Whether your business is small or large, it probably relies on leads—and for those leads to count, they need to be converted into sales.

If you only had a handful of leads or inquiries at any given time, you could probably manage them manually without too many problems. However, if you receive larger volumes of leads, in the hundreds or thousands, you’re likely to struggle to maintain full visibility and organisation of these leads throughout their conversion journey. In fact, with a regional average of 70% of leads never receiving responses, and a 5.5-day response time for those that do, it’s clear that lead management is a widespread struggle for businesses that don’t have a dedicated system in place.

What is a lead management system & who is it for?

At its essence, a lead management system (LMS) exists to help you manage leads, by automating lead-to-sale (L2S) processes like lead capture, lead qualification, lead distribution, data organisation and reporting. For this purpose, most businesses, whether SMEs, medium-sized enterprises, or large enterprises including multinational corporations will benefit from a suitable LMS.

That said—a modern, innovative LMS can do more than just manage your leads. An optimal system should be able to help you enforce a contact strategy that optimally unifies your sales and marketing efforts, streamline your lead-to-sale conversion activities, and provide you with adequate visibility to evaluate the efficiency of your operations—all according to your specific business segment and needs.

LMS benefits for various business segments

Depending on the size, structure and specific needs of your organisation, the ways in which you use an LMS will differ.

Small to Medium Enterprise

Typically, smaller businesses and SME/SMBs will find that an LMS’s fundamental lead management features can sufficiently elevate their conversion rates. An LMS can automatically capture leads from inquiry submissions, sort them according to your defined parameters, and provide general reports for convenient supervision.

Large Enterprise

Larger businesses have vast amounts of leads that need to be intelligently distributed, and data that needs to be consolidated, organised and interpreted in a practical, insightful manner. For these companies, an LMS is indispensable for automatically distributing leads to the right salespersons at the right time (leads that are followed up within 5 minutes have 8x higher odds of winning). On top of that, every lead can be tracked throughout its user journey to generate a hoard of valuable information such as ad-to-sale attribution, salesperson performance, effectiveness of strategy and tactics, and so on.

Fortune Global 500

Even international giants can find shortcomings in their lead management operations. An established CRM infrastructure can often lack the right tools for executing a contact strategy. Here, an LMS can be incorporated to complement a comprehensive suite of software applications that work together harmoniously to optimise the broader sales & marketing ecosystem.

“Do I need it now?”

Wherever you are in your business’s growth journey, an LMS has the potential to streamline your sales operations and increase your lead-to-sale conversion rates. The question is: Is now the time for your business to make this investment? Are you in the right position to gain a significant ROI? Here are a few scenarios that determine whether and why your business stands to benefit substantially from an LMS now:

1. Your growing sales team has more than 10 salespersons

As your business grows and you acquire more staff and resources, the organising and delegating of sales leads become more and more complex very quickly. Manually routing leads to the right salespersons and monitoring their individual performances—it all gets difficult to manage and will come at the cost of inefficiency and lost opportunities.

2. You manage more than 400 leads per month

Even if you are capable of managing hundreds of leads manually, the time and labour it would cost you is a painfully ineffective expense. Not only is it an inefficient use of resources, but the time it would take between the submission of an enquiry and routing it to a suitable salesperson would be long enough to lose your lead to a competitor or sheer disinterest. When the golden window to respond to an enquiry is 5 minutes, manual lead management of large lead volumes simply won’t cut it.

3. Your current CRM system lacks the ability to enforce contact strategy

Whether or not you have an existing CRM system, you may not be optimally equipped to enforce an effective contact strategy. CRM, at its essence, is designed to focus on retaining existing customers, upselling and cross-selling to them, and managing feedback. An LMS, on the other hand, is used to manage leads before they are sales-qualified, with the aim of making them sales-ready and increasing marketing efficiency through comprehensive data analytics. The two systems can work hand-in-hand, focusing on different stages of the lead-to-sale journey.

Here’s what the right LMS can do to dramatically improve your lead-to-sale conversion rates:

• Instantly and automatically distribute new leads to the appropriate available salespersons for immediate follow-up (within minutes)

• Track and trace every sales action (and non-action) to gain valuable insights on the performance of both your sales team and your ads (reflected in real-time sales reports)

Whatever industry you are in—whether you are a property developer, insurer or banker—if your business is one of the many that lose a large percentage of their leads to a lack of an effective contact strategy, and/or insufficient or inaccurate ad performance data, there is a high chance a lead management system is just what your company needs.

Learn more about how the right LMS can streamline your operations and improve your conversion rates with a free demo today.