Demystifying Lead Management: A Comprehensive B2B Playbook for Success

Summary

Synopsis:

What is lead management, and what are its elements and strategies?
Key metrics, tools, technologies, and best practices in lead management
Measuring, analyzing, and recalibrating your lead management strategy

WHAT IS LEAD MANAGEMENT?

An integral element of identifying and converting leads to clients is implementing effective lead management. In essence, lead management is a detailed and calibrated framework that encompasses the processes of identifying, nurturing, converting, and, most importantly, retaining leads.

Designing and maintaining lead management workflows is built on a strong collaboration between marketing and sales teams to ensure pipelines are continuously fed with quality engagement and opportunities.

For most, this lead management workflow consists of the following processes:

The marketing team focuses on identifying, capturing, and selecting leads that match ICP criteria and have interacted with marketing materials or demonstrated a strong interest in your services.

After engaging with enough touchpoints (subject to lead scoring), these leads are then categorized as marketing-qualified leads (MQL).

These MQLs are then passed on to sales, who further distill and qualify the leads based on their behavior and lead scoring, finally determining them as sales-qualified leads (SQL). These are leads that have demonstrated interest and purchase intent in your product or service.

These SQLs are then placed into targeted nurturing cadences (for example, at a persona or account level, in the case of ABM) and moved toward conversion and, ideally, retention.

While this is a simplified view of a complex process, digital marketing outcomes can be greatly improved by implementing lead management—particularly conversion rates.

Therefore, effective lead management is essential for delivering business growth and optimizing the ROI on your B2B marketing dollars.

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