8 proven ways to enhance lead management and foster business growth

Fostering business growth by enhancing lead management

If you’re looking to determine what impacts your leads from the first impression to conversion and pinpoint the factors that potentially block your conversions, your best bet is to start looking past the basics and enhance your lead management tactics. 

By equipping the right lead management solution, your business can build well-crafted lead nurturing programs, offer elevated CX, maximize the individual value of every lead, and drive growth on multiple levels.

Phonexa, an all-in-one marketing automation solution for calls, leads, clicks, email, SMS, accounting, and more, does that by providing marketing executives, publishers, and advertisers across lead generation industries with actionable results through its suite of products to revitalize and fine-tune leads.

Keep track of customer interactions

Large enterprises often struggle to keep track of all customer interactions because of the daily influx of consumers. 

Implementing a lead tracking tool can help you keep an eye on all the activities as your leads move to the bottom of the funnel. With lead tracking, all the correspondence details can be stored in the database and accessed at any moment by sales representatives to move the conversation forward.

Why do you need full-funnel visibility? Well, without it, your options will be extremely limited when it comes to the lead generation or the nurturing process. Besides, not having a visual on some of the touchpoints might result in blocked conversions. 

For instance, if one of the channels dedicated to capturing prospects is your blog, you’re well aware that the numbers of incoming, qualified, closed, and won leads often differ dramatically. 

Let’s say theoretically that around 500 people heard about your blog or stumbled upon your content at some point. That’s the number we have at the very top of the funnel. Out of 500 who are aware of it, around 200 people read your blog posts religiously. However, only 180 readers are interested in your lead generation content, and 50 readers actually download your e-books or sign up for email newsletters. That’s the middle of the funnel. 

It’s safe to say that all 50 readers won’t be interested in product demonstrations or one-on-one walkthroughs. That leaves us with only 30 prospects moving closer to the bottom of the funnel. 

Finally, you get to convert 18 prospects into clients. That’s the bottom of the funnel, but the journey is far from being over because you still need to achieve client retention.

Define buyer personas

Effective lead management implies a profound understanding of the traits and qualities that make a prospect an ideal client — a perfect fit for your products.

While working on a detailed description of a fictional character might seem counterproductive, it’s a critical step toward understanding who your ideal buyers are, how to qualify and nurture prospects, and when the time is right to route them.

Ultimately, it can give a roadmap for all your future lead gen decisions and help you create favorable conditions for successful campaigns.

Personalize lead capturing

Conventional wisdom is marketing says that no two leads are the same. That’s why effective lead management depends heavily on collecting sufficient information at the point of conversion. 

Here’s how you can personalize this process:

• Utilize customized web forms: It’s no secret that prospects can get to your website from various channels. Besides, they can be at different stages of their customer journey. That’s why you should consider building custom landing pages instead of using standardized lead capture forms.
• Build a chatbot: It’s one of the most popular and effective personalization methods in conversational marketing. In fact, around 69% of consumers prefer chatbots to other communication methods because they deliver quick answers. If you’re looking to automate the process of capturing the most relevant data, chatbot can be an excellent choice.
• Leverage the A/B testing tool: Every marketer knows that personalized lead generation is something you can’t get right on the very first try. But with the right A/B testing tool, you can see how alterations of one or more elements on your page can impact CR. 

Ultimately, personalization is all about utilizing a tailored approach to gathering intelligence on individual leads.

Targeted content = successful nurturing

There’s an art to dealing with leads that are qualified but not yet ready to make a purchase. That’s the art of lead nurturing. 

The true and tried way to ensure that your nurturing efforts will not go in vain is to carefully map your content strategy. In a nutshell, you need to make sure that you serve the right content to the right prospects, at just the right moment.

Leverage filtering tools

Whether you receive leads via web forms or calls, filtering tools can help you deal with spam or fraudulent leads.

Let’s say that you’re putting together an IVR survey or a web form. First of all, you don’t want to overwhelm prospective clients with endless questions and lengthy forms, so tread carefully. Secondly, there’s always a chance that a fraudulent lead can enter your sales funnel.

Since lead management solutions typically offer filtering tools, you can make sure that you receive only relevant prospects. No spam or bots whatsoever.

Turn rejected leads into opportunity

Every marketer’s dream is to leave no lead unturned. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for businesses to decline a certain number of prospects. But what if they were instead presented with an alternative that is tied back to the company initially rejecting them? 

We’re talking about exit offers that are designed to facilitate customer journey toward an exit path offer and deliver revenue to the brand that rejected the lead.

This solution is fairly simple and can be used by any industry vertical.

Let’s take an insurance provider as an example. Sure, ads can attract a lot of attention and drive traffic to their website. However, some of the prospects might inquire about insurance services that do not match the provider’s criteria. In this case, an exit lead feature can match the prospective clients that happen to be unqualified with another provider that offers more suitable products.

Focus on data hygiene

Keeping the database clean is one of the main tasks for every marketer. Here’s how you can deal with the most common issues and ensure that your lead management process isn’t thrown off:

• Utilize data deduplication: The average cost of poor marketing data amounts to $14.2 million annually. One of the most effective ways to tackle this issue is to remove duplicates. Naturally, it’s time-consuming and counterproductive to sort through the entire database manually. With the help of marketing automation platforms, businesses can scrub their database clean in a matter of minutes and deduplicate records as they come in. 
• Leverage automatic verification: Marketers are no strangers to dealing with fake or outdated information submitted by prospects. Implementing a verification process can help you eliminate the chances of receiving false or inaccurate data.
• Practice data auditing: At some point, you will have to deal with data decay. That’s why it is important to invest in solutions that automatically conduct data audits and keep your database clean.

Implement integrative solutions

Your lead management process can only be as strong as the technology you utilize to store and analyze data.

For instance, if you implement a lead management solution, you can employ a dual approach to enhancing your lead quality. It can be achieved through filtering and spotting duplicate leads. On top of that, it will help you refine your campaigns with tools like lead analytics and predictive modeling. Finally, the ability to integrate with third-party software will help you share data between applications.

It’s imperative now more than ever that your CRM and marketing automation software integrate with one another. That’s why it is critical to invest in martech that offers multiple integration opportunities. 

Ultimately, apart from data quality, you will get to leverage seamless lead routing and more efficient workflow.