What is Lead?
One of the most frequently asked questions from companies that buy their first CRM is about leads. What they are, why they are needed, how to work with them, and so on.
One of the most frequently asked questions from companies that buy their first CRM is about leads. What they are, why they are needed, how to work with them, and so on.
In general, a lead is a certain need of a client that he or she has expressed in one way or another. I want to emphasize that this is not necessarily a request for a specific product that you sell. It's a need to solve a problem. Let's look at an example. Let's say you sell industrial machines and a customer visits your website and leaves a request for a certain lathe. This request will be a lead. But the customer's need is not necessarily this particular machine. His need is to process large metal blanks. And you will decide which machine to use to satisfy this need during the sales process.
In general, a lead is a need that can be identified in any way: a business card at an exhibition, an incoming email, a request through a website, a phone call, etc. Any of these actions can generate a lead.
You should also keep in mind that in order to work with a lead, it must have a certain set of characteristics. First of all, contact information. Any kind of contact information. Mail, phone, address (if your work is built through field sales by sales representatives). But they must be there.
Without contact information, it's not a lead anymore, it's just garbage in the CRM. What do we need a lead for if we can't contact them?
And this brings us to the first stage of working with a lead - Qualification. At this stage, we make a decision - whether to hire the lead or not, whether they really have a need, whether their contact information is correct, whether they have contacted us before, or whether they are a completely new client. And most importantly, is this client warm enough to start selling?
If we have qualified a lead and are preparing to convert it to a sale, we need to determine whether it meets our internal criteria for readiness to start a sale or not. These criteria are different for everyone. For example, the budget - if the client tells you that the budget is deliberately lower than the prices you can offer, then it makes no sense to start selling (wasting the time resources of the sales manager). Or, for example, you have a budget, but it will be available at the end of the year. And here we come to the most important answer to the question "Why do you need a lead?".
The main need for a lead appears when you realize that it's too early to start or continue selling for some reason. That is, you see that there is a need, but it is at a very early stage of maturity. And then you can send this lead to the marketing department for nurturing. And marketing, accordingly, begins to move the lead through its funnel to grow the maturity of the need, which will allow you to send this lead back to the sales funnel and sell to the client with greater probability and less effort.
It works the same way if you lost the sale, but the lead's need was not met. And you need to conduct additional marketing efforts to increase trust in you or your brand.
Keep in mind that the sooner a customer enters your funnel or stays in it, the higher the level of trust you can build with them.
That's why adult CRM systems separate Lead from Sales (or Transactions, as they call it).
This separation also allows you to get statistics on how many leads were converted into sales. This tells us about the quality of the marketing department's work. And if this indicator starts to sag, we can conclude that marketers are driving too cold traffic to the sales department.
But you need to understand that it all works this way only when you have a well-built marketing system.
And you can see how it works on the example of CRM Creatio Sales from Terrasoft in the free demo version .