B2B Sales Top Challenges: Lead Relationship Management
The task of marketing is to generate a large number of quality leads. Lead management should lead customers to purchase. To achieve high performance in customer relationship management, this business process must be constantly reviewed and customized to specific products and services – ensuring that your company is using the most effective lead management tools at all times.
Lead Relationship Management
There are several stages in lead management:
- customer acquisition (lead generation)
- lead nurturing
- conversion to a deal.
1. Customer Acquisition (Lead Generation)
A variety of marketing channels can be used to engage with potential customers. These channels differ both in their cost structure and in their ability to reach customers and win their attention. A channel in this case refers to a format for interacting with an audience that is seen as promising in terms of attracting new customers.
Among the traditional direct channels of lead generation we can mention contextual and banner online advertising, email campaigns, cold calling, link building, etc.
To ensure effective lead management, it is necessary to build a process that will purposefully lead the customer to purchase. Since many people may be involved in this process, rules must be formalized to manage cross-functional teams of employees.
2. Lead Nurturing
Statistics show that only 3% of customers are immediately ready to make a purchase. The nurturing process involves moving leads from groups of leads who are not ready for a transaction to a group of prospects who are ready to buy. At the nurturing stage it is necessary to:
Provide effective email marketing, i.e., content delivery via email campaigns
Remind about yourself through advertising transmission channels (both through new Internet channels and traditional ones).
Lead qualification
Common challenges companies used to face when dealing with leads include:
- overlapping lead information
- chaotic distribution of leads
- significant amount of duplicated data
- inability to evaluate the performance of sales managers.
In order to effectively manage lead relationships, it is necessary to qualify them. The qualification of leads is understood as linking information about a particular lead with information about the company this contact represents and with the contact persons of this company.
If the lead taken into work represents a company that has already been listed on the client database, it will be enough to highlight a specific enterprise on the list. If the client database does not contain information about the company to which this lead relates, such information can be added and immediately linked to this lead.
The same goes for information regarding the contact person with whom the lead is associated. It may turn out that your company has already collected a rich history of interactions with various employees of the client organization. In this case, it is quite possible that the contact list already contains information about the person with whom the lead is associated. Then it is enough to select from the list of contact persons representing this company the contact person with whom the lead will be associated. If a lead needs to be associated with a contact person who is not on the list, you can quickly enter this information into the contact person database and immediately associate the lead to be processed with this contact person.
In Sales Accelerator by Kompass this process is substantially automated, allowing you to get the necessary categorized data quickly and easily.
Expanding your customer database
One of the main goals of the sales department is effective management of the customer database, its regular updating, enrichment and expansion. And here we are talking about both actual and potential customers. And the information necessary for management is not limited to just a list of companies, but should contain the necessary data for the segmentation of companies, information about the people who represent the company, their contact information and the history of interactions. All these data can become part of a CRM system.
EasyBusiness allows you to create marketing lists that contain information about the company, such as, for example, type of activity, number of employees, mailing address, e-mail addresses by departments and the company website address, export and import data, data on top managers and heads of departments.
Further, with the help of Sales Accelerator module you can create a full-fledged sales pipeline, linking an unlimited number of contacts to any company.
Lead management operations
To plan and effectively control the operations on lead relationship management, Sales Accelerator offers a toolkit for working with different functions and actions. In addition to specifying the date and description of the planned action, a manager can specify the need for a reminder of the upcoming activity, as well as how long before the action is started, this reminder should be triggered.
Sales Accelerator not only allows you to export all data to your CRM system using CRM connectors, but also to integrate them with your email program for email campaigns, as well as to add information about the upcoming activity to the manager’s calendar automatically.
The history of actions and activities that took place in relation to a particular lead is stored in the system and is available for viewing by authorized managers.
3. Conversion to a deal
Over time, due to sales and marketing activities, lead qualification reaches a level at which the lead is considered ready to close a deal.
Traditionally, the BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeframe) model is used in B2B to qualify the deal prospectivity (in terms of the possibility of deal closing). In other words, to convert a deal from a prospect to a new client, the following criteria must be met:
- the client’s solvency is confirmed (Budget)
- a particular person with whom negotiations are conducted must have sufficient authority to close the transaction (Authority)
- the client’s need for the product/service is realized (Need)
- the prospect has enough time to make a decision to purchase the service/product (Timeframe).
If at least one of the qualification criteria is violated, it becomes impossible to close a deal.
Lead analytics
Lead analytics is an easy-to-use analytical tool that allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of the company’s work with leads at each stage of the sales pipeline, as well as the effectiveness of each manager’s work with leads. This information makes it possible to identify reserves and improve the efficiency of lead management.
In particular, the analytical report provides information on each manager of the company in the context of activities performed during the reporting period. The report shows the total number of planned actions for each manager, as well as the number of activities that were planned but not completed on time. In this way, you can monitor the performance of each employee while interacting with customers.
The concept of customer relationship management (CRM) is a key concept in today’s system of communication with various interest groups in business. Today, no company providing services, or working in the B2B segment, can achieve significant results without the use of tools that provide long-term orientation in the needs of customers. Any business today is customer-oriented, so enterprises of any scale and sphere of activity require those or other elements of the CRM concept.
Kompass’ state-of-the-art EasyBusiness and Sales Accelerator tools provide sales managers not only with the functions to generate and work with a database of contacts, but also with advanced analytics tools that allow them to make effective strategic decisions in the area of processing their customer data.
In conclusion
EasyBusiness and its Sales Accelerator module is a data-driven service that will help your company’s sales team to build long-term trusting relationships with your customers. It provides functionality that will help you easily find the most promising customers, and then develop and maintain mutually beneficial relationships with them. With this toolkit, your company will plan and analyze the full sales life cycle, find new ways to accelerate deal closing, and step into new opportunities to improve the effectiveness of your sales force.