when choosing the software
There are several lead management tools in the market. Since they can be expensive, organizations need to evaluate specific factors before zeroing in on an option and investing their money.
Short-term and long-term budget
When purchasing lead management software, businesses will have to pay the selling price upfront. But that’s not everything. They would also have to pay to install the software and shell out recurring fees for training, support, and updates. These expenses could run into hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is why businesses must examine their financial resources and budgets before getting the tool.
User interface simplicity and customizability
Sales representatives will use their organization’s lead management software frequently and extensively. Since they may not be technologically savvy, the tools should be easy to use. Every button, link, or folder needs to be easily accessible and operable. The interface must also be customizable to adapt to a company’s specific needs over the years.
Scalability
As a company grows, its number of cold and warm leads will increase exponentially. This means a given lead management tool will have to be scalable. For instance, it will need to provide more storage space later on to record the details of all the leads.
Popular customer lead management software
Many software companies offer lead management tools, but not all of them are equal. A few stand out due to their reasonable installation and running costs, extensive list of features, and scalability.
- Pipedrive
- Shape
- Salesflare
- Close CRM
- Freshsales
- Salesforce Sales Cloud
- HubSpot
- Zoho CRM
- ActiveCampaign