Your company’s lead management process is the main artery of your Go-to-Market (GTM) and Marketing processes. With a healthy lead management process, your company can function effectively and grow quickly. Conversely, a poor lead process negatively impacts other GTM processes and will stagnate, causing erroneous insights from bad data.
As you begin to unify lead management processes, there will be natural comparisons to past performance. This is important because stakeholders (like the board) will draw incorrect conclusions about weaknesses that you don’t actually have. This article will help you unify your lead management process, giving you an apples-to-apples comparison across your entire business. This allows your marketing process to become more refined and accurate than what would be possible with distinct and discrete lead management processes.
What is the Lead Management Process?
What do we mean by “lead management process”? It’s the stages you define from your company’s perspective on how a lead should move through the funnel. With a healthy lead management process, you’ll know where every lead in your customer relationship management (CRM) software is in the funnel. At any given moment, you’ll know how close your leads are from not-in-market through purchase. These “lead stages” or “lifecycle stages” can be named whatever makes the most sense for your company, as long as they convey the same points. At Cortado we (generally) default to these common terms or similar:
Stages of the Lead Management Process
- Suspect (or Prospect)
- Marketing Captured Lead
- Marketing Qualified Lead
- Sales Accepted Lead
- Sales Qualified Lead (or Opportunity)
- Customer
Knowing where individuals are in the funnel helps you to know what communication you should execute and when. Your team will be following a unified lead management process with clearly defined criteria and objectives for each lead. They will know how to engage with an individual at that particular time and what desired outcomes are required. This will create an efficient flow to move leads through the funnel. You will know how effective your current efforts are, particularly where leads convert effectively and where they don’t.
