SME Knowledge Series on Marketing 1.2

In the world of marketing and sales, when you start a company or a brand, you start at a very basic level but to reach the highest, you need to climb up the ladder of success by taking small but valuable steps that add up to your company’s value and production. One of the small but very essential steps is Lead generation.

Lead generation is a process of gathering all the names, contact numbers, email addresses, or any other contact information available about qualified prospects. The very much valuable contact information is needed by the company to contact the qualified prospects for generating orders. Lead generation is a method or process, which starts to funnel in eventual purchasers of your product or service down the path of buying.

Now the question that comes up to people’s mind is what kind of leads are we looking for exactly:

• New Lead: New Lead consists of the customers that are considered as a potential lead. It can be anyone, from someone who viewed your website and entered their mail address to someone who came across your brand via a friend and is keen to know more about it. They have the potential to start working with you soon.

• Working Lead: Working Lead consists of the customers that are already active with the working progress of your brand. They may have signed up their mail address on your website or dropped an email to inquire about the service or may have visited you for a face-to-face conversation.

• Nurturing Lead: Nurturing Lead consists of customers who are not interested in your services as of now but there are chances that they might need you in the future. They can very soon turn into working leads so to maintain that, you have to keep in touch with them by sending them mailers, letter or services details. This is done so that the lead doesn’t forget you or your brand and reaches out to you the moment they realize they need some foreign services.

• Qualified Leads: Qualified Leads consists of the leads that have already shown interest in your services and are ready for taking the next step. They are also known as sales leads.

• Unqualified Leads: Unqualified Leads consists of the leads or customers which have made up their mind for not accepting your services and have no interest in them.

Now, if we talk about the process of how lead generation works in a company, then the credit goes to Customer Relationship Management of the brand.

Customer Relationship Management is one of the essential tools that is needed to organize and manage all your leads and convert them into a customer. CRM is considered a major part of running the company because they help in refining the customers, finding any opportunity to up-sell their services to the customers. The medium through which the CRM is maintained is a set of tools that capture customer information from all customer touch points. This is done so that the information collected is stored in a common customer database and is made available to everyone in the organization.

There are mainly three types of customer relationship management systems

• Operational CRM: The Operational Customer Relationship Management System is responsible to provide the entire support to the front office business which involves direct interaction with the leads or customer through any medium. Every detail of the lead or customer is stored under the specific customer’s name.

• Analytical CRM: Analytical CRM enables the company to analyze the customer’s data generated by the operational CRM applications. The analytical CRM also allows the company to understand the customer’s behavior and derive their true value to the organization.

• Collaborative CRM: Collaborative CRM allows easy collaboration of the customers, suppliers, and business partners which eventually enhances the sales and customer services. This CRM looks after the improvement of the quality of services provided to the customers.

An effective and efficient customer relationship management system brings value to the company by nurturing more leads for the benefit of the company. They nurture the leads for better and long term relationship with the company. Every company’s CRM has its own way of tracking down the leads for managing. Companies usually use CRM to reach their objective and improve their lead generation quality. Since in today’s technology, SMS nurture leads are progressing, companies are using the CRM to reach their leads as CRM is aware of which messaging technology is working for which customer. The more targeted your content is, the more value that content will be and the possibility of a lead engaging is high.

Thus, Customer Relationship Management and Lead Generation work hand in hand as the company needs an efficient CRM system to nurture lead generations where as lead generation is essential to benefit the success rate of the company.

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Coming up next :

“Everything you need to know about a CRM System”