Lead management is a set of methodologies, systems and practices designed to generate new potential business clientele. It facilitates a business’ connection between its outgoing consumer advertising and the responses to that advertising. These processes are designed for business-to-business and direct-to-consumer strategies. Lead management is, in many cases, a precursor to sales management and customer relationship management. This connection helps facilitate business profitability through the acquisition of new customers, selling to existing customers and creating a market brand. Lead management can also often be referred to as customer acquisition management.

The general principle of lead management is to create an ordered structure for managing volumes of business inquiries, or leads. A lot of other processes have now shifted almost all of the prior manual workload to automated systems. However, with Requestbox, personal interaction with the inquiries is still essential to effectively maintain and process each lead.

Along with its other related business practices, such as; marketing, brand development, advertising and sales. The goal of an effective lead management initiative is to generate new business revenue, increase visibility and improve the general attitudes of potential clients and the public at large for future business development.

A typical outline of a lead management process might follow the following steps:

1. Business engages in a range of advertising media (Lead generation)
2. Recipients of advertising respond, creating a customer inquiry, or lead
3. Respondent’s information is captured (Inquiry capture)
4. Captured information is then filtered to determine validity (Inquiry filtering)
5. The filtered leads are then graded and prioritised for potential (Lead grading)
6. Leads are then distributed to marketing and/or sales personnel (Lead distribution)
7. Leads are contacted for prospecting (Sales contact)
8. Contacted and uncontacted leads are entered into personal and automated follow-up processes (Lead nurturing)
9. End result is new business sale (Sales result)

While it seems simple in theory, the lead flow process can become more complex as clients, prospective clients and those trying to sell interact. Interactions and subsequent actions create a variety of potential outcomes, both productive and counter-productive to business development. The increase in complexity and various outcome scenarios can lead to the mishandling of an inquiry that reduces or destroys its potential value. Appropriate management of these scenarios is the function of lead management and is, hopefully, the biggest selling point for Lead Management in Requestbox.