What are the stages of lead?

Leads are at the heart of any sales or marketing strategy. Without them you have no business whatsoever. While there's much debate over how many leads should be considered "qualified" for conversion, it seems like most agree that more than half of all leads should ideally be qualified before even considering making an offer (or having a conversation with someone). And yet so often these opportunities fall through the cracks as prospects become overwhelmed by too many messages from different sources. That means less time spent on qualifying leads and more wasted effort chasing unproductive ones. 

It doesn't need to be this way. With some careful planning and attention paid to each step along the way, you can ensure you're not wasting precious resources chasing after the wrong people. Here's what you'll learn about the five major steps of lead management below - plus tips on how to make sure they work for you!

What are the 5 major steps of lead management?

1) Lead Qualification - This is where leads come in. You want to know who has shown interest enough in your product/service/company to qualify for further consideration. But what makes one prospect better than another? The answer lies in their profile data. So let's take a look at the three key elements of a great lead profile:

- Demographics - Age, gender, location, income level, etc...

- Interests - What do they care about? Do they watch sports? Are they interested in politics? What kind of activities does they participate in? How active is their social media presence? These are just a few examples but you get the idea.

- Behaviors - If you've ever been on Facebook, you probably noticed those little buttons in the upper right hand corner of every post asking if you'd like to add friends. They show up when somebody likes your page, shares something interesting, comments on your posts, sends you friend requests, etc... By clicking on these buttons, users give permission for their information to be shared with other websites and apps. Your job is to use this information wisely, matching interests and behaviors across multiple platforms. It's also important to note that while interests are subjective things, such as hobbies and passions, they aren't always indicative of future actions, which is why behavioral signals are equally valuable. For example, if somebody signs up for a free trial of your service without following up, they likely won't return later either.

2) Lead Nurturing - Now that you've found good candidates, you need to nurture them towards becoming customers. In order to achieve maximum ROI, you must first identify whether your target audience is going to respond to email marketing campaigns. There are only two ways to find out: ask or measure. Ask yourself: would I open an email from your company with a subject line like "New Product Launch"? Then test it. Send emails with relevant offers or announcements to a sample group of subscribers and see how many click through. Measurement allows you to determine if there's actually value in sending emails based off actual results instead of assumptions.

3) Lead Generation - After nurturing leads, you need to generate new traffic that may eventually turn into paying customers. There are several ways to go about doing this. One popular method is using content marketing strategies. Content marketing isn't just limited to blog articles and white papers though. It encompasses everything you publish online including videos, infographics, images, podcasts, webinars, ebooks, whitepapers, etc… Even though it might seem obvious, you need to create compelling content that provides value to readers, especially since search engines tend to favor sites with lots of unique high quality content. If done correctly, you will naturally increase awareness of your brand among prospective buyers.

4) Closing & Upselling - Once you've built trust between buyer and seller, it's finally time to close the deal. A lot goes into closing a sale. First, you need to understand what motivates potential customers. Some say money is king, others claim customer satisfaction is far more appealing. Regardless, the bottom line is that once you've identified the factors that drive buying decisions, you need to align your offerings accordingly. As mentioned above, you could send promotional material via email, but you should also consider direct mailers, phone calls, and live events. Finally, don't forget about referrals. Getting word out about your products to trusted contacts within your target market is a powerful tool that can help grow your pipeline faster.

5) Managing Leads after Sale - To keep your relationship strong, you need to stay connected with customers long after they buy. Whether its through follow ups, periodic updates, or simply dropping by in person, keeping in touch is essential to maintaining the bond between both parties. However, it's easy to lose track of clients who haven't bought anything from you recently. Fortunately, tools exist to help you manage your relationships with prospects and customers alike. An effective CRM solution keeps tabs on all interactions with individual clients, allowing you to easily view all details of past deals and upcoming projects. This ensures you never miss an opportunity to build rapport and strengthen ties with existing customers. Plus, it's easier to reach out to people who already know your name.

What are the core principles of lead management?

The basic tenets of lead management include consistency, speed, accuracy, and relevance. Let's break down each principle separately.

Consistency - Consistent communication is critical for building lasting relationships. Not everyone responds well to constant interruptions, so try to limit messaging frequency to twice per week unless absolutely necessary.

Speed - When working with large numbers of leads, you need to move quickly to avoid losing momentum. Ideally, you'll spend 10% of your day dealing with leads. Keep in mind that the higher number you aim for, the longer it takes to develop relationships and convert leads.

Accuracy - Accuracy is very closely related to speed. Because you only have 10 minutes to connect with prospects, you need to deliver accurate information. Don't waste your time trying to convince someone to sign up for your newsletter when they clearly didn't intend to purchase anyway. Instead, focus on providing useful insights that encourage decision makers to contact you back. 

Relevance - Relevance is defined as "the extent to which an explanation, argument, or description applies specifically to the topic." Although this sounds simple, it's important to remember that you shouldn't only provide relevant information to your leads. While it's fine to share newsworthy stories about your organization, you should also keep in mind that people read and consume information differently. Each reader has his own preferences and expectations regarding what he wants to hear. Therefore, you must tailor your content to appeal to specific audiences. For instance, if you sell software to small businesses, you wouldn't want to promote movies and TV shows featuring superheroes. On the other hand, if you sell health insurance to older adults, you might want to highlight documentaries about aging. Just as importantly, keep your language clean and professional. Never talk down about competitors or disparage your own company.

What is a lead management system?

A lead management system is the combination of various technologies used to collect, analyze, and distribute leads. Most commonly, a CRM application stores contact information and associated profiles, generates leads, tracks responses, and manages communications. Other components of a lead management system include analytics tools, workflow automation systems, and automated outreach solutions. These applications enable companies to efficiently run complex processes, improve productivity, and reduce costs simultaneously.

What are the stages of leads in Salesforce?

Salesforce is a leading cloud platform designed to empower organizations to maximize visibility, automate tasks, and streamline operations. Today, over 3 million businesses rely on the Sales Cloud component alone. According to HubSpot, 80% of B2B marketers use Salesforce to power their digital marketing efforts. Because it's widely known to be highly customizable and user friendly, Salesforce has risen to prominence in recent years. Below is a brief overview of the stages of the lead life cycle in Salesforce:

Stage 1 - Discovery: Prospecting begins here. During discovery, you begin collecting information about your ideal client. At this point, you still don’t know exactly what type of product or services you will ultimately offer, so you gather general demographic and psychographic data about your prospect.

Stage 2 - Attraction: Marketing begins here. Based on your findings during discovery, you identify what types of offers attract your target audience. If you notice certain words or phrases frequently appearing in their profiles, then you can start tailoring your messaging to match their interests.

Stage 3 - Decision: Mapping starts here. Using your collected information, you map out the buyer journey and establish clear goals. From now until purchase, you continue mapping and refining your message throughout the entire funnel.

Stage 4 - Close: Negotiation starts here. During this phase, you negotiate terms and conditions with your target. Also, during this phase, you decide upon pricing models and choose payment methods.

Stage 5 - Post-sale: Ongoing engagement starts here. Throughout this period, you monitor feedback and adjust your offering according to changing needs. You also maintain ongoing conversations with satisfied clients to foster loyalty and repeat business.

Leads can be tricky things. They’re not always what they seem. In fact, sometimes it feels like you’ve got one step ahead on them all - until they suddenly disappear altogether. 

In this article, I'm going to take you through some key stages of leads that will help you better understand how to manage your pipeline. We'll cover what each stage means, why they're important, and how best to use them to improve your performance as an SDR or marketer.

By understanding these stages, you'll have more clarity around which ones you need to focus on at any given time. This will mean being able to identify when something isn't working properly so you know where to start troubleshooting. It's also vital for measuring your success against others' if you want to compare yourself with other marketers.

So before diving in, let me ask you... What exactly does 'lead' mean anyway?!

What is lead lifecycle stage?

A lead is someone who has expressed interest in knowing more about your business or service by signing up for information via email (or similar), filling out a form, downloading a PDF, etc. Once they've done so, they become qualified prospects. These are people who may come back to you again down the line, but only after doing their own research first.

You might think of them as potential customers, but remember that most businesses don't sell products directly to consumers. Instead, they send emails and promotions to potential clients, offering discounts and deals. If you do run direct-to-consumer campaigns, you should still consider leads to be qualified, even though they haven't yet purchased anything from you.

This brings us onto our next question... How long must a lead stay active before becoming inactive? Or put another way, how many days must go by without receiving communication from a prospect before he becomes unqualified? There doesn't appear to be a set number agreed upon across industries, but there are general guidelines. Here's a few examples:

For B2B companies, it could range anywhere from 7 to 30 days. For example, if you were selling software to small businesses, then 7 would be reasonable, while 30 wouldn't work well unless you had very specific rules regarding closing accounts within X amount of days.

If you're selling services, then things can vary depending on whether you operate as a freelancer or employ staff. But generally speaking, you want to avoid letting leads lapse too much. You'd probably prefer to keep those in your database rather than lose them completely.

The same goes for eCommerce sites. Even if they're just hosting affiliate links, you don't want visitors leaving your site and never coming back. So try to ensure they stick around for at least 24 hours.

What is lead lifecycle?

As mentioned above, a lead typically comes in two forms. The first is a prospective customer who hasn't made a purchase decision yet. He's either interested enough to sign up for your newsletter/email campaign, fill out a form, download a coupon code, etc., or he's clicked a link in your ad or social media post.

He's a lead now, but he's not necessarily buying right away. However, he's still a valuable asset. His name and contact details remain on file, meaning you can follow him up later once his mind is made up.

The second type of lead is someone who's already bought something from you. Nowadays, you won't find many brick-and-mortar stores that require you to buy something before you enter. Most online retailers offer free shipping, no matter the size of order. That said, many smaller shops still expect payment upfront.

Either way, you've got a new customer base to nurture over time. Depending on the industry, you might see repeat purchases every month or year, or perhaps they'll choose to shop with you occasionally but aren't loyal to you. Either way, you want to make sure you keep track of them.

How can you tell if someone's been shopping with you recently? Well, if they've ordered from you since the last time you spoke to them, then they're definitely considered a returning customer. A good rule of thumb is to wait 3 months prior to contacting them again.

But here's the thing – you shouldn't treat them differently simply because they've bought from you previously. As far as your CRM system is concerned, they're exactly the same person. Just because they've shown interest before doesn't mean they'll show interest again.

To learn more about managing existing leads effectively, check out the following articles:

What is the difference between lead status and lifecycle stage?

When talking about leads, we tend to talk about lead statuses instead of lifecycle stages. Why is that? Because it sounds cooler! Let's break it down:

Lead Status: When you add a new lead into your CRM platform using the ‘Add Leads’ function, they automatically receive a status based on whether they fit your criteria or not.

Lifecycle Stage: Lifecycles refer to the phases of the life of a lead. Some will enter the initial stage, and others will move on to the next phase.

Now, it's possible to create multiple stages for a single lead, giving them different names and changing the color scheme accordingly. Each stage represents a unique point during the lead lifecycle.

Here's what your stages look like, according to HubSpot:

Let's say you wanted to categorize your leads into four main groups. Your first group consists of prospects who have signed up for your newsletter but haven't actually visited your website yet. Then you'd place your second category alongside prospects who are actively looking to buy something from you.

Finally, you'd include anyone who was making a purchase within the past 90 days. This gives you a pretty accurate idea of how engaged your audience is, especially if you segment them further based on demographics such as age, gender, location, income level, education, and occupation.

It's worth noting that although you can easily build a dashboard showing a breakdown of leads per stage, you really oughtn't to rely solely on this data. After all, the best indicator of future behavior is previous patterns, not current trends. And you never truly know what motivates someone to visit certain websites, engage with ads, or read content.

Instead, you should aim to measure progress towards achieving your goals. To help you achieve that, you can use tools like Google Analytics to view overall conversion rates. By tracking conversions, you'll have a clearer picture of how effective your strategies are.

What is a lifecycle stage?

We talked earlier about the various stages of leads in the course of their lifetime. In addition to these stages, you can divide leads into individual categories. These categories often represent the different types of audiences you serve, including demographic segments, geographic areas, and product preferences.

These are great ways to organize leads into relevant buckets, helping you quickly spot opportunities wherever they are. You might discover that some of your top performing leads belong to the 20-25 year old female demographic. Perhaps there's a high proportion of male users aged 35-45 living in New York City.

Or maybe you find that women between 40 and 50 years old are purchasing significantly higher quantities of items compared to men in the same age bracket. Using your analytics tool, you can drill down beyond broad categories to uncover insights like these.

Of course, you can apply this approach to both incoming leads and existing leads. For example, you might notice that half of your leads fall into the 25+ age bracket, whereas the other half falls under the 18-24 age bracket.

Using this insight alone, you can determine that younger buyers are likely to spend less money than older generations. Therefore, you might decide to prioritize spending resources on advertising campaigns targeting the former demographic.

Once you've identified the correct target audience, you can tailor your messages appropriately. You might want to change the tone of your promotional material to reflect the interests of your young followers. Likewise, if you know that your customers are predominantly male, you might want to consider sending personalized offers to them.

Ultimately, the goal is to increase engagement, not just revenue. Having a clear idea of your ideal clientele can give you the confidence to reach out to them sooner, resulting in happier customers and happier employees.

Hopefully this guide helps you identify the stages of leads, along with their associated definitions. Remember that even if you feel confident about the metrics you're currently monitoring, it's advisable to review them regularly. It's easy to forget about outdated numbers if you ignore them for long periods of time.

Do you ever struggle with leads? Are you finding it difficult to monitor your activity? Maybe you're unsure about how to classify them correctly? We'd love to hear from you below!

Please note that this article contains language which may offend some readers.

Leads can be a confusing topic for many people. They come from all kinds of sources – online advertising, cold calls, referrals, or even word-of-mouth recommendations. This makes it hard to track them down and keep an eye on their progress throughout the entire sales cycle.

But don’t worry! We’re here to help with some useful information that will teach you how to effectively manage your leads through the various phases they go through before becoming customers. Let’s start by looking at what exactly constitutes a “lead”.

What are the three 3 stages of the customer's lifecycle?

The first thing you should know is that there are actually three distinct stages to each prospecting session. These include:

1) The initial contact (IAC): A person who has expressed interest in learning more about your product or service.

2) An inquiry (AIC): Someone who asks questions regarding your company and/or its products but hasn't made a commitment yet.

3) A qualified lead (QLC): Someone who shows interest in buying something from you after receiving answers to his/her inquiries.

These terms may seem simple enough, but knowing which one you're dealing with while making sure that your follow up efforts aren't wasted could save you so much time later on. For example, if you send out emails to everyone on your email list without taking any action afterward, not only would you waste your time, but you'd also end up losing potential clients too. You have to take actions as soon as possible to ensure that those prospects convert into paying customers.

What are three different types of leads in retail?

You might think that every single type of lead comes from either online ads, direct mailers, or referrals, but this isn't always true. There are other ways in which leads can enter your pipeline. Here are three common ones:

1) Referral Leads: These are generated when someone recommends your business to another individual. It doesn't matter whether the referral came via phone call, face-to-face conversation, or social media post.

2) Organic Leads: When visitors arrive directly to your website. If you've done a good job optimizing your site for search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc., then chances are good that these visitors were interested in finding what you offer already.

3) Online Direct Traffic: Visitors coming from websites outside your own domain name. This usually happens when you use paid advertisements to drive traffic to your site.

So now that you know what kind of leads exist, let's look closely at how to identify them.

How do you classify leads?

It is important to understand the difference between a "qualified" versus "unqualified" lead. In order to qualify a prospect, he must show interest in purchasing your product or service by asking specific questions. He must also provide additional details such as demographics, location, budget, etc. A qualified lead becomes a potential client once he completes the following steps:

1) Contact Information Is Collected: Your team needs to collect the necessary data that will allow you to reach the prospective client. This includes things like names, addresses, mobile numbers, email address, credit card number, etc.

2) Lead Qualification Process Begins: Now that you have collected all the required data, it's time to put together a short questionnaire. Make sure that the questions asked are relevant to the prospect's situation. Also make sure that the questions are related to the subject being discussed within the survey itself.

For instance, if you sell health insurance, you wouldn't ask the question "Where did you hear about us?" since most people probably won't answer that unless they had been referred to your firm from a friend or family member. Instead, you'll want to focus on collecting demographic and financial information such as income level, age group, gender, marital status, occupation, household size, amount of debt, etc.

3) Follow Up After Survey Completion: Once the survey is finished, you need to send it back to the prospect in order to give him ample opportunity to respond. Keep in mind that the longer he takes to reply, the less likely he is going to buy anything from you. Don't wait until the last minute to send out surveys - instead, send them out over a period of days or weeks.

4) Respond: Once the recipient responds to the survey, he should receive a personalized response from your sales reps. Be careful though, since you don't want to overwhelm them with hundreds of responses. Try sending just two or three messages per day (once every 24 hours). And remember to check to see if the recipient answered your requests properly.

5) Close Deal: Finally, you'll need to inform the prospect that he qualifies for a special discount. Offer him a free trial version of whatever it is that you're selling, and encourage him to purchase it immediately.

If the prospect declines, move on to the next step in the process. Otherwise, you'll need to continue working with him until you close the deal.

6) Customer Conversion: Once the sale is finalized, the new client will become part of your target audience. Use your CRM system to create an account record for him so that you can monitor his behavior and future purchases afterwards.

Now that you know everything about the three stages of the sales funnel, let's quickly review how to handle leads during each.

What are 4 main stages in lead management process?

As mentioned earlier, there are six key points you need to pay attention to when managing leads. While I'm not going to cover all of them right away, I am going to point out the most important ones based on our discussion above.

1) Sales Pipeline Management: Every organization should set aside time to plan and organize their sales activities so that they can optimize the flow of leads across their sales channels.

2) Lead Tracking & Monitoring: Since you cannot expect a lead to turn into a customer overnight, you need to find reliable methods to track the performance of each prospect that enters your sales funnel. This way you can better allocate resources and improve upon your conversion rate.

3) Lead Lifecycle Management: As the previous section states, you need to establish a standard process to nurture your leads. This means that you need to develop a well-defined procedure that allows you to measure the effectiveness of each campaign.

4) Lead Generation Strategy Development: To maximize the efficiency of your sales effort, you need to devise strategies that generate quality leads. By doing so, you'll eventually increase the number of conversions and boost overall revenue.

To sum it all up, you really shouldn't consider yourself an expert on lead generation unless you fully grasp the concept behind the whole process. It is crucial to treat each lead as unique, and never assume that you know what the best strategy is simply because you've seen others succeed. So keep reading, and learn how to build success around your sales process using the knowledge gained today.

There's plenty more information available online concerning the stages of the lead life cycle, but hopefully this article helped clear up the confusion surrounding the term "leads". Have fun exploring the rest of HubSpot's blog posts on this particular subject!