How Marketing Benefits from Lead Management Software

The Advantages of Empowering Your Marketing Team with Lead Management Software

Lead management software isn’t just for sales people anymore. In fact, it has been proven to offer tremendous value to marketing staff as well.

Every year, marketing teams across the United States spend billions and billions of dollars on programs designed to generate new sales leads. Budget funds are strategically invested in trade shows, advertising, online sponsorships, direct marketing, and other types of campaigns in an effort to identify potential business opportunities and collect related contact information.

Yet, without a lead management software solution in place, many of those leads are likely to go cold rather quickly. A recent post in a popular blog that highlights current issues and trends in B2B lead generation supports that position – claiming that numerous studies show that as many as 70 percent of marketing-produced leads are never pursued.

What goes wrong? In some cases, sales reps will be too busy working existing deals in progress to conduct timely follow-up on new prospects. In other scenarios, vital contact information will be lost or misfiled. And occasionally, leads will be routed to the wrong sales teams, or will never be assigned at all.

Regardless of the reasons, it is clear that without lead management software, the opportunities uncovered through marketing initiatives have a high risk of being mishandled. And campaign managers will have no way of finding out what happened to them.

A lead management software system can change all that. These powerful solutions allow marketing professionals to boost the results, conversions, and return on investment from their most important programs.

Through the utilization of a lead management software package, marketing teams can:

• Define and enforce criteria for lead routing and distribution, so the right reps receive the right contacts every time.
• Create a centralized database for all data about leads and related activities. So the information needed to ensure timely follow up, qualification, and ongoing nurturing is complete, accurate, up-to-date, and readily accessible to all key stakeholders.
• Monitor the status of leads, to track their progress throughout the sales cycle. This will help them to instantly identify those leads that were not followed up on, so they can be reassigned before they go cold.
• Identify patterns and trends in lead conversions, so they can understand which campaigns are most successful, and why. This enables them to develop more effective campaign strategies and plans in the future.
• Gain insight into the actual costs associated with lead generation, so they can more accurately forecast for budgeting purposes.

But, perhaps the greatest advantage that a lead management software package can provide to a marketing department is its ability to demonstrate the team’s true value, and its contributions to corporate profitability and growth. For example, marketing leaders can directly link closed deals and associated revenues to specific promotions and initiatives. This will let senior management know that marketing efforts are paying off, and that campaigns are impacting the bottom line.