A lead is understood as a potential sales contact. Appropriate dealing with leads significantly impacts the success in the marketplace. That’s why it’s absolutely necessary to know the process of building relationships with leads.
Lead management refers to finding and generating new clients, maintaining the existing ones, understanding their interests, needs and driving customer loyalty. It includes:
- Lead generation
- Lead nurturing
- Lead scoring
Lead generation is responsible for capturing interest or inquiry into services and products. Today it can start much earlier in the buying process than it did in the past. Marketers and marketing departments seek for their prospects in many different channels. They focus on striving ‘quality’ leads, which means leads that are ready to take the next action towards a buying decision.
Lead nurturing pertains to building relationships, loyalty and trust with the quality leads and educating them in order to make them ready to buy. Marketing Automation systems allow to realize these marketing actions.
Lead scoring is ranking the importance of leads in order to take the right steps with potential clients according to their stage at the buying process. Marketing Automation softwares help with pointing at the right moment to deal with them in specific ways.