Lead management is an essential service that every CRM software offers companies to boost sales growth and overall sales operations. It helps companies or institutions govern their communication with consumers. It uses data analysis to examine a vast range of data, and also collect data from various communication media. The media include an enterprise’s website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials, and social media. CRM permits companies to know more about their target audiences. And how companies can cater to customers’ needs, thus retaining them and optimizing sales growth. In conclusion, CRM may be used with past, present or potential customers.
How Lead Management can Optimize the Retail Business
We will look at two crucial real-life use cases of CRM software. It will help us to understand how lead management can optimize retail and other business.
- Lead management CRM assists in finding the leads using various parameters like past engagement, geography, the purchase history. A company’s sales and marketing team will have better prospects to convert and improve sales. Tyco International, one of the leading North American company. It provides business intelligence and security solutions to over 500000 clients. The company faced lead generation and management issues while restructuring its sales and marketing operations in 2015.
- A leading medical device manufacturing company wanted a comprehensive strategy for inbound marketing. The company aimed to skillfully move the leads by the sales funnel and optimize brand recognition amongst dialysis experts. It has also recently redesigned its product-specific contact us form and the lead generation strategies. This design would exponentially increase the company’s conversion rate.
- Makana Solutions is a subscription-based software company. It had two significant challenges while marketing its software that assists businesses to conduct sales compensation planning. First, the online service they provided was a new category for clients who set a specific sales compensation target. Second, their target market had those companies with fewer sales reps. Therefore, this company used SEO and online registration form methods. It tripled leads through a free trial program and saw traffic jump 200%.
- Union Assurance is a leading life insurance company in the Southeast Asian market. And around 4000 life advisors and bancassurance are deployed. It offers a broad range of insurance products and services of international standards. And also track sales staff activities of how they transform the leads into policy conversion regularly. The Multi-Channel Lead Management solution provided by a CRM company helped UA manage their entire lead lifecycle.
Top 5 CRM Lead Management Tools
Lead management is an important feature in every CRM software. However, the core focus of the software can vary from one another. Let us have a look at the top 5 CRM software and the features they offer.
Hubspot
HubSpot is a sales software. It is used for inbound marketing and help businesses attract visitors, convert leads and convert customers into buyers. HubSpot helps create valuable content. HubSpot offers a CRM platform with a set of crucial tools and integrations. Businesses require CRM for content management, marketing, sales, and customer support service. All HubSpot products, if used together, can do wonders for businesses. These products cater to various needs of a company. The HubSpot provides a range of pricing plans to address unique business needs. However, specifically, the CRM suite comes in Starter, Professional and Enterprise versions. The free version is available. Companies can design a customized CRM suite and HubSpot provides a calculator for calculating the prices of the chosen products.
Salesforce
Salesforce and HubSpot perform neck to neck to provide basic CRM facilities like they provide vital lead capture capacity and automatically import contact information. However, Salesforce offers more customizable lead management and a scoring facility. It uses separate marketing automation software called Marketo to provide facilities like a content management system(CMS) for publishing whitepapers, blogs and generating leads all on one platform. Later on, integrate them with the CRM, whereas one has to pay extra for integration in HubSpot. Salesforce provides in-depth customization features. Hence, it sets up lead assignment protocols, quickly add leads to enhance marketing lists, and establish security access levels for authorized users and the datatypes they can view. Also, Salesforce provides a wide range of products and has different editions pricing schemes. The Free trial is available.
Zoho
Zoho is a cloud-based software for project management. It provides services like sales automation which consists of leads management, CRM views, Sales forecasting, Email insights, contextual custom related lists. Zoho CRM features product customization, automation and process management that includes workflow rules, approval process. Some more features include reports, analytics and measurements that contain charts, API, funnels, cohorts, custom dashboards. The Social has features like an automated lead generation from social media. It also offers marketing automation, inventory management, customer support, user portal, data administration, security administration, add ons and integration. Zoho provides a wide range of editions with different pricing range like the Standard version ranging from INR 800/user/mo, Professional INR 1400/user/mo, Enterprise INR 2400/user/mo, Ultimate 2600/user/mo. The free version is available.
ActiveCampaign CRM
Another sales CRM software that made it to our list is ActiveCampaign CRM. Its prominent feature is the ability to provide a robust lead management system. Activecampaign CRM notifies the sales team, updates the deals and creates tasks, and automatically nurtures the leads. ActiveCampaign provides a wide range of features according to B2B, B2C and eCommerce integration with BigCommerce, Shopify, WooCommerce. The pricing varies according to a lite version which costs around $9/ mo. The Plus version costs $ 49/mo, the Professional version is $ 129/mo, and the Enterprise version costs around $229/ mo. The free version is available.
SAP SALES CRM
SAP Sales Cloud helps businesses connect and guide consumers throughout their buying journey. This software helps convert the lead to cash and stimulate sales performance with incentive optimization. It also provides sales training and learning recommendations – helping sales teams to contribute their time on the most suitable deals.SAP Sales CRM is an SAP sales module. The software offers the following features like accounts and relationship management, lead, opportunity management and insights, predictive analytics and machine learning, quote, contract, and sales order management. The CRM version of SAP is the Customer Experience edition that costs around $58/user/mo(a free trial is available).
Conclusion
Lead management is a popular feature of CRM software. Business gets a boost in their conversion rate and also enhances the overall operational performance of an organization. Some notable real-life examples are Tyco international and a leading medical device manufacturing company. They used lead generation and management methods. The methods help to deal with challenges like lead leakages and optimize brand recognition, enhancing conversion rates. CRM provides a range of services, including lead generation and management, to boost the performance of companies.
