Tips & Tricks to Optimize your Lead Management Process
Customers are arguably the most important factor in business success, and a company’s ability to optimize lead management processes is key to growing. Clients provide cash flow, help get the word out, provide great insights, and do many other wonders for a business. Unfortunately, not all businesses do a good job of managing interactions, communications, and transactions with their potential clients. A big majority of those businesses mishandle client relationships because of a lack of a CRM system or poor use. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and tools that help with this branch of business can help automate and scale your business by leaps and bounds. Here are eight tips and tricks to help you maximize your lead management through the use of a CRM system.
1. Integrate your CRM with your website
One of the first must-dos to a lead generation process is integrating your company’s official website and your CRM platform. It’s common practice for any business marketing online to drive potential leads through their website. You can nurture leads on your site through value-giving content, such as blogs, free training, ebooks, or a cheat sheet. It’s also where you inform your potential customers about all the products and services that your company offers.
But the part where most websites might come short is a place where leads can send their information and get in touch with a sales agent in your company or a customer service representative if they’re looking for after-sales support. Integrating your CRM to your website allows for all that connection to happen fluidly.
2. Get all staff on board
There is one common denominator for companies that have deployed a CRM system and placed in various lead generation strategies and still fall short. Those companies have lapses in terms of getting everyone on board when using the system. It’s not enough to have one, two, or even most staff to use your CRM. Everyone has to use it. When there are even one or two staff members who don’t use the system, this can cause future problems.
Companies must spend time, energy, and resources when rolling out lead management software. Everyone is to receive training on how to use the system and navigate through all the nuts and bolts to contact clients, manage leads, check information, move them through the lead funnel process, and so on.
3. Maximize integrations
One of the wonderful things about technology today is how well they integrate with other software tools and applications. Teams can get the most out of your CRM system by making use of these integrations. Most CRM systems can integrate with useful tools and data sources and vice versa. The WP-CRM System, for example, provides flawless integrations with services like MailChimp, GravityForms, Slack, and ZenDesk, to ramp up your marketing, sales, and after-sales processes.
There might be a technical aspect to getting these integrations set up at times. But this process is always a one-time ordeal and provides a company with many long term benefits.
4. Create automation for repetitive processes
A common productivity-killer for sales and marketing staff is performing repetitive tasks such as sending out proposals, creating invoices, emailing onboarding instructions to new customers, and so on. The average CRM manager spends up to 5.5 hours a week logging repetitive tasks on CRM. That accounts for over 13% of a company’s workforce costs.
One way to avoid this deadweight loss is to use CRM tools to automate various lead management process stages. CRM tools can automate various parts of your sales process, including responding to certain queries, sending out follow up emails to leads, sign people up to certain lists and subscriptions, getting client information, and so on.
5. Integrate CRMs with your calendar
Any team that makes an electronic calendar its best friend will find out how powerful it can be. Electronic calendars like iCalendar or Google Calendar enable staff to coordinate better with each other and staff. So if a potential client wants to schedule a call to talk more about a company’s products and services, for instance, a calendar can help a team get those schedules in place.
Calendar integrations provide a quick resolution to a potential client’s itch, get you in the door faster, and make the likelihood of a sale much better.
6. Audit data regularly
When utilizing CRM software for optimizing your lead management, data can get old quite regularly. So keeping a regular schedule of auditing data can keep your CRM system organized and clean. Data decays at a rate of 30-70% every year. People change jobs, emails, phone numbers, addresses, or other information almost all the time. So keep your data clean by auditing as often as you can.
A simple auditing process might look something like this:
- Gather all your customer information.
- Organize information based on importance. Contact information (i.e., emails and phone numbers) are of primary importance, next to demographic (jobs, position, marital status, income brackets, etc.)
- Remove any duplicate or incorrect information.
- Remove or update any information that might be a year old.
- Fill up fields that are missing.
- Repeat the audit process regularly once per quarter should be a good start.
7. Study your marketing and sales data
What many companies with lead management tools fail to realize is the wealth of marketing and sales information on their systems. Your CRM tool can tell you more about your customer than a survey form ever will.
CRMs track all kinds of data and information on clients: where they signed up for your email list, what products they’re interested in, what they can afford, what products they’ve bought, and so on. This data can help provide more context and knowledge to marketing teams to create campaigns that might attract more people who share the same avatar as your existing clientele. Market research is your key to understanding your market more and leveraging that, and your lead management software allows you to do that.
8. Use CRM for Customer Service
There’s no denying the importance that customer service plays in a business’ success. Of all the people who stopped doing business with a previous provider, 56% did so because of poor customer service. The good news is that CRM tools are great ways to keep customers engaged and tend to their after-sales needs.
Many CRMs connect with chat support, social media platforms, and email management tools that integrate with one platform where customer service representatives can communicate with clients about their pre-sales or after-sales queries and concerns. Some can also create a directory of canned responses to provide uniform professional answers to common questions.
Using these tools can give your company an edge in wowing clients and providing above and beyond support through fast and quick communication.
Have a CRM software for lead management
All these tips and tricks depend on one thing: a robust lead management software. Why is a lead management software important? Times are changing fast, and the world is more connected than ever.
A business that wants to win in 2021 and beyond needs to start using the best available tools to automate and ramp up business activities. CRM tools improve the basic business processes of lead generation, sales, marketing, and customer relationship management by leaps and bounds, and having them in your arsenal will make your business a force to be reckoned with.