Done right, lead management increases the effectiveness of your marketing and lead generation efforts. Ultimately it will convert more leads to deals and drive revenue.

While some of this sounds simple, in reality it’s not so easy to manage leads, especially if you generate a lot of leads and from a variety of channels and sources. CRM tools tend to focus on managing contacts and existing customer interactions, without the workflow or tools needed to assist marketing in capturing and distributing these leads.

Here are 5 common problems marketers face:

1. Can’t easily capture leads?

When you create Leads from a variety of  channels, they invariably come in different formats, with different fields. Compound this with the volume of leads, then making sure each one is captured and tracked becomes a pain.

2. Lead assignment is time consuming and difficult

Working out who is the best person to assign a lead to, whether by territory, account, product specialists or simply who has the bandwidth to follow-up is troublesome especially when dealing with more than a handful of leads.

3. Too many duplicate or poor quality leads

Often when you have created interest, the same prospects will turn up  in a variety of channels having met you at the tradeshow, responded to the campaign , registered on your website. This creates potential duplicate leads. Sales people are busy enough, let alone being expected to filter through leads already actioned.

4. Leads are not sales ready

Marketing professionals will be aware that sales are forever complaining about poor quality leads. Although this may only represent a small percentage of leads generated the unfortunate result is the majority of leads passed on to the sales team are simply ignored. To give you an idea of the scale of lead wastage, it is estimated that more than 80% of the leads which get passed to sales will be categorised as ‘Not sales ready’, and are rarely actually contacted.

You do not need to implement a complex lead nurturing process but you should filter the obviously non sales ready leads from wasting the sales departments time.

5. Not learning from your successes and failures

It seems obvious but with no feedback loop in place, how can you evaluate the ultimate success of a campaign?

Do you know which campaigns deliver the best results? Can you determine your cost per lead, cost per opportunity, and ultimately cost per sale? Most importantly, can you justify your marketing budget?

Having a close loop system enables you to redefine and tweak your lead management process. Knowing with greater accuracy what you need to do in order to achieve your targets is the true benefit of lead management.

An easy solution

Lead management software automates the time consuming tasks marketers have to do in order to pass leads to sales. Overcoming these obstacles frees your time to concentrate on creating more content, and generate more leads.

B12Leads is an online lead management tool to capture, distribute and convert leads. Everything you would expect from a CRM tool but with a focus on keeping track of leads and your sales teams. An affordable solution that has everything you need to take control of your sales pipeline.