Convey.ai Blog

As a marketer or a salesperson, you know how important lead generation is to your business. Despite its importance, 80% of marketers report that their lead-generation efforts are only slightly effective. An effective lead lifecycle management system significantly improves lead generation efforts by optimizing the process of targeting the right individuals, nurturing them, and converting them efficiently.

In this article, we will explore lead lifecycle management and the stages of the lead management process. From capturing leads, and nurturing leads, to converting them into customers, we will walk you through each step of the process.

_{What is Lead Lifecycle Management?}

Lead management involves a series of steps to convert a lead into a paying customer. Let’s take a simple example to understand the process better. 

Imagine that you’re running an educational services company and you have posted a Facebook ad about offering tutoring services. Someone is interested in your tutoring services and wants to check it out. To access detailed information, that person has to fill out a form by giving their email ID, personal details, and educational details. At this stage, this individual becomes your lead. Now, it’s your job to nurture that lead and keep them interested in your services. 

To engage your lead effectively, you can send a series of emails containing tips for effective studying or insights into your tutoring methodologies. If the lead shows continued interest, the person might call you and that individual transforms into a warm lead. Over the call, your job is to convince the prospective student to enroll in your tutoring services. This can be done by showcasing the value of your tutoring services and addressing concerns if any.

This whole process in a nutshell is lead lifecycle management - nurturing and converting a “not interested” person to a lead and then into a paying customer.

Here’s a detailed breakdown of the lead lifecycle management process.

‍_{Different Stages of Lead Lifecycle Management Process}

The lead lifecycle management can be broken down into several stages:

_{Capture the Anonymous Lead}

Every day thousands of people land on e-commerce websites and 97% to 98% leave without providing information. These are called anonymous leads. What if we said - you can pull out 2 to 5% more conversions from these anonymous people? It’s possible. The first step involves capturing their information by using landing pages, short forms, or popups. While creating a landing page or popups offering an incentive such as a discount code or access to exclusive content can significantly increase the chances of them providing information. Once the information is captured, you have a lead. 

_{Lead Criteria and Segmentation}

After capturing leads, the next logical step in the lead management process is lead criteria and segmentation. At this point, you have leads but how many of them provide value to your business is uncertain. Are they willing to go through the entire sales funnel is a big question? This is where lead criteria and segmentation come in handy. 

Lead criteria help evaluate the quality of leads and confirm if they are genuinely interested in your product or service. This evaluation is facilitated through lead scoring and lead grading. 

A lead scoring is a method used to rank leads based on their level of engagement or interest in the product. To rank the leads, you must take in various factors like engagement with the marketing efforts, content downloads, etc. 

In addition to lead scoring, you must grade the leads. Lead grading is evaluating how well the lead aligns with your customer profile. This method is beyond lead scoring, it accurately tells if the lead can become a potential customer.

Once leads are scored and graded, they are segmented into categories and groups. Segmentation allows for more targeted and personalized marketing.

_{Integrate CRM and Marketing Automation Systems}

Once the leads are scored, graded, and segmented, the data is fed into the CRM. Integrating the data into a CRM is crucial because it consolidates the data with other information like contact details, providing a holistic view of each lead. This way both marketing and sales teams will be able to understand their behaviors, characteristics, and readiness to make a purchase.

Integrate CRM with a marketing automation system. The integration enables the marketing automation system to leverage CRM data to deliver automated targeted emails and personalized content. Moreover, the system can deliver timely and relevant communication to the leads, keeping the leads engaged. This way you not only increase engagement but also boost conversion rates.

_{Lead Nurturing and Qualification}

Lead nurturing is a crucial step in the lead management process. It involves addressing a lead’s pain points, educating them about your products or services by leveraging automated target emails and personalized content, and ultimately motivating them to make a purchase.

After nurturing the leads, identify or evaluate those leads that are motivated or most likely to become customers. This is a lead qualification. The criteria for being qualified is to assess if the leads are ready to engage with your sales team.

_{Sales Qualified Lead}

A sales-qualified lead is a lead who has been thoroughly nurtured and qualified and is deemed to be handed over to the sales team. How do you know if they are ready to engage with the sales team? If they ask for a quote, purchase information, or even a live demonstration, this indicates they are ready to buy. Once they meet this criterion, hand them off to the sales from the marketing team for direct follow-up.

_{Create Follow-Up Strategy}

The follow-up strategy is essential to convert a lead into a customer effectively. The strategy involves making initial contact with the lead via emails or phone calls. Next, the sales team emphasizes how the product effectively meets the lead’s requirements and provides compelling reasons to make a purchase. In addition to this, the team addresses concerns regarding the product and alleviates doubts. Finally, the team closes the sale.

_{Monitor and Analyze the Process}

After closing the sale, monitor and analyze the post-sale activities. Focus on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the process such as conversion rates, time taken to convert a lead to a customer, customer acquisition costs, and ROI. Analyze all these so that you will know what areas in the lead management process can be improved.

_{Why is Lead Lifecycle Management Automation Important?}

Manually generating and tracking the leads is time-consuming and expensive. Human error can lead to a lead slipping away from conversion. Automation is a game-changer. Here are the compelling reasons why you require automation software for your lead management process.

• Improves Lead Engagement: Don’t you agree that providing the right content at the right time improves engagement? It certainly does. At various stages in the buyer’s journey, the lead needs relevant information at each stage. Automation allows for the delivery of personalized content based on interests and behaviors. This way relevant information at the right time is delivered at every stage, improving engagement.
• Streamlines Lead Criteria and Segmentation: Traditionally, lead scoring and grading are done manually and then fed into the CRM system. However, integrating automation tools with CRM enables you to score and grade leads automatically based on predefined criteria. This makes the identification of high-quality leads simpler and cost-effective.
• Offers a Holistic View of the Lead Data: Having lead data on multiple platforms can be hard to handle and manage. Automation comes in handy. An automation tool integrated with the CRM consolidates the data into a holistic view, giving both the marketing and sales teams a unified view and up-to-date data on the leads.
• Streamlines Sales Processes: Once the leads are handed over to the sales team, they have to follow up. The follow up strategy includes routine tasks such as sending emails and creating tailored presentations about the product, which can be automated. As the routine tasks are taken care of via automation, your sales team can focus on the negotiations and closing the sale.
• Get Insights into Real-Time Data: Automation tools come with analytics and reporting. Use them to assess every stage of the buyer’s journey and take measures accordingly to improve the process.

_{Streamline your Lead Lifecycle Management Process With our Automation Tool}

If you’re looking to transform your lead management process and drive business growth, Convey.ai is what you need. Our cutting-edge automated tool automates manual tasks and processes, making it easier for you to convert a lead into a customer.

• Don’t want to slip away the lead? Our automation captures the details of anonymous people through landing pages and short forms and converts them into leads. This way you avoid a lead slipping away from you.
• Integration with multiple platforms. Our tool seamlessly integrates with CRM and other platforms providing a 360-degree view of the lead data to the marketing and sales teams.
• Convey.ai automation tool offers intelligent lead scoring and grading. The tool evaluates and identifies the best leads aligned with our customer profile with the help of scoring and grading algorithms. 
• Convey.ai automates follow-up tasks. Whether it is sending emails or personalized content, our tool does all of these and more. Automated follow-up tasks will help you to close the sale quickly.
• Convey.ai tool has a friendly UI interface. You don’t require extensive technical knowledge to operate our tool. It is easy to understand and easy to use for any business irrespective of size.

Are you looking to close that sale in no time? Consider our Convey.ai automation tool and take the first step toward converting the lead to a customer. With its powerful features and intuitive interface, it automates the processes in lead lifecycle management and converts potential customers. Call us today and learn more about our product.

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