Demystifying Lead Management: A Comprehensive B2B Playbook for Success

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.

Lead management is about driving efficiency across the six-step process used to progress leads through the funnel toward conversion and beyond. B2B lead management includes strategies such as:

It is important to note that the linear nature of the lead management process means that each element requires its own optimization metrics, which need to be constantly monitored, measured, and recalibrated in order to achieve desired outcomes. Each element is discussed in more detail below:

Think of lead generation as the doorway for prospects to enter your conversion pipeline. Crafting an ideal customer profile (ICP) 
for your business will tell you who is the right prospect, where you can find them, and how you can attract them.

With a well-defined ICP, you can then collect leads from channels like your website, HubSpot, LinkedIn, and social media. 
At a minimum, you need to collect the name and email address of the lead, but for B2B leads, you should also collect information like their company, their role, and, if possible, a contact number.

Creating gated content that people can download for free in exchange for their details is a great lead magnet. Newsletter and product demo CTAs are other excellent touch points for collecting leads.

An important element of lead generation is ensuring that goals concerning quality and quantity are met. While there are a multitude of metrics to choose from, monthly lead volume and lead quality (how closely leads align with your ICP) are essential. To accomplish the latter, consider leveraging automated tools to cut down on workloads to determine how leads score against your market segmentation attributes, e.g., industry, location, etc. You will also need to plan how to organize and input the lead data into your 
Client Relationship Management (CRM) system for your marketing strategies (see more details on these later in the article).

Although you must continuously optimize your lead generation and management processes, the volume of leads you generate will always exceed those you can actively pursue. Hence, you must qualify the incoming leads to identify those more likely to convert.

Lead qualification happens in two steps:

1. The marketing team identifies marketing qualified leads (MQLs), which are leads who fit your client profile
and are more likely to buy.

2. MQLs are then passed to the sales team, who further filter the marketing leads to sales-qualified leads (SQLs). SQLs are leads that have demonstrated purchase intent, and these leads are then nurtured toward conversion.

With lead qualification, you must track and measure the percentage of SQL leads qualifying as MQL. A low number here could signal problems upstream with lead generation, which signals a lead to revisit your targeting or buyer personas.

Due to the complexity of B2B purchases, leads must be nurtured and fully convinced of the value of a solution before converting 
into a sale. Lead nurturing, as a practice, aims to establish a relationship with leads to encourage these purchases.

Nurturing your leads with relevant content is an excellent way to address their most common pain points while establishing your brand authority. The type of content you use to nurture leads depends on your industry and product, but some typical content types include:

Lead nurturing is an ongoing process fulfilled by both marketers and salespeople, which goes beyond a purchase 
since it is also crucial for retaining clients and driving brand evangelism.

Lead scoring is the process of filtering MQLs and determining those of the highest priority for further lead nurturing efforts, as well 
as moving onto the SQL stage. It assigns numerical values from 1-100 based on insights on how the leads have interacted with your brand, their engagement level, their stage in the sales funnel, and how closely they align with your ICP.

Most CRMs will do this once you input the value assigned to each type of lead engagement. Here is how lead scoring commonly works:

Lead management is an ongoing process where you must measure critical metrics to identify working strategies and those which require adjustments and recalibration. This can be done by analyzing metrics such as sales cycle length, conversion time from lead to client, and the sales team’s close rate of leads.

Tracking multiple metrics is important to form a bigger picture to inform your optimizations. In the infographic below
are 5 core factors you should prioritize when optimizing lead management at your organization:

Ensure you provide relevant content to the lead in every touchpoint, especially their first contact. This helps build trust in your brand, as well as position your organization as a reputable source for future visits whenever the lead wishes for information. This will result in the consumption of more content, such as a gated whitepaper, which will then generate a lead.

Some leads will qualify as SQL faster than others, while others will naturally go through a long lead nurturing cycle before converting. Another fact to keep in mind is the average selling price (ASP) of your product. A service that costs $100,000 per year will require more thoughtful decision-making from a buying committee, while a cheaper $20 monthly solution might be decided in a few months.

It is important to automate lead segmentation based on criteria such as location, industry, and other factors that are relevant
to determining your ICP. Segmenting your leads this way allows for automated nurture, which is personalized and relevant.

Likewise, the lead qualification must also be automated. It enables you to manage a higher volume of leads with a smaller team. 
Most CRMs will allow you to automate the segmentation and qualification process, but you must first create a framework
that defines the processes and criteria.

The ability to respond to lead inquiries timely positively impacts your conversion rate. A lead inquiry is an opportunity to start 
a conversation and nurture the lead towards conversion. It is also an opportunity to reinforce your brand's credibility.

According to a unique 2017 study by Drift:

While chatbots have their utility, human responses always work better for conversations, which is why investing in a Client Success
or Support team is crucial to ensure leads and website visitors can get information from a qualified professional.

Lead management is a collaboration between marketing and sales teams; hence both must work off the same page. Typically, performance goals for marketing include MQL numbers, while for sales, the goals relate to MQLs to SQL conversion, the close rate from meetings, and revenue from deals. Even so, ensuring that both departments have common goals, or at least a common baseline for both departments (such as ROI targets/metrics) is ideal for effective lead management. RevOps is a discipline that aims to achieve this alignment.

Here are a selection of useful tools and platforms for you to consider when building your lead management tech stack:

A B2B demand generation provider with clients ranging from startups to legacy brands and global enterprises. INFUSE crafts content with its in-house team and engages decision-makers through its ITCurated network of over 138+ million buyers.

A tool for automating email marketing that provides a wide selection of templates for use cases and with an intuitive 
drag-and-drop interface. Automate your email campaigns and use the free analytics for informing optimizations.

Advanced marketing automation for larger companies that is AI-enabled for automation and analytics. 
It offers the ability to define complex workflows, rules, and metrics.

An easy-to-use multifunctional tool that provides an all-in-one growth software, including CRM, email marketing, 
and contact management, to facilitate faster deal closure.

One of the most acclaimed all-in-one solutions for SMEs. HubSpot’s main selling point is offering an all-in-one solution, including marketing, sales, analytics, service, and operations.

Recommended for lead management at large enterprises. This Adobe offering is marked as a singular solution 
for your marketing and sales workflow. Track lead engagement at every touchpoint for clearer analysis.

Good for adaptive marketing and CRM integration, this easy-to-use marketing automation platform can handle your email campaigns and automation of tasks like lead generation and qualification, while delivering insights based on your customized metrics.

A sales automation tool that enables you to monitor your sales process while nurturing your leads into clients. The tool helps in automating routine tasks to make your sales team more productive. It can also monitor multiple complex sales strategies while combining lead data in a single platform.

Deciding to perform lead management in-house or to outsource it to an agency is a decision that every organization faces, with pros and cons to either choice. The pros and cons listed below give an idea
of the challenges most companies face while making this decision:

Agencies have expertise managing leads for years and multiple clients, which means they have the experience to develop the best, custom-tailored approach for your organization.

Particularly for small businesses and startups, learning all the factors for effective lead management can take time, as well 
as a period of trial and error until the most effective system is identified. Working with an agency can shorten this time by crafting a bespoke system for lead management which can then be implemented in your CRM.

For smaller organizations, the cost of hiring seasoned marketers with operational experience can be quite steep when compared to the lower cost of hiring an agency. Yet for an enterprise, building an in-house team may be more cost-effective.

You are a specialist when it comes to your business. You know all the ins and outs, which an outsourced agency will not have knowledge of. Agencies usually handle multiple clients across different industries, so they will mostly have generalists on their teams.

The changing size of digital agencies, as well as the fact that they work with multiple clients, makes them less agile to effectively respond to your evolving demands. Unless you secure a unique relationship with the agency, most changes your business requires take a while to be actioned.

The service levels can vary from agency to agency, and you should do your due diligence when it comes to selecting yours. Reviews and the agency’s client list are good starting points. Drafting a detailed service level agreement (SLA) that lays out the expectations and deliverables for both sides is a must to avoid future issues and disagreements.

A robust lead management strategy is essential for amplifying the pace of your company’s growth. It provides clear visibility into each element of the sales pipeline and offers valuable insights to help you make better decisions that ramp your business growth.

Investing in lead management services and tech, as well as aligning marketing and sales teams, is crucial to ensure precise lead management that qualifies prospects effectively to drive business ROI.

Lead management is a framework for identifying leads, as well as nurturing, scoring, converting, and retaining them as clients after a purchase. Lead management entails collecting leads from multiple channels and later engaging them to encourage conversions.

Lead management enables organizations to develop techniques for optimizing the workflow from lead generation to conversion. Lead management enables your sales teams to efficiently utilize their time by focusing their efforts on qualified leads who are most likely to convert. It also facilitates the segmentation, categorization, and scoring of leads.

A lead management strategy usually includes these six elements:

1. Lead generation
2. Lead qualification and segmentation
3. Lead nurturing
4. Lead scoring
5. Lead distribution
6. Continuous optimization and recalibrating of processes

It is important to note that since the lead management process is linear (lead qualification comes after generation), each element requires its own optimization metrics that need to be constantly monitored and recalibrated for the lead management to deliver desired outcomes.

The lead lifecycle is the time taken and the steps involved from the lead's first contact to their final conversion into a purchasing client. The lead lifecycle involves multiple processes, including generating, analyzing, segmenting, qualifying, and nurturing leads. An effective lead management strategy helps your sales and marketing teams identify each lead’s position in the sales pipeline and manage their nurturing more efficiently.