Every business invests a tremendous amount of time, money, and resources to generate leads. But, most of the time, this hard work of marketers goes in vain. The main reason is the absence of a good sales and marketing process. Inadequate marketing management practice is the biggest cause of businesses losing expensive leads at some point in the sales funnel. So after acquiring leads, it is vital to channel them through the right sales team to increase ROI.
Fortunately, today, automated lead management practices can significantly help businesses Block Lead Leakage and increase ROI. Let us understand in-depth how.
What is Lead Leakage?
While the definition of lead leakage may vary according to the business model (B2B/B2C), it is the loss of potential sale opportunities as prospects progress through the sales funnel.
The loss could be both progressive and cumulative. A successful conversion entails channelizing the lead from the first time they visit your website to making the purchase. Lead leakage can happen at any sales funnel stage for several reasons.
Fortunately, there are ways to plug this lead leakage to increase the conversion rate.
How lead leakage affects the sales funnel?
Lead leakage is a cause of concern, especially for companies aiming to widen their sales funnel. With progress, the task of keeping quality leads within the sales funnel becomes challenging. Here are some potential demerits of lead leakage:
It is closely related to Revenue leakage, which means leaving your money on the table due to your demerits. A company can lose a large portion of revenue in sales due to lead leakage.
Today, a large percentage of any company’s budget goes to marketing. If an expensive lead ditches you midway, it can cost you a lot.
In addition to financial woes, unsatisfied customers could directly impact your brand image and company growth.
What are the causes of lead leakage?
The following are the most common causes of lead leakage:
Unqualified leads- The most challenging thing in marketing and sales is dealing with unqualified leads. These leads remain on the top of the sales process, yet haven’t decided on the purchase part.
Therefore, it is of utmost importance to use lead scoring that effectively ranks leads depending upon leads’ actions, level of interest, and willingness to purchase. In addition, it effectively cuts down on unqualified leads by ensuring that all your leads are ready for sales in advance.
Lack of lead nurturing- Another major cause of lead leakage is the lack of lead nurturing. It is a critical component of building relationships with leads and customers. Therefore, never neglect this component. In simpler words, you get to be in touch with your prospective customers or leads even when they aren’t quite ready to make a purchase.
Non-sales ready leads- Lead nurturing is very crucial. However, you must keep a safe distance while engaging with your leads. More often, too much persistence from the sales team leads to leakage. Moreover, you must acknowledge where your leads stand in your sales process and offer only what they need.
How to control lead leakage?
Lead leakage is serious, but quantitative and qualitative research can help you overcome this situation. Consider the following tips to effectively control lead leakage.
Map out the entire sales funnel
The first entails an in-depth analysis of the overall sale process or entire sales funnel. This step is vital to determine where you are losing leads. Typically, a lead goes through following these steps while interacting with business:
- Awareness stage
- Interest or consideration stage
- Decision stage
To find out the lead leakage in the sale funnel, try:
- Google Analytics to find out gray areas. The centralized dashboard offers various technical analyses, like pages with a slow turnout.
- Surveys and polls to gather information about your shortcomings. Surprisingly you may find your website is too slow or not optimized for mobile apps, and your customer support service is unresponsive.
Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is an umbrella term for all your efforts to retain customers and convert them. First, you must assess a prospect based on their identity, interests, and digital activity. After that, connect the lead to the right sales team at the right stage. When done systematically, lead nurturing increases revenue and brand loyalty.
For a better understanding, here is an overview of a complete lead management process:
- Lead Capturing
- Lead Tracking
- Lead Qualification
- Lead Nurturing
- Top Lead Nurturing Strategies
- Lead Distribution
Last but not least, the final step is to prioritize leads. This step focuses on the leads with the highest potential return.
Invest in technology
Technology is the thing of today. And businesses that fail to keep pace with it fail miserably. So here are some tools that will help you fill the sales funnel gap.
Marketing Automation Tools
Technology can easily overcome your woes, from cold emailing software to automated lead-assigning tools. These tools can automate repeatable tasks, collect data, and save time and resources. Moreover, through automated emails, you can easily keep your customers informed or engaged.
Lead management tool
An intelligent lead management tool can help you with lead information, lead storage, and lead distribution. In addition, ROI automatically increases when a sales team attends to a customer based on their preference or background.
Align Sales and Marketing efforts
Team effort can do wonders in lead management. Irrespective of your industry, sales and marketing team collaboration is the key to success. Also, both teams should share responsibilities and work toward a common goal. Effective sales largely depend on effective marketing, and vice versa, so effective collaboration is crucial for overall growth. Further, to enforce the collaboration, review the dashboard fortnightly to assess their performances.
Endnote
To conclude, you can effectively plug the gaps in the sales funnel by following the tips mentioned in this article. Start with finding the point of the funnels where your potential prospects start to lose interest. After that, use automated lead management tools and emphasize team management to block lead leakage.
So, for a successful marketing and sales practice, you must spend time and money looking for its reasons. Finally, always remember that if you are paying for a lead and then simply letting them go, it is a mere waste of resources. But, with the right tools, it is possible to reduce it.
