What is Lead Management Software

Lead management is the process of engaging customers or leads to buy a company's products and services through effective marketing campaigns. Lead management software is deployed to manage leads at different stages, such as, lead generation and distribution, tracking, nurturing, scoring, etc.

Lead management solutions capture leads from multiple forums such as social media, emails and websites to send those to companies. Businesses and organizations thus make use of these leads generated by online lead management software to forecast, collect and track sales. Along with these, lead management tools also offer email templates for running successful product marketing campaigns.

You can further manage the company and contact details of your leads and track the communication history with them to streamline the entire sales process. Lead management systems help with pipeline management so that you can align tasks to your sales professionals and track their progress towards deal closure.

Lead Management System Features

Lead management software offers comprehensive reporting solutions for accurate performance analysis of your sales and marketing teams. All lead generation & nurturing and pipeline management processes are automated that make them less time consuming and more result-driven. Some of the key features of lead management systems for small businesses and big enterprises are:

Integrated marketing

Businesses and organizations create marketing campaigns for maximizing the reach of their products to targeted customers. With lead management system software, you can segregate your contacts and run targeted campaigns. Along with email campaigns, lead management software further helps running all forms of paid and organic campaigns with higher efficiency.

Smart routing

Organizations allocate work to the sales team based on multiple criteria such as performance, skills, etc. You can use lead management software to assign leads to your team members and track their progress in terms of shortening the sales funnel and achieving conversions.

Lead tracking

Lead tracking software is especially useful for sales reps for it helps them keep a track of the leads they have so far worked on. The best lead management software solutions let end users keep a track of all their activities, set follow up reminders with prospects, receive instant notifications, and analyze their preferences better.

CRM lead management

CRM lead management software is used for managing sales and customer relationships. It also helps generate accurate business reports by tracking the leads generated so far. This is critical for improving the profitability of your business, determining marketing investment, return on investments and conversion statistics.

Sales notifications

With an online lead management software, businesses can track every time a lead makes a new move or further moves down the sales funnel. Lead tracking is necessary to reach these targeted customers on time and close deals.

Landing page/email builder

Lead management tools with drag-n-drop designers help create stunning email designs and templates to help businesses move one step closer to achieving high conversion rates. You can create responsive landing pages as well with lead management software solutions.

Lead distribution

Lead distribution is a core feature of lead management distribution software. With this feature, you can distribute leads to the team members based on geography, area of expertise, industry, and type of product.

Lead capture

This is obviously one of the most critical features and benefits of the best lead management software. Lead capture, marketing efforts, sales deals are all interconnected functionalities of any lead management system. Lead capturing further helps in creating forms, post-click pages for landing, and other data-harvesting technicalities necessary for generating web traffic.

Maximizing customer interactions

With all details regarding your recent dealings and conversations with customers, you can interact with them without ever missing on details of the previous meetings. All information gets saved in the software's database.

Predefined metrics

Predefined metrics club interested leads together so that these can be contacted for further dealings. Predefined metrics are necessary to score leads so that no time is wasted on leads that are not interested in your product or service.

Management dashboard

Management dashboard in lead tracking systems gives a complete overview of leads generated, nurtured and scored so far. Some of the best lead management software offer such management dashboard functions as checking the agent's overall performance, analyzing the average customer lifecycle, and identifying qualified leads.

Reporting/analytics

Use powerful reporting and analytical tools to examine acquisition rates, conversion statistics and other management metrics. These are necessary to determine the success of your marketing efforts and examine the areas that may need further improvement.

Integration with existing applications

As a business owner you must be using other software solutions and tools to manage your business. Lead management solutions offer API integration as a result of which they can be easily integrated with the existing application son your system.

Benefits of using lead management tools

Converting leads to proper buyers require skills, knowledge and efficient lead management systems to handle leads. These tools are necessary for both lead generation and nurturing process. The following are the core benefits offered by the software:

Communication amongst teams

Communication across entire sales team is critical to receive immediate information on progress made in different sales accounts. Live instant notification system is quite useful for such quick updates. Then there are live chat tools, SMS tools and voice communication mechanisms to ensure that each member of the team stays in touch and thoroughly updated.

Information Security

All important information is stored in the software’s database system for quick access. Leads captured, conversations, stage of a deal, etc. get stored in the software system to streamline the work of sales reps. With all such information secured, you do not have to worry about its safety as the data is secured and free from malware attack.

Efficient tracking of leads

Identify the leads that are bound to generate higher conversion with lead management software. You can track leads from multiple platforms to ensure timely response to their queries and from multiple campaigns you run at a time.

Robust lead nurturing

Lead distribution software also does effective lead nurturing by following various processes such as segmenting leads into different groups based on their personas. Automatic email triggers is another way in which lead management software nurtures leads. Businesses also nurture leads through funnel reporting systems that help identify the status of each lead captured.

Performance tracking with Inbuilt dialer

Most of the best CRM lead management software comes preinstalled with built-in dialer support to record and track all conversations between sales representatives and prospective client/customer. This step is necessary to ensure higher productivity and compliance.

Automated workflows

All workflows related to the marketing teams for lead tracking and distribution can be automated. Leads can be assigned directly to the sales team and alerts can be sent for follow-ups. Also, the status will change automatically with the lead management software as they move through the sales funnel.

Real time reporting with engagement scoring

You can use lead tracking software for analyzing a lead's engagement on real-time basis. Lead management software keeps track of such lead actions as inquiries, click through rate, website visits, and email open rate to create a general engagement score for prospects.

Steps to How To Track and Manage Leads with Lead Management Systems

You will get an insight into your sales team’s performance, agents’ conversations with the customer, lead's preferences, location and demographics with online lead management software solutions. By adopting a lead management system, you can ensure better tracking and management of leads in the following steps:

Step 1- Identify leads

You need to understand the leads in order to understand their buying behavior. Different metrics, such as demographics, lead scoring by lead management systems and psychographic analysis need to be considered as the first step towards effective lead management.

Step 2- Tracking content

It is important for businesses to know which content on a website is being most looked at by customers to understand their individual needs and areas of interests. Marketing analytics are thus useful for examining lead's behaviour and preferences.

Step 3- Lead scoring

You need to qualify your leads in terms of their interest in your offerings before approaching them with your sales pitch. Take those prospects on priority who seem interested in your product and would be eager to buy from you. Lead scoring is done based on analyzing the needs of your prospects and finding out how your offerings would be useful for them.

Step 4- Sending leads to sales reps

Qualified leads are to be sent to the sales team for further action. The sales team would then handle the selling procedures to ensure that the prospects’ needs and preferences are being taken care of well. With lead management software, you can track the performance of your sales reps and their conversation with customers.

Comparison of Best Lead Management Tools (CRM)

Best Sales Lead Management Software for Small Business in India

Here are the best Sales Management Software for Small Business in India

Unomy

Collect information about clients, partners and even competitors with Unomy lead management software to plan your marketing leads accordingly. Automate important workflows to keep the entire team connected as well as improve their productivity at work.

Key features:

• External integrations
• Forms customisation
• Calendar view
• Timeline support
• Five dashboards
• Full API

Pardot

Sell faster with Pardot lead distribution software’s marketing automation capabilities. The software helps send trigger based automatic emails for efficient lead nurturing. Use the software's lead qualification tools to identify the right customers and define the outreach approach of your sales team.

Key features:

• Dynamic content
• Account based marketing
• Marketing analytics
• Sales alignment
• ROI reporting

Freshsales

Automated emails, management dashboard or lead scoring, you can perform all these lead management practices with Freshsales software. It also helps analyse qualified leads to maximize sales and make your business more profitable. You can easily track the progress of all the deals with Freshsales lead tracking system.

Key features:

• Event tracking
• Custom fields
• Renaming modules
• Webforms
• Data integration
• Sales sequences

Deskera

Manage leads with Deskera lead management software and see your business grow. Take advantage of the software’s lead recording and tracking capabilities for collecting relevant details such as the lead’s status, type, source, psychographics, etc. You can also use this Deskera lead management software’s powerful filtering tools for segregating the qualified leads.

Key features:

• Export/import leads
• Leads classification
• Document support
• Tracking leads details
• Automatic updates

Marketo

Support all your lead generation activities with Marketo online lead distribution software. It helps track the performance of your marketing content and automate all the email campaigns for effective lead nurturing. Further, you can streamline the marketing funnel with inbuilt templates for contact forms and landing pages.

Key features:

• Marketing analytics
• Sales Connect
• Predictive content
• Account insights/profiling
• Digital ads