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Running a good lead management program can be a lot l ike being the coach of a hot football team. You have a lot of leads coming in that need to be understood, appreciated, and then handled in a specific way depending on certain criteria. A NFL-level football coach has a stream made up of dozens of players, all with varying skills and attributes to fill certain positions. Looking at the teams that perform best, they often have very similar resources to other teams but manage themselves and execute better, just like a strong marketing and sales organization will. The similarities go deeper than that too.
 
If you’re responsible for lead management, you need to be able to appraise all of your leads and understand which ones are ready for your sales organization and which need more work. Just a football coach does, you have to understand precisely what the sales team needs and is looking for, and have a system in place that recognizes your leads when they come in hot. According to Gleanster Research, only about 25% of your leads will be sales-ready when they come in the door. These are your exceptional rookie or second-year players that are coming in with a little experience, but have the talent and development that let you sell to them right away. These leads are more sophisticated, have already done research, and are close to a buying decision.

 Marketing Takeaway: Don’t let your leads sit in a lead nurturing campaign (or on the sideline) if they’re ready to deliver value. If they convert on a bottom of the funnel offer, move them to sales quickly.
 
There are other components to lead management that coaches and marketers both use to help make good decisions in this process. Lead scoring is the process of understanding which of your leads are ready, based on your past experience with leads and what you know about your business. Just like coaches develop statistics and systems for observing a player’s performance and potential for success, lead scoring systems let you quickly appraise how qualified your leads are based on what you know about them. Some of the data that you can use includes how many pages they viewed on your website, what form they filled out, and the information that they gave you when they did.
 
Marketing Takeaway: If you’re generating enough leads that the sales organization can’t or won’t call all of them, you should be evaluating them before you pass them off and making sure that you don’t pass on leads that will not be a productive use of time for sales.
 
For any leads that aren’t ready yet, you have your lead nurturing training camp. Lead nurturing is a process, primarily via email, of sending targeted messages to your leads with the goal of helping them become a better lead. Just like training and practice improves any player, education and guided information can help improve your lead quality. Lead nurturing can include other formats as well, like social media or text messages, if those work well with inspiring action from your leads.
 
The hardest part of lead nurturing is knowing when to stop - That is, when a lead is ready and can be advanced to the next stage. Your series of messages to them should have an end goal, that makes them ready for a salesperson to talk to if the lead responded to the messages. For example, you might send them an additional content offer or information that could help them make a decision on if you are selling a product that they need, and then offer them a demo or consultation afterwards. If they respond positively to those two events, downloading the ebook and then saying they’d like to learn more, you’ve just determined that your lead is better informed about your company than they were before and they’re interested in talking with a salesperson.

 Marketing Takeaway: Use lead nurturing as a tool to save your sales team time from calling leads that aren’t ready, or possibly discarding leads that are too early in their sales cycle. Lead nurturing can make this process much easier for you.
 
Once you have these fundamentals locked down, your lead management process will be looking pretty sharp. If you can effectively score, nurture, and pass along the right leads to sales, your marketing and sales efforts will be made much more effective. The last step to being on top is to continue to measure the performance of your efforts. Periodically reviewing your lead nurturing campaigns to make sure that people are still accomplishing the goals that you have for them, for example, is a good task. If your click-through rates start to decline, or you see other signals that your campaigns are not doing as well as they should be, you can go back and review them and make changes.