Consequently in common words lead management is about how to get and manage those leads. It is notable that lead management has a number of definitions by different specialist and marketing companies. The following can be outlined:
«Complete process of tracking and managing sales leads (prospective customers) from generation of leads to their conversion into sales and long-term relationships. The generated data of this process is used in the measurement of the efficiency of the marketing and sales efforts [1]»;
To give a vision of the lead management, sales pipeline should be mentioned. Sales pipeline is a principle of the clients spread by the different stages of the selling process from the first contact till the sales closure. It has the shape of the up-side down pyramid which demonstrates the decrease of the clients from stage to stage. Often the place of the lead management in the funnel of sales is defined as a gap between the interest and deal closure, which allows eliminating or decreasing leaks in the conversion between those stages.
The principle of the leak elimination can be described by the processes involved on the lead management. The lead management consists of the various steps which involve many different processes. They are unique in many cases depending on the certain terms of the business or sector.
The following steps of lead-management funnel can be outlined:
- Awareness – to generate traffic to your site with various tools.
- All names – it is generated awareness to the web-sites, people who have entered the funnel but has not become leads yet.
- Engaged – this stage contains of the people who have responded to your offer.
- Prospects – if a person actions have gained him certain score system promotes him to the prospect, someone who may buy from you one day.
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) – those are prospects that have passed through certain nurturing phase by the marketers and have gained enough scores in lead scoring system to become a lead.
- Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) – when sales person approves maturity of the lead it becomes SQL, who are needed to be contacted immediately.
- Opportunity – lead gets to this stage when sales person has succeeded in appointing a meeting with the contact, from that stage responsibility for the lead is solely borne by the sales person.
A way to comprehend when lead management is rational to be used and get further understanding of its advantages and limitations is to compare it with another tool used for similar purposes. For instance we can examine how lead management is different with the cold calls. Cold calls is an advertising and sales tool when call is made by the representative of the selling company to the customer in order to promote product, attract potential customers and make sales without preliminary agreement between sales person and customer. It means that those calls are made by the initiative of the selling personnel and can be done with the help of the special data base or by dialing random numbers . The comparison of those tools is summed up in the table 1.
Table 1
Cold calls and lead management comparison
| Characteristic | Cold calls | Lead management |
| Initiator | Seller | Buyer |
| Privacy | Low | High |
| Interest | Unknown | Interested |
| Tracking | Not available | Full tracking |
| Nurturing | Depends on calls | Depends on e-mails |
| Cost | High cost | Low cost |
| Applicability | B2B, sometimes B2C | B2B, B2C |
It must be mentioned that lead in the e–marketing is a response of the customer on the certain offer or advertising campaign of the advertiser which contains contact information. There are two types of the leads:
— consumer leads – leads are generated on the basis of the demographic criteria such as creditworthiness, income, age, etc. Those leads are often resold to the different advertisers. Consumer leads are usually developed by the sales managers’ telephone calls. Those leads are usually used in the mortgage, insurance and financial sector;
— target leads – special leads which are generated for the unique offer of the advertiser. In contrast to consumer leads those leads can be sold only to the advertiser on whose offer customer has responded. Because of the transparency is being a necessary requirement of the target leads, campaign for target leads generation can be optimized by the check of the authenticity of their sources.
The web-site of the advertiser has a cornerstone role in the online lead management. All hype is generated only in order to generate traffic to the web-site. It has a special landing page or even squeezing page. It means that online lead management is not available for the company which does not have its own web-site. It is a weak point of lead management online, meaning that if a company wants to implement lead management, it has to invest in its web-site development as well. To get better understanding what online lead management is, the comparison of online and offline lead management should be done. Recently one of those lead management software developers has conducted a huge research comparing offline and online lead management.
References:
- Вырин Ф. Ю. Интернет-маркетинг. Полный сборник практических инструментов. М. : Эксмо, 2010. 160 с
- Халилов Д. Маркетинг в социальных сетях. М. : Манн, Иванов и Фербер, 2013. 201 с
- Halligan B. Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs. Wiley. 2008, 250 p.[schema type=»book» name=»LEAD-MANAGEMEN AS A TOOL FOR PROMOTION» description=»The article gives a definition for a lead-management. Lead-management advantages and disadvantages in comparison with traditional tools for promotion on the web are considered.» author=»Trykov Aleksei» publisher=»Басаранович Екатерина» pubdate=»2016-12-16″ edition=»euroasia-science_6(27)_23.06.2016″ ebook=»yes» ]