How Does CRM Software Help in Lead Management?

A sales lead is a prospect, or a potential sales contact, individual, or organization that shows interest in buying your products or using your services. Leads usually come through a direct response to an ad or publicity for some reason, or through the referral of an existing customer. Lead generation is usually the marketing department's job.

The marketing department in a company is usually responsible for pursuing and closing leads. For example, an IT solutions provider may promote their product or services at an industry trade show or through online ads to attract the attention of those who are looking for such solutions or might be interested in buying them. In this case, each inquiry about the product or service counts as a lead, which is a potential sale as this person may become a customer.

There is some information that will be collected and captured in a sales lead, and this information varies depending on the vendor, the type of product or service they provide, and more. This information could include a person's name, email address, phone number, or it could be broader and ask for information about the potential buyer, including questions about the potential buyer's position and role in their company, the anticipated time frame, the number of employees in their company, and so on.

The way a company deals with lead generation affects its sales significantly and in turn affects its growth, success, and visibility in the marketplace. To ensure that their lead generation efforts are met with great results, companies go to great lengths to try and establish effective lead generation practices and the qualification and distribution processes.
 

Lead Management

One of the ways in which a company can boost its sales is lead management. Lead management is a process in which the marketing or sales team manages prospects from the moments they come as leads and through every step of the sales funnel until they close a deal. Managing leads is done through keeping constant tabs on new inquiries about the product or service you provide, pairing leads with the sales reps of suitable companies, recording and saving every interaction with any lead for future reference, and more. Your lead's sales rep should also qualify and score the prospect and constantly reevaluate their assessments as part of the lead management process.

Lead management is key to the success of your company, as it ensures you convert as many leads as possible into sales. Overlooking new leads can result in missing opportunities and losing potential sales and revenue. Of course, not all leads are worth pursuing, as so many people may not be interested in actually buying your product, which is why lead qualification is very important.

Trying to make lead management an easier task, companies are now resorting to customer relationship management (CRM) software systems to help them manage the process efficiently. With the help of CRM software, your team will be able to track all meaningful leads that are more likely to be converted. They will then move them along the sales pipeline and eventually make sales.
 

How Does CRM Help in Lead Management?

Lead management goes hand in hand with CRM software systems. If you use a robust CRM software, it will help make it easier to manage leads and get the benefits out of this process. Below are some of the ways in which your CRM software can help when it comes to lead management:

• Lead qualification and scoring: As mentioned before, lead qualification is a vital process to prevent your team from wasting time pursuing leads that are not worth the time. Your CRM software will help you properly qualify and score leads. The software will help centralize lead scores for the entire marketing or sales team to see. Your team will be able to prioritize leads according to the information available for them.
   
• Lead information: Your CRM software allows you to pull information about any lead on your screen from within the software itself through integrations with third-party apps. So instead of having your information here and there in separate documents for each sales lead, you will have everything consolidated in one place, a paperless platform at that.
   
• Lead reporting: Keeping all sales data in separate documents outside your system means that your team will need more time and effort classifying such leads and understanding the demographics of certain leads. Having a CRM software system means that you can store all of this important information and lead management data in one place. It also provides you with tools that generate reports and insights based on this data. You can utilize such reports to plan and customize demographic marketing strategies aimed at the groups that your leads belong to.
   
• Sales rep accountability: Your CRM software can track the response times and other statistics of every sales rep to help improve their performance and boost your company's sales. This way, you can see which sales reps are doing better and in what areas so you can work on improving any area in which they are lacking.
   

How CRM Software Helps in Every Step of the Lead Management Process

In the previous section, we explained how a CRM software system can help in lead management in general. In this section, though, we will go over all the ways in which the CRM software will help every step of the way.
 

1. Lead capture

Lead capture, through lead capture forms, is the very first step of the lead management process. Your CRM software will collect all the data in the lead capture form and centralize it in one platform rather than leave it scattered across multiple digital and physical locations awaiting being manually handled. The CRM software will automatically add new information from any lead capture form to your database as a contact card. Some CRM software systems will even auto-generate tasks for your team to contact each lead.
 

2. Lead enrichment and tracking

Your lead capture forms will usually ask prospects to fill in with some basic information, like name, email, company, pain points, and more. The CRM software will help throughout what is called lead enrichment; in the tracking stage of the lead management process, you will try to find any helpful information that can fill in the gaps between the data points given in the form. To do this, you may need to visit the website of the company, its LinkedIn page, and any other sources that may provide more information. Your CRM software can help by automatically finding this data and storing it for you.

In addition to that, your CRM software system will also track every single interaction with your company. It is true that you can manually track your leads' interactions or by using email marketing software, website back-end data, and social media analytics. However, your CRM software will do all of that and more in one single platform and at once. And since your CRM software tracks your leads' engagement, you will be able to learn more about your prospects' needs.

3. Lead qualification

The process of lead qualification involves engagement tracking in its first steps as well as lead data analysis. Your CRM software system can do both of these tasks efficiently and at once.
 

4. Lead distribution

This part of the lead management process can be a little bit tricky. Due to certain events, like a marketing campaign or a holiday season, your company may face an overwhelming influx of leads. Tending to this increase in leads manually and individually can be very overwhelming and confusing, and this is where a CRM software system will help; you can utilize your software's tools to set certain criteria that can automatically pair new leads to a certain sales rep who is appropriate for the task. This will help you in connecting a prospect to the team member who is best suited for the task so that they can evaluate them and move them through the sales pipeline. This will also save you time that otherwise would be wasted in talking to your team to decide which rep should contact and follow up with which leads.

Lead distribution with a CRM software system also enhances multi-territory sales processes. You can customize the settings of your CRM software to have it designate new leads from a certain region to a certain group of sales reps automatically. Your CRM can choose a group of sales reps and can even choose a certain member within the group based on other criteria that you get to set. This means that you can control who works with what; for example, a sales rep working in one branch of your company will not have to pursue a lead that is located somewhere around another branch of the company.
 

5. Lead nurturing

Lead nurture is usually mistaken with lead management. However, lead nurture is only one part of the whole lead management process. It refers to everything that takes place after you do the steps mentioned above (capturing, enriching, tracking, qualifying, and distributing prospects). The lead nurturing process includes creating targeted content, communicating with prospects regularly across different platforms, and more tasks that your CRM software will take care of.

With that being said, you now know how CRM software systems can help in lead management. You can further make use of your CRM by personalizing and coordinating all communications. In addition, you can track all lead interactions with these communications to understand the points of success. You can also track your prospects along the whole sales pipeline in real-time. It would be quite difficult to get a broad picture of your leads and generate sales without the help of a CRM software system to automate and streamline the lead management process for you. Lead management with a CRM software system gives you everything you need to maximize conversion chances and boost your sales.
 

Choosing the Right CRM Software System

Choosing the right CRM software system determines to what extent your software will help with handling the whole lead management process. So before making any rushed decision or choosing the first CRM software that promises the best services, you need to do some comparison shopping to make sure that you make a well-informed decision, keeping in mind features, tools, add-ons, and prices. To help you with the comparison shopping process, we have researched the best CRM software providers on the market and compiled a list of our top picks for the best CRM software systems in handling lead management and more.
 

Monday.com

Monday.com offers an all-inclusive customer relationship and lead management software system that will help you manage your leads and boost your sales. The software offers a long list of features that can help you grow your business and never miss a valuable lead. With Monday.com CRM, you will surely convert more leads into sales. Below are some of the features Monday.com CRM software provides:

• Lead/Pipeline Management
• Prospect Tracking
• Mobile CRM
• Project Management
• Integrations

Monday.com CRM offers four paid subscription plans and a free version for personal use with basic and limited features. The four plans are:

Individual plan: Free

The Individual plan is free to use forever with no obligations. Its best for tracking personal work; it offers two users and the following features:

• Unlimited boards
• Unlimited docs
• +200 templates you can choose from and can be customized to your needs
• Over 20 column types
• Android and iOS apps
• 500 MB file storage

The Basic plan: $8/user/month

The basic plan offers necessary basic features, which include everything in the Free plan plus:

• Unlimited boards
• Unlimited docs
• +200 templates
• Over 20 column types
• 500 MB file storage
• Lead, contact, and deal management
• Unlimited visual sales pipelines
• Unlimited contacts
• Unlimited custom fields
• Unlimited free viewers
• Full mobile CRM
• Document management
• Full API access
• The Standard Plan: $10/user/month
• The Standard plan includes everything in the Basic plan, plus:
• Timeline view
• Guest access
• 2-way email integration with Gmail or Outlook
• Sales analytics
• Mailchimp integration
• Sales goals and forecasting
• Calendar view
• Automation
• Integrations
• 20 GB file storage

The Standard plan: $10/user/month

This is Monday.com's most popular plan. It allows an unlimited number of users and charges $10 per seat per month. So if you have 5 users, you will be charged $50 per month in total. The Standard plan includes everything in the Basic plan plus the following features:

• Timeline view
• Guest access
• 2-way email integration with Gmail or Outlook
• Sales analytics
• Mailchimp integration
• Sales goals and forecasting
• Calendar view
• Automations up to 250 actions per month
• Integrations up to 250 actions per month
• 20 GB file storage

The Pro plan: $16/user/month

The Pro plan is great for growing businesses; it packs everything in the Basic plan, in addition to:

• Customized notifications
• Marketing activity management
• Advanced permissions
• Time tracking
• Workflow and approval automation
• Advanced reports (dashboards with up to 20 boards)
• Private boards and docs
• Formula column

The Enterprise plan: Quote-based

The Enterprise plan is the fully-featured CRM package from Monday.com. It packs everything in the Pro plan, plus the following:

• Enterprise-scale automation and integrations
• Enterprise-grade security and governance
• Advanced reporting and analytics
• Multi-level permissions
• Tailored onboarding
• Premium 24/7 priority support
• A dashboard that combines up to 50 boards
• 1000 GB file storage

Zendesk

Zendesk is our second top pick for a CRM software solution that can help greatly with lead management. With Zendesk, you can expect your business to grow by converting more leads into actual sales and acquiring and retaining more customers. Some of Zendesk CRM's outstanding features include:

• Native dialer
• Sales email intelligence
• Integrations
• Sales prospecting
• Mobile CRM

As for its subscription plans, Zendesk offers you four plans with different features and prices:

Sell Team plan: $19/user/month

The Sell Team plan offers basic capabilities, which include:

• Email integration
• Up to 3 paid users
• 1 custom sales pipeline
• Built-in click-to-dial & call recording
• Fully featured mobile CRM
• Apps & integrations

Sell Professional: $49/user/month

The Sell Professional plan is great for growing businesses, and it includes everything in the Sell Team plan, plus:

• Email integration
• Unlimited paid users
• 1 custom sales pipeline
• Personalized bulk emailing
• Unlimited email templates
• Sales goals & forecasting
• Unlimited custom fields
• Advanced call analytics

Sell Enterprise: $99/user/month

The Sell Enterprise plan is best suited for enterprises and large businesses; it offers everything in the Sell Professional plan, plus the following features:

• 2 sales pipelines
• Unlimited custom fields
• Advanced call analytics
• Activity reports
• Advanced permissions
• Product catalog
• Lead and deal scoring
• Task automation
• Customized notifications

Sell Elite: $199/user/month

The Sell Elite plan is the fully-featured CRM package from Zendesk. It packs everything previously offered in the other plans, plus a few more features:

• Open API
• Rep performance reports
• Advanced sales insight reports
• Success insight reports

Salesmate

Salesmate is our last recommendation for the best CRM software providers on the market. It supports a wide variety of business types and all sizes, with plans and tools specially made for lead management. Its CRM software is designed with inclusive capabilities and everything you may need to drive more traffic, convert more leads into sales, and help retain customers. Its key features include:

• Contact Management
• Sales Pipeline
• Sales Automation
• Text Messaging
• Built-in Calling
• Marketing Automation
• Google Integrations
• Customizations
• Product management

As for its plans, you are offered four options, and each comes with a set of features that can help you manage your leads and grow your business. Below are their plans in detail:

Starter plan: $12 per user per month or $144 billed annually

Its features include the following:

• Contacts, Companies, Deals
• Email Sync, Tracking & Templates
• Multiple Pipeline Management
• Standard Dashboard & Reports
• Workflow Management
• Built-in Calling & Text
• Web forms
• Lists

The Growth plan: $24 per user per month or $288 billed annually

The Growth Plan includes everything in the Starter plan, plus the following:

• Product Management
• Goal Management
• Email Reminders & Scheduling
• Team Inbox
• Custom Dashboard & Reports
• Date based Workflows
• Custom Roles
• SSO/SAML integration

Boost Plan: $40/user/month or $480 billed annually

The Boost plan packs everything in the Growth plan, in addition to:

• Team Management
• Increased Team Inbox Limits
• Smart Activity Queue
• Power Dialer
• Voicemail Drop
• Smart Activity Queue
• IP Restriction
• Increased Workflow & Sequence Limits

Enterprise: Quote-based

The Enterprise plan is the fully-featured CRM package you get from Salesmate, and it includes everything from the previous plans plus:

• Dedicated Account Manager
• Personalized Onboarding
• Priority Support
• Dedicated Instance
• Dashboards - Unlimited
• Increased Workflow Limits
• Permissions - Unlimited
• Increased Sequence Limits