Today I’m going to let you into the secrets of making those all-important conversions from leads to sales – whether you’re a small business or a massive organisation.
Every business needs leads – whether you’re big or small. And to make money, you need to turn those leads into loyal customers. Sounds super easy, doesn’t it? But if this was as simple as it sounds, we’d all be millionaires.
It all comes down to managing your leads really well. And the good news is there are solutions out there to help. A top-performing lead management software is the only way to effectively handle the lead and the overall lead lifecycle.
Lead management software helps you win potential leads who aren’t yet ready to buy. And lead management is the process of staying connected to those leads.
It’s all about keeping these leads drawn in through each phase of the purchasing cycle. By giving leads the essential data they need to settle on a buying choice, you’ll stay top of their mind and be there when they’re finally prepared to buy.
To excel in B2B, first, you need to choose a lead management software. Lead management software helps you track the people who are interested in what you have to offer. In B2B, it means managing the record of the business interested in directly purchasing your services.
How can you increase B2B lead generation?
If you’re having trouble increasing your B2B leads, don’t worry – loads of businesses face the same problem. Many B2B organizations struggle with putting increased leads into their pipeline. You’ll need loads of different B2B lead generation ideas to help you grow and attract conversions.
There are some ways to increase B2B lead generation growth. When you’re struggling to improve – it’s not time to give up! It’s time to read on… I’m going to talk through the best B2B lead generation ideas to help you achieve your goal.
There are lots of lead generation strategies to try. Most importantly, you want to tailor your B2B lead strategies around your industry and the buyer.
The basics
Making sure you include a chatbot on your website, as it can reduce your website’s bounce rate (when people leave quickly without even clicking through to another page). A lower bounce rate can increase your website’s dwell time, giving you a better chance to rank in higher search results with the expectation of generating more leads.
Following up on an engaged prospect on a website by scheduling a call with them is a really good way to create a more personal lead journey – leading to better sales.
What is lead management and lead management software?
In times of old, things were a lot more straightforward – but in today’s multi-channel sales process, you’ve got to keep up with tracking and managing your leads. Lead management is about managing your prospects to slowly convert them into your potential customers. Again – not as simple as it sounds! Lead management has a heap of different phases to it, and you’ve got to be on it to make it work.
How can lead management software increase sales?
Lead management software can effortlessly handle any number of leads. The best lead management software has marketing automation features and customer relationship management abilities.
So now let’s shine a spotlight on how lead management software can boost your sales – which is what it’s all about.
- Lead capturing: Captured leads are visitors who once visited your website and gave you some super-handy info like phone numbers and email addresses.
- Lead scoring: This means positioning the leads in relation to their interest levels by labelling them with an indicative number from a range, usually 1-100.
- Lead filtering: Segregating the qualified and unqualified leads based on the information submitted from the place of conversion. Assigning leads to different teams based on product, location, company size, so you can go further with your lead management.
- Lead distribution: Once you’ve segregated them, you allot the qualified leads to the sales team to get the conversation started.
- Lead nurturing: The process of following up your leads in different ways, like phone calls, email marketing, etc.
Lead management is a bit of a challenge for any business – and it gets trickier as the leads start flowing in. Once your organisation starts struggling with the leads, you realise that, yep, a robust lead management system is absolutely crucial.
And for that you need lead management software – to help you manage and nurture those all-important warm leads – and then to boost your sales. Without a decent lead management software, you’ll find all those lovely leads are falling through the cracks, and your hard work will be wasted.
Businesses are increasingly cottoning on to the need for a lead management software. It helps save you time and streamline the whole process by organising and scheduling follow-up contacts without the need for human intervention.
I’d be amazed if a company that was amazing at nurturing and converting leads wasn’t using this type of software. Without a lead management software, I reckon any company would struggle with handling the complexities involved in managing sales leads.
Builds customer relationships
All businesses know that keeping customers can be a tricky ask. So managing a lead isn’t the sales team’s only responsibility. They also need to keep a close eye on managing the relationship with existing customers. Lead management software with customer relationship management features can help reduce customers churning, reducing your customer acquisition costs (CAC) and increasing the lifetime value (LTV) of these customers, making your business more profitable. These calculations are shown below:
CAC can be calculated like this:
LTV can be calculated like this:
Fixing the gaps
The B2B lead management process is currently full of gaps in between different software tools to complete what a lead management system is used to fulfilling.
What is that?
A series of actions completed synchronously to move the lead to different stages down the businesses funnel, whilst triggering off various forms of communication.
This communication triggered can take many forms within your B2B lead management process; emails, SMS’s, phone calls, Facebook Message and much more. The point is, that one standalone B2B lead management software never does the the entire job
This is why it’s ideal to have a tool for each stage of the lead journey.
Advanced scheduling software like QikChat improves the B2B lead management process by automating the scheduling of meetings with your leads, managing your leads like a boss.
There are other lead management softwares out there that also don’t need any human intervention, but only for individual parts of this process.
The lead management process can be broken down into stages. The lead converts by filling in a form, and the lead will then be stored in the place of conversion (social media platforms or landing page providers).
The lead information is then downloaded and added to an email marketing campaign, in the hope that the lead will respond or click on a supplied link to make contact to schedule a conversation.
QikChat assigns the lead to the team member of choice, sending their calendar availability to the lead. The lead information is pre-filled, through existing integrations, reducing the friction points for the lead to fill out their information. All they have to do is simply select a time.
This speeds up the time it takes for a lead to schedule a meeting. And when meetings happen closer to the time of enquiry, meeting attendance is higher – and conversion skyrockets.
Using an advanced scheduling platform for lead management takes the hassle right out of the process. The software is reactive after the lead enquiry is made, so and the lead management journey starts at an earlier point than other platforms in this software category.
It can also fix the gaps in the lead funnel. For example, you can use lead management software to recognise delays in the times of sales, etc. These delays can include when the lead makes an enquiry and when the first meeting is scheduled – and can then identify the gap between the continuation of the sales process.
Here are some crazy stats that really hit home about the importance of good software.
- Responding to leads within the first minute increases conversions by an astonishing 391%.
- And after just five minutes, the odds of connecting and qualifying with the lead drop by 80%.
Having the right tools in place can provide the analysis you need to fix these issues with new technologies like QikChat really advancing the way lead management software connects a lead to a conversation with the right team member.
Sales automation
Lead management software helps automate the distribution of leads, and helps engage with leads in real time. I’m just going to repeat that stat as it’s such a powerful one: Responding to leads within the first minute increases conversions by an astonishing 391%.
Being able schedule meetings within your B2B lead management process is critical for lead to customer conversion, the faster you are able to schedule that first meeting, the faster you are able to begin your sales engagement process.
It’s just not possible to do this without sales automation, which is why it’s essential in systems that use forms as conversion points. These forms can have as many fields as you like, but will usually have at least four. The fields in the form are used to segment, assign, schedule and email leads right after they convert. What this does is speed up the engagement between when a lead converts and the time the first interaction point is initiated.
It saves the assigned team member time as they don’t have to manually complete these tasks. And it saves money on standalone tools that don’t have the functionality to pass this data to the ideal destination.
A platform like QikChat, using its advanced scheduling software, gives businesses the fastest way to speak to their leads. This B2B software platform enables teams to assign, schedule and speak to their enquiries from their main digital channels instantly, giving a massive boost to conversion rates and productivity.
Being able schedule meetings within your B2B lead management process is critical for lead to customer conversion, the faster you are able to schedule that first meeting, the faster you are able to begin your sales engagement process.
You can schedule meetings with your leads hassle-free, speeding up the time it takes to schedule that first meeting, making more meetings happen within ideal timelines, increasing revenue and driving productivity.
As the lead comes in through the digital channel of choice, the assigned team member’s calendar is immediately shared with the lead.
This allows leads to book time in the right team member’s calendar with just one click, as the calendar is embedded in the team member’s email.
B2B lead management software will not provide the ability to do this, as it usually provides the ability to store the lead information and make changes when necessary. A robust B2B lead management process will have an automation part to it, from a completely separate platform, bridging the gap between two or three pieces of software to make sure all stages of the lead journey are covered.
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Automating manual processes will save you endless amounts of time and money – especially when you scale the costs increase relatively. While software that provides automation isn’t brand new (though it’s definitely not old), using these types of technologies will put you ahead of your competition and create a reactiveness that just can’t be matched by a human manually completing it.
Re-engage leads for increased ROI
One of the main things lead management software can help with is re-engaging or nurturing leads through a process that provides a destination for the lead to interact with the business.
Lead management software provides direction to your sales cycle and gives you guidance on how interested the lead is in buying your product or service. It’s a bit like a playbook, showing you when and where to spend your time to achieve the best result with the resources you have. In this case, it’s which leads to continually maintaining close contact with and which leads to de-prioritise.
Having specific intervals for following up de-prioritised leads (because it wasn’t the right time to engage), is a great way to get the most out of every lead. 80 percent of the time, business leads need about five follow-ups to convert to paying customers
Reconnecting with a lead at a better time – for both parties – will increase your lead engagement percentage, which will increase sales efficiency for your business.
Lead management software for small businesses
Leads are essential for every business, whether small or big, and they all really matter. You never know which lead is going to be your next sale and what that sale will turn into in the future.
Not only that, small businesses tend to have small budgets. So every lead is a potential sale that the business needs.
No matter what size your company is, you can tailor the functionality of lead management software to fit your exact needs. Whether you want to focus on the immediate follow-up process or after the sales process has begun (after the first meeting), there are so many ways to boost success.
Companies use lead management software as it stores data from multiple channels. And that data is used to analyse the efficiency and the progress of the sales process. The right lead management software can help identify unforeseen problems that are slowing down the sales cycle and that could be costing the business potential growth.
Taking it one step further, having the right B2B lead management process will place less reliance on your team to complete menial tasks that are extremely inefficient for the business and allow them to focus on converting a lead to customer, accompanying an amazing lead experience.
Don’t leave this to a single lead management sales software, build out a strong B2B lead management process, anyone can do it!
So now I’m going to go through which features make lead management software the best thing to enhance your B2B lead generation initiatives.
- Tracking conversations: Lead management software has tracking features that display the exact engagement points of where and what the lead has interacted with, throughout your business’s digital presence. This helps your sales team monitor exactly what’s going on, and the system adds a reminder for a follow-up or prospect call. These lead management software features mean it’s incredibly helpful for businesses of all sizes.
- Scheduling: The lead management system should be used for communication because you can easily start the conversation with your warm lead. It also helps you recognise which time is best for a really good interaction.
- Responding to leads: The best way to lose a lead is to not get back to them quickly. It seems like a small thing, but these are often the deciding factor when it comes to turning a lead into a potential customer. Lead management software comes with a chatbot that can be placed on your website, allowing you to send immediate responses to leads on-site, creating the opportunity to turn them into qualified leads. This can increase your onsite lead volume by up to 33% and provides the lead with another way to make an enquiry than just a traditional form.
- Reporting & analysis: Bigger businesses analyse lead automation, prioritisation, lead scoring, tracking the stages a lead moves through to become a sale, and forecasting. To do that, they need a tool that provides detailed reporting of the metrics that matter – the lead-time, conversion cost, and ROI.
And you don’t need to worry – the lead software management keeps the lead information fully confidential. Lead management software handles everything from the initial phase to the sale – and deals with relationship and pipeline management along the way.
A snapshot of benefits of a lead management system
- It saves a lot of time by automating manual tasks that are a cost to the business.
- It improves the lead experience by being instantly reactive.
- It provides deeper insights and visibility on the lead journey to identify opportunities.
- It gives businesses the ability to nurture leads through numerous channels and re-engage leads at customisable touch points.
It can be a struggle to provide a superior experience that turns leads into customers, but it’s not impossible. Especially when you have the technologies to make your business instantly reactive across multiple channels so you’re connected to your lead throughout their entire journey.
QikChat’s advanced scheduling platform is creating the calendar of the future by enabling online meetings to become part of the lead journey, creating a fast and direct channel with your leads to speed up the sales cycle, easily scale your B2B sales and stay ahead of your competition.
