Lead management - what is it and who needs it

[subornaakter40]

Marketing is aimed at making sales easier and making the client mature to the point of purchase faster. In English, this task is defined by such a term as Lead Nurturing. There is no exact equivalent in Russian, but the closest to conveying the essence is the concept of lead management or "cultivating a lead". We will use this one.


To understand what lead management is, you need to understand what a lead is. This definition refers to a potential client who has responded to a marketing message.

Lead management - what is it and who realtor email list needs it

That is, if a person has somehow expressed interest in your commercial offer (registered on the website, downloaded materials, subscribed to the newsletter, or called the specified phone number), he can be considered a lead.

Depending on the stage of readiness to purchase, leads are:

cold (prospects) - those who are just looking at the market and thinking whether your offer suits them or not. They are not yet interested in the product you offer, so they can easily leave without buying;

warm (suspects, marketing qualified leads) - they have already entered the funnel and are interested, but it is not a fact that they will make a purchase; usually these are those who have taken certain steps: entered their data in the form, marked the products they liked, downloaded the lead magnet, etc. Marketing usually deals with them;

hot (sales qualified leads)—ready to make a purchase; have read your training materials, understood the value of the product and looked at the rates, they have the means to make a purchase and can make a decision about the purchase, their contacts can be sent to sales people or independently brought to payment.

Lead management is a model of consumer management. What does it look like? Imagine that you literally take your potential client by the hand, walk them through the company, introduce them to the achievements and plans, show them your product, sell it, and the client becomes a regular.

Lead management necessarily includes four processes on which the entire system is built:

Attracting potential clients (Lead Generation).

Lead Development.

Initial Sale (Lead Conversion).

Further interaction with clients and their support (Account Management).

It is worth paying attention to the fact that some companies need lead management, while others can exist without it. For example, if your business has a complex product or a long purchase cycle (consulting services, IT services, industrial engines, etc.), then you cannot do without lead management.