Your sales team is struggling to keep track of leads. What are the best tools to help them stay organized?

In the fast-paced world of marketing, a CRM is not just a tool for organization—it's the backbone of a strategic approach to customer engagement. By leveraging CRM software, sales teams can align closely with marketing efforts, ensuring that leads are nurtured and scored based on their interactions, which ultimately streamlines the path from prospect to customer. As a CEO and entrepreneur who has mastered the art of digital marketing ROI, I can attest to the transformative power of a CRM in converting data into actionable insights and fostering meaningful relationships with clients.

While tools are important, and others have already listed some of the best in class tools out there, I think building the right deal governance process around proactively managing/tracking leads is super critical in a world where sales folks are usually busy chasing qualified opportunities/RFPs that are here and now and don’t always have the cycles to prioritize leads. If not pursued/acted upon in a timely manner, an exclusive lead could quickly turn into a competitive RFP or even worse disappear from your funnel altogether.

In my experience Salesforce would be my #1 pick. Once you get past the complexity of the platform there are many excellent options such as 6sense. A solution such as this CRM requires input. It’s only as good as the data being collected and sorted. But with this solution you are well armed.

As a sales professional, I understand the challenges of keeping track of leads. To stay organized, utilizing tools like CRM software (e.g., Salesforce, Hubspot), lead management platforms (e.g., Dealfront, LeadSquared), and email marketing software can streamline processes. Additionally, sales enablement platforms and project management tools facilitate collaboration and goal tracking. Combining these tools optimizes lead management, empowering sales teams to convert leads more efficiently.

A CRM system helps sales teams organize leads by providing a centralized platform for storing, managing, and tracking customer interactions and data. Besides that, a sales rep can always access the client's activity history.

BANT methodology. Budget: Determine whether the lead has the financial resources to make a purchase. This involves understanding the prospect's budget constraints. Authority: Identify the decisionmakers or key influencers within the organization. It's crucial to engage with individuals who have the authority to make purchasing decisions or influence the decision-making process. Need: Assess the lead's specific needs and challenges. Understand if your product or service addresses their pain points and provides a solution to meet their requirements. Timeline: Determine the timeframe within which the lead intends to make a purchase. Knowing the prospect's buying timeline helps in prioritizing leads based on their readiness to make a decision.

If you have a book of business or geographic territory, you need to break your prospect list into your A (most important and crucial, B (important but not crucial), C (not important nor crucial) deals. Invest your time more into your A and B prospects than your B and C, but don't neglect any of them.

Lead scoring greatly aids in prioritization, making lead conversions easy to track. Scoring is also pivotal in prioritizing. Additionally, a CRM enables the collection of valuable data to understand audience behavior.

Deal cycles should be optimized for shortness in length, but the journey to the first meeting with a lead is typically the longest step. Diversify your channels of communication and engagement with prospective leaders to garner trust and rapport over time. When they are ready, so will you.

Once you've scored your leads, you need to nurture them until they're ready to make a purchase. Lead nurturing is a process of building trust and a relationship with your leads by providing them with valuable and relevant content. It helps educate your leads, address their pain points, and guide them through the buyer's journey. You can use various channels and formats to nurture your leads, such as email, social media, webinars, and ebooks. Lead nurturing can help increase your credibility, loyalty, and revenue.

To measure the effectiveness of your lead management, you need to track your lead performance. Lead tracking is a tool that allows you to monitor and analyze how your leads interact with your sales and marketing efforts. It helps identify which sources, campaigns, and content generate the most leads, conversions, and sales. Additionally, it assists in identifying gaps, bottlenecks, or issues in your lead management process. Lead tracking can help enhance your strategy, decision-making, and ROI.

Automating lead generation should and will take constant iterations as your product/service evolve along with the needs of your ICP. The revenue you close is directly translated by your pipeline so focus on growing it through effective lead gen.

In addressing the challenge of lead management for a sales team, there's a crucial aspect that often goes overlooked – the integration and compatibility of tools with existing systems. In my experience, ensuring that new tools seamlessly mesh with your team's current workflow is key to their effective adoption and utilization. It might seem early to think about other stuff, however, changing your stack comes with a cost of re-educating your people. So try to cover as much as you can from the top!

"You get more of what you measure" springs to mind as I consider why a sales team is struggling to keep up. Take a deep look at the daily activities of your team, what are they spending time doing and how valuable are those activities. All of this can be tracked and measured through most CRMs; so, no need to reinvent the wheel. By understanding the behaviors that drive these key activities, we can drive the outcomes that will allow your sales team to "catch up" with lead flow.