Having a well-organised database is one of the greatest assets a company can have today. Whether it is large or small, not all the contacts in it will be active and, as it grows, the greater the number of leads that will not participate with your content. This concept refers to the cooling of leads.
what is Lead Management?
Lead Management is the set of actions, technology, tracking and analysis that we carry out with the leads collected, in order to guide them through the sales funnel, i.e. all the contact that our company has with the leads.
It is a methodology based on the management of prospects so that they have a positive experience with the brand throughout the buying process towards the sale. This method allows us to generate new potential customers for the business with the aim of guiding these leads through the sales funnel that we have created.
Phases of lead management
In order to keep this database intact and to keep our contacts loyal, it is important to follow a few steps to achieve a solid list of contacts:
- Standardisation.
The first thing you need to do is to standardise the lead information, so that the result is exactly the same for each of them, no matter where they come from. This lead information can be obtained through forms on landing pages, but it is also possible to do it through external recruitment platforms or partner sites.
- Enrichment.
Once this information has been collected, we can enrich the lead data with external information, such as: name, address, postcode, etc. This allows for more precise marketing actions. Finally, the lead must be checked against the company's CRM, in order to see if any of these leads is a new prospect or has already had contact with the brand, either through a customer transaction or by requesting information previously.
- Lead Tracking.
Once the lead has filled out a form and has contacted us, we can draw a plan to understand the behaviour of users with our website, achieving create a navigation profile. To create this profile, in our Lead Management plan, we must consider the following: web browsing, social tracking, through social media, or call tracking, a call from the contact centre can help collect valuable information from the lead.
- Lead Rating.
In this phase, the aim is to know the probability of purchase of each lead, in order to invest more or less effort in helping them to move on to the final phase.
To achieve this, it is necessary to create a scoring system to score the leads in order to know if this is a lead ready to buy, interested or with the intention of buying. This is based on different variables, to then segment the leads, optimising the experience of each one of them, and investing what is strictly necessary in each one of them.
- Lead Nurturing.
Once the leads have been classified and placed in their respective phase within the sales funnel, we will send the most determined to buy to sales, while with the rest we will continue to work with nurturing techniques.
These techniques are based on directing the lead towards the sale, with communications of value over time. During this period, we create personalised content designed for each stage of the customer journey. Depending on the lead's response, we will move the prospect through the funnel, until it becomes a hot lead.
- Transfer to the sales team.
Once the Leads with a "high" or "very high" probability of purchase have been located, and sufficient data has been identified for the correct management of the Lead by the commercial department, the lead is transferred as quickly as possible.
In these cases, once a lead with a high probability of purchase is identified, the speed at which the sales department acts will be essential for the final success of the process.
- Follow-up.
Between 60-75% of the leads delivered to the sales department of any brand are lost because they are not properly followed up by sales.
It is therefore necessary to create a follow-up programme with scheduled communications to the end customer and the lead, so that we can check and verify whether the commercial procedures have been complied with, and whether the sales experience has been correct.
The importance of leads and a database
There is a dilemma around the question of which is more important, acquiring customers or retaining existing ones. While it is essential to win new customers, we must not forget to take care of existing customers, and this can be achieved with a good lead management strategy.
In order to have a good management of our leads it is important to obtain all the data, contact them and personalise the communication to be able to accompany them correctly throughout the whole purchasing process, as well as maintaining contact and preventing them from cooling off.
All these leads that we obtain are stored in our database, making it bigger and bigger. It is very important not only to obtain new leads but to go one step further by working it, so we must also keep track of those inactive leads that only take up space but do not bring us any benefit.
It has been proven that the more time has passed since the user's last interaction with our brand, the lower the response to the action that we put in place. In addition, it is very possible that if a user no longer interacts with our emails, these will be sent to spam, which is even more detrimental to us.
Tips to reactivate your cold leads
Not having a careful and continuously updated database means that it is full of cold or inactive leads that do not contribute anything to our business. But all is not lost, here are three tips to reactivate these leads so that they continue to be contacts:
- Segment
The most important thing is to correctly define our buyer persona. Once identified, we must know what are those characteristics of our buyer persona that we ask about in the forms that interest us. It is important to create segmented databases that allow us to see which contacts are inactive and what characteristics they have, as well as at what point in the buying process they were. For example, we can make the following distinctions:
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- According to period of inactivity
- 3 months inactive
- Between three months and 1 year inactive
- More than one year inactive
- According to interests
- By time of purchase process
- Designing a reengagement lead nurturing strategy
Once we have the segmentation done, we must carry out a lead nurturing strategy according to the interests of the previous segmentation to reactivate them. The objective of these communications is to awaken the interest of "dormant" contacts to reactivate their behaviour.
A client who has already contracted your company's services is not in the same buying process as a new prospect or an opportunity that has been at a standstill for months. Therefore, we must offer a proposal that increases the value provided to the leads, depending on their type and specific needs.
- Eliminate contacts that do not meet our minimum engagement criteria
Once we have set up the system, we must document and analyse the results and, based on the minimum criteria we have established to designate the activity of the contacts, we must proceed to eliminate those contacts from the database that, after some time and despite our reengagement lead nurturing, have continued not to interact with us.
As you can see, having a large database is not the most important thing. The ideal is to have an optimised database that can really help the sales team to create good opportunities to get customers. Keep in mind the importance of generating leads and nurturing them, as well as having a good data structure in order to manage them in a more optimal way.
