What Is Lead Management & How to Find the Right Tool

Lead management is the process of capturing leads, assessing their quality, and engaging with them so they become customers. A lead management system is designed to make every step of the process easier so businesses can maximize the ROI of their marketing efforts.

In this guide, we take a closer look at lead management from a marketer’s perspective: what it is, why marketers need it, lead management differences between sales and marketing, and qualities to look for in lead management software.

What Is Lead Management? – A Closer Look

Lead management is the process of capturing, assessing, and engaging leads with the goal of closing more sales and spending marketing budget more effectively. Lead management organizes your leads from the moment they express interest in your business until they convert into paying customers. With this organization in place, marketing can understand which channels are most valuable, and sales can engage with the highest quality leads.

At its core, lead management helps businesses streamline their operations, improve communication between departments, and boost the ROI of their marketing efforts.

Why Do Marketers Need Lead Management?

Better Organization

Effective lead management makes it easy to see where quality leads are coming from and which marketing channels are most effective. The best lead management tools will collect all your leads—phone leads, form leads, e-commerce leads—in one place. As a result, you can use a single tool to manage all your leads, no matter the channel or conversion type.

Better Data & Reporting

With a lead management system, marketing teams can easily analyze which channels and campaigns are producing the most valuable leads. This data can help refine strategies and boost overall performance. On top of that, better data and reporting lets marketing teams prove their value, justify budget changes, and give data-backed reasons for their decisions. For instance, if you’re running ads on Google, Bing, and Facebook, solid lead management lets you see which channel is driving the most value.

Guide: The Best Way to Track Calls from Google Ads

Better Lead Quality

A solid lead management system also makes it easier to see which leads are qualified (likely to buy) and which are junk (spam, unrelated inquiries, job seekers, etc.). By qualifying leads earlier in the process, marketing can pass on only the best leads to sales. For sales, this means spending less time chasing low-quality leads and more time closing deals. For marketing, it’s clearer insights on which channels produce the best leads, not just the most.

What Is the Lead Management Process Flow?

The lead management process flow follows the entire buyer’s journey. Along this journey, a buyer will go through five different stages: Stranger, Visitor, Lead, Opportunity, and Customer.

1. Stranger – This is before a lead has interacted with or even knows about your business. Through marketing (organic and paid search, referrals, etc.), they’ll navigate to your site where they become a Visitor.
2. Visitor – Once arrived on your site or interacted with your marketing, a Visitor will be persuaded to take a conversion action. This could include calling the business, filling out a form, chatting with support, and more. That’s when they become a Lead.
3. Lead – After converting to a lead, a prospect will go through the nurturing process. Here, they’ll get their questions answered by sales and become likely to purchase, changing them into an Opportunity.
4. Opportunity – Further nurturing from newsletters, continued sales outreach, and other marketing collateral will convert an Opportunity into a Customer.
5. Customer – Once a customer, the goal is repeat business, upselling, and advocacy/referrals. This is accomplished through additional marketing materials and outreach from Customer Success Specialists.

The more visibility you have into this entire process—where leads are coming from, who those leads are, what they're interested in—the easier it is for you to optimize your lead management process flow for even better results. In WhatConverts, you can see all this information for every lead.

Example: A Lead Management Process Flow

Let’s say you’re running marketing for a home services business that handles siding replacement. To bring in new customers, you run a variety of ads across Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Facebook, each of which directs Strangers to your client’s website, where they can request a quote.

But which platforms are the most effective? Which are driving leads that turn into actual sales? And where does it make sense to increase/decrease your budget?

With an effective lead management system, you could not only see which of those channels is driving the most leads to convert, but you could also see:

• Which leads are high-quality vs. low-quality
• Which channels produce a higher percentage of high-quality leads
• Which ads or even keywords generated the most revenue

With that information, you can now choose to increase the budget to the high-performers, cut it from the low-performers, and increase your overall ROI.

Case Study: Path to $1M MRR – Agency Shifts from Vendor to Partner w/ Advanced Reporting

Marketing + Sales = Smarter Lead Management

Those of you with a keen eye for detail will notice the lead management process flows across two departments: marketing and sales.

Each plays a valuable role in the process:

• Marketing – Attracts strangers to your business using various marketing channels (stranger→visitor) and convinces those visitors to take a conversion action like calling or filling out a form (visitor→lead).
• Sales – Nurtures a lead until they’re ready to make a buying decision (lead→opportunity) and ensures they have the information they need to become a customer (opportunity→customer).

As you can see, both marketing and sales need to work together for the best outcome. If marketing drops the ball, sales won’t have any leads to turn into customers. Likewise, if sales fumbles the leads that marketing sends their way, then marketing’s effort is spent in vain.

But there’s a problem here—often the two teams are unaligned. In fact, nearly half of marketers believe their sales counterparts don’t understand what’s important to their department. And 77% of salespeople don’t think the departments are aligned at all.

In order to maximize the results of your lead management, both marketing and sales need to work as a team, not as competitors.

Tips for Marketing + Sales Alignment

Strong marketing + sales alignment helps companies achieve an annual growth rate of 20%. Here’s what’s needed in the lead management process to support both departments.

• What Marketing Needs from Sales – Revenue earned per lead. When marketers can attach actual earned revenue to each lead they generate, they can better understand the value their marketing generates. With that info, they can see which campaigns, ads, and even keywords are creating the most value and optimize accordingly.
• What Sales Needs from Marketing – Higher quality leads. More than 40% of sales reps report that marketing sends them mostly low-quality leads, hurting chances of closing a deal. Marketers can fix that problem by qualifying their leads using who, what, and where data offered by lead tracking tools.

5 Qualities to Look for in Lead Management Software

The best way to manage your leads effectively is with lead management software. Here are the top five qualities to look for during your search.

1. All Your Data

First and foremost, don’t settle for multiple lead management platforms. If you have to use three different tools to track all your leads—organic, paid, phone calls, form fills, e-commerce, etc.—you’re wasting your time. For many marketers, these leads and channels often overlap. And to provide a full view of your marketing’s effectiveness, you’d need to combine data across these platforms into a single place (usually Excel). This takes more manpower than you might think.

Instead, look for a system that lets you manage all your leads in one place, no matter where they’re from or what type of lead they may be. WhatConverts does this automatically.

2. Intuitive Organization

Next, you need to be able to sort and filter your leads easily. For example, if you have all your leads in one place but you only want to see leads coming from a specific keyword, you should be able to do so without having to export all your data and filtering it in a spreadsheet like Excel.

In WhatConverts, you can quickly and easily organize your leads how you want with just a few clicks.

3. Lead Enrichment + Lead Quality

The key to understanding which marketing is producing the most value is lead qualification. Lead qualification lets you filter out the junk leads and focus on which are most likely to turn into cold, hard revenue. Your lead management software should let you qualify your leads within the platform.

You should also be able to enrich your leads by adding more data yourself. For instance, it’d be helpful to know which services a lead is interested in. You also may want to value those leads based on the services they’re requesting. For example, a lead interested in a brand new roof ($40K) is worth more than someone just looking for a small repair ($1K).

Guide: How to Use Lead Qualification to Optimize Your Marketing

4. Detailed Reporting

Your lead management software should also include robust reporting tools. It should allow you to create visually appealing bird's eye views of your data, create custom reports to meet your specific needs, and schedule reports to be sent out to stakeholders. The better the reporting features, the easier it is to communicate your value, uncover insights, and build an effective optimization strategy.

Guide: 9 Best Marketing Reporting Software for Agencies (In-Depth Look)

5. Access to Optimization Opportunities

Last but not least, your lead management platform should make it simple to find optimization opportunities. For example, you should be able to see which keywords, landing pages, and channels are driving the most value, which you can easily do in WhatConverts.

WhatConverts also lets you train Google’s algorithm to target higher-quality leads thanks to our powerful integration. With it, you can choose to send back only certain leads (e.g., high-value) as conversions. As a result, Google can refine its model on what a quality lead looks like for your business, letting you attract even more and up your ROI.

It’s a powerful tool that drives massive value for our customers and their clients.

Guide: How to Optimize Google Ads Automated Bidding for Better Results

Wrapping Up

Effective lead management is essential for both marketing and sales. And to make lead management as fruitful as possible, you need solid lead management software like WhatConverts.

With it, you can uncover more optimization opportunities, prove the value of your efforts, and grow your ROI.

If you don't have a WhatConverts account yet, sign up for a 14-day free trial and get started with qualifying your leads today!