It’s one thing to generate leads. Converting them into customers is a different process entirely—one that doesn’t happen by accident. So while it’s important to build optimized inbound marketing channels, through-provoking content, and eye-catching ads, you also need a lead management process flow to service those leads and make sure they enter (and complete) the sales pipeline.
This article will walk you through the steps in inbound lead management, how to build your own process, and the tools you need to do so effectively.
Key takeaways
- Lead management adds value to your organization by accelerating speed-to-lead, reducing lead dropoff, improving marketing-sales alignment, and distributing sales resources (especially personnel) more efficiently
- A lead management process flow consists of ten stages: capture, enrichment, qualification, routing, scheduling, first meeting (discovery), follow-up (nurture), second meeting (proposal), contract, and onboarding
- There are a number of KPIs that help you manage the effectiveness of your your lead management process flow, including Sales Velocity, LTV:CAC ratio, Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rates, and more
- Every organization is different, which means every lead management process is different—so it’s important to have tools and software that can adapt to your unique needs.
What is lead management?
Lead management encompasses the servicing of leads and prospective customers from their first interaction with your organization until they make a purchase. Good lead management adds value to the organization in a number of ways, including:
- Accelerating speed-to-lead through systems for responding to new contacts in real time
- Reducing lead dropoff and revenue leakage through internal accountability structures
- Identifying which leads are most likely to convert, prioritizing those leads, and implementing personalized outreach to further engage them
- Improving marketing-sales alignment with clearly defined processes for qualifying and handing off inbound leads
In modern revenue organizations, lead management is often handled through a combination of automated workflows and manual interventions. For example, an inbound lead goes through an automated process to become a marketing qualified lead, then is routed to a sales rep and a meeting is automatically booked. The rep then engages in a combination of manual and automated outreach to move them through the sales pipeline.
What is the lead management process?
Lead management processes consist of multiple steps. Once an inbound lead comes in, there’s a lot that has to happen before you qualify and reach out to them:
- Capture. Leads come to your website and are intrigued enough to request more information. This can happen through web forms, social media forms, product sign-up pages, and more.
- Enrichment. Our proprietary data shows that limiting inbound form fields to five (or fewer) helps maximize conversion rates. To form a complete picture of the lead and account, data enrichment is critical.
- Qualification. Not all leads are created equal. To prioritize where your reps spend their time (read: the opportunities with the greatest value) it’s important to quickly determine whether the lead is worth the effort.
- Routing. After qualifying a lead, you should automatically send them to the salesperson best positioned to engage and close the deal. Enrichment data plays a key role in identifying lead-rep alignment: industry experience, product expertise, etc. (See our lead routing software)
- Scheduling. Once a lead is routed to the appropriate rep, you should get that meeting on the calendar ASAP. We’ve found that integrating scheduling with forms increases lead response time by 240X.
- First Meeting/Discovery. Typically, the first meeting (or “discovery” call) is where sales qualification happens. Here, the rep confirms that the lead is a good fit and ready to buy, and gathers key information to customize the proposal to their specific needs.
- Followup/Nurture. After the initial meeting, it’s important to keep the prospect engaged so they don’t drop off. Automated follow-up and nurture will ensure your first meeting turns into a second.
- Second Meeting/Proposal. Some prospects need only one more meeting post-discovery. For more complicated deals, you’re going to be spending a lot more time with them. In either event, it’s important to tailor the conversation and proposal to the information surfaced earlier in the lead management process.
- Contract. Once you get a verbal agreement, you still have to sign the contract. Many deals drop between the proposal and contract phases, so it’s important to continue actively managing the deal at this point.
- Onboarding. Once the client signs, a seamless onboarding process is critical. The faster they can start achieving bottom-line results with your product, the less likely they are to churn.
Why is it important to build a lead management process flow?
What’s more, the timing among these various steps in the lead management process is irregular. Some of them happen in rapid succession, and with others there’s a lag.
For example, we’ve written before about how customers have high expectations around response times. If you respond within five minutes, the likelihood of booking a meeting is 100X higher. Customers also want a “fast” response (10 minutes or less).
To maximize speed to lead, capture, enrichment, qualification, routing, and scheduling must happen in rapid succession. However, B2B deals have a longer sales cycle length than B2C, with a 60-day average. Enterprise B2B deals are even longer, ranging from several months to even a year or more.
By building an automated inbound lead management process, you can reduce friction and accelerate your speed-to-lead. Additionally, you can integrate best practices from successful deals into your flow and increase your chances of success in future deals.
A step-by-step approach to building a lead management process flow
Now let’s talk about how to actually build an inbound lead flow. We’ve kept these steps fairly broad, as every organization will need to adapt them to their specific needs, customer expectations, sales team size, etc.
1. Identify lead sources
You can’t manage leads you haven’t captured. So the first step in building a lead management process is to map out your inbound lead sources.
You may be tempted to skip this step. After all, if the leads are coming in, what does it matter where they come from?
In reality, a lot.
Did the lead request a demo, register for a webinar, or download an eBook? Each of these actions signal a different buyer intent. Has the lead visited your website or engaged with your social media channels before this conversion? Or is this a one-off action? This signals a likely familiarity with your brand and product that may improve the likelihood of a deal.
Lead sources can provide a great deal of insight into where your customers sit in their buying journey. This can help not only with qualifying and routing the lead, but also personalizing your meetings and follow-up.
2. Develop a scoring system for qualification
Inbound lead qualification helps ensure your reps only spend time with leads that have a high likelihood of conversion. But as you scale up your inbound flow, manual lead qualification quickly becomes infeasible—which means you need to adopt an automated solution.
Automated lead qualification starts with scoring leads based on their alignment with your ICP and buying intent signals. If a lead matches your ICP’s attributes (e.g. company size, annual revenue, industry) and has clear intent signals (whether first- or third-party), your lead qualification software and tools will automatically designate those leads as ready for sales handoff.
Lead scoring not only helps enable automated qualification and routing, but it also establishes a single source-of-truth for marketing qualification. For organizations large enough to have service-level agreements requiring marketing to provide sales with a certain number of qualified leads per month, lead scoring offers an objective measure of whether those expectations and obligations are met.
3. Map out a dynamic customer journey
Once you qualify a lead, you need to route it to the sales rep best positioned to handle it. Simple round robin rules won’t do that. You need a lead routing software that enables you to establish rules-based lead distribution.
To determine what those rules are, you need to first map out your customer journeys to align with their actions and engagement from the first moment of interest until they become a paying customer. This is certainly easier said than done, as modern B2B customer journeys aren’t linear and include double-backs, funnel re-entry, and other behaviors that complicate this process.
Image source: Gartner
While your prospects’ customer journey may be simpler (or not) than that graphic above, mapping it out will give you some guidelines for building out your rules-based lead routing workflows.
4. Create clear follow-up rules and processes
Most deals need more than a handful of touches in order to close, especially in the B2B world. But a shocking 48% of reps never make a follow-up call.
While training, coaching, and accountability is one way to get reps to follow-up more consistently, it still leaves plenty of room for human error. Another option is to automate your follow-up.
According to our proprietary research, automating follow-up lifts your meeting booking rates by 14%.
Automated lead outreach can achieve a number of potential outcomes:
- Book a first meeting
- Book a second meeting
- Convert unqualified leads into qualified leads
- Keep your product top of mind
- Build a sense of urgency among prospects
It’s important to define exactly what you’re trying to accomplish with your automated nurture streams and craft your content, ads, and emails accordingly. Then, you can feed these messages and content into your inbound marketing automation software to ensure those messages are sent in a timely, consistent manner.
How to measure the effectiveness of your lead management process flow
The objective of any lead management process flow is to accelerate speed-to-lead and conversion, ensure consistent motions among your sales team, and drive marketing revenue. To track whether you’re meeting these goals, here are some KPIs and metrics that are important to note.
Sales Velocity
The purpose of any lead management process flow is to accelerate sales. A good diagnostic of whether that’s working is to measure Sales Velocity, or your Weighted Pipeline Value divided by Average Sales Cycle Length.
For example, if you have a 60-day sales cycle and your Weighted Pipeline Value is $500,000, then you have a Sales Velocity of $8,333.
Once you implement your lead management process flow, you should see your velocity increase. If not, there is likely a problem you need to troubleshoot.
Pipeline Predictability & Coverage Ratio
Pipeline Value & Sales Velocity are only helpful metrics if it aligns with your real financials. As such, you should always compare it with the actual closed revenue per period (day, week, month) to determine its accuracy—this metric is known as Pipeline Predictability.
Additionally, you should also measure whether you have the Pipeline Value to cover your current sales quota. If not, this can indicate a problem either in your lead generation or lead management processes.
Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost Ratio (LTV:CAC)
While building a lead management process flow is an upfront investment, in the long run it should end up saving you in saved time and resources in customer acquisition cost (CAC). Additionally, by improving your lead qualification and outreach processes, you can close customers that are less likely to churn, which improves your overall customer lifetime value (LTV).
As such, it’s important to track both LTV and CAC individually, but also as a ratio. Higher LTVs justify higher CACs, which is important if you want to land high-end enterprise deals. A solid lead management process flow can help you track these metrics and justify those expenses in the future.
Lead to Customer Conversion Rate
A solid lead management process flow should help you close business faster and more effectively. As such, your lead-to-customer conversion rate is a critical metric of the health of your lead management process flow. If it remains stagnant or, worse, starts declining, that’s a major warning sign that something is broken.
Sales Cycle Length to Average Deal Size Ratio
Automated lead management should shorten your sales cycles. However, larger deals will still take longer to close. By measuring the ratio of Sales Cycle Length to Average Deal Size, you can see whether your lead management process flow is helping those deals within easier reach close faster.
Time Spent on Manual Tasks
One of the major value-adds of an automated lead management process flow is the ability to divert sales resources (especially personnel resources) from monotonous administrative tasks and into more productive, revenue-generating activities. As such, Time Spent on Manual Tasks is a good KPI of whether your process is accomplishing that goal.
Marketing-Sourced & Influenced Revenue
Lead management is the critical link between lead generation and marketing-sourced (or influenced) revenue. So it’s important to track the latter as a KPI.
Marketing-Sourced Revenue is exactly what it sounds: the total revenue generated from contacts and accounts sourced through marketing channels. We won’t get into the merits of first-, last-, or multi-touch attribution here. But with Marketing-Sourced Revenue, there is some attribution process in place.
But especially in a world of non-linear customer journeys (which, ideally, you’ve mapped out as we recommended in the section above), Marketing’s impact is far wider than the channels they actively “own.” For example, let’s say a customer sees a LinkedIn ad but doesn’t convert. Three weeks later, a salesperson reaches out to them and they take the call. Had they not seen that Marketing ad, they likely wouldn’t have paid the rep any attention.
So while, yes, you probably should give higher priority to Marketing-Sourced Revenue, don’t neglect Marketing-Influenced Revenue. It’s a significant part of your overall ROI.
Lead management process flow FAQs
What are the stages of a lead flow?
There are 10 stages of a lead flow: capture, enrichment, qualification, routing, scheduling, first meeting (or discovery call), followup (or nurture), second meeting (or proposal), contract, and onboarding.
What is the B2B lead management process?
The B2B lead management process follows many of the same steps as other sales processes. The main difference is that B2B sales involves multiple stakeholders, so lead management process flows must account for multiple contacts within an existing account.
How do you create a lead management system?
Creating a lead management system involves four steps: 1) identify and audit your lead capture channels, 2) develop a lead scoring system, 3) map out your customer journeys, and 4) create clear follow-up rules and automations after leads convert.
Automate your lead management process flow with Default’s sales workflow software
If you have fewer than 10 inbound customers per month, you may be able to handle a manual lead management process. But once you scale your inbound flow past 100 customers per month, your team just doesn’t have the time to devote hours of manual action to each lead.
That’s why you need a lead management platform that enables you to automate your inbound sales. Default’s sales workflow software handles every stage of the lead management journey in a centralized platform. Plus, its built-in orchestration capabilities enable you to integrate existing technologies into a seamless flow—no extensive API library needed!
Our platform is flexible and customizable, which means we can match whatever lead management process your organization has.
The best way to learn about Default’s automation capabilities is on a live demo. Schedule a time with our team here.
.svg)
.png)
.svg)
%201.svg)
%201.svg)
%201.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)