How to Get the Most From Your Sales Leads & Opportunities

A practical guide to closing more sales and growing your business.

Niche or sector aside, your ability to manage your sales leads and opportunities consistently and effectively will have a major impact on your long-term success.

Managing prospects and sales opportunities is a top priority for 61% of modern businesses. If you want to expand your customer base and increase your revenue sustainably, developing an effective lead management process is vital.

Armed with a lead and sales opportunity management strategy, you will be able to engage with more prospects, drive better conversion and boost your sales..

To help you significantly improve your sales lead management initiatives, we’re going to explore four essential elements you should consider as part of your strategy—starting with team structure.

Streamline your team structure

Your team structure is pivotal to how you handle and seize sales leads opportunities. Every organisation is different, so you should structure your sales team in a way that will improve internal communication while maximising productivity based on these two models:

1. The specialisation model: Here, you can assign your reps different tasks or roles based on each stage of the sales process, from lead generation and lead nurturing to customer success and aftercare. Once your lead generation team has engaged a prospect, for example, they will pass them onto the nurturing team to guide them down the funnel.
2. The team model: Here, you can develop tighter-knit teams of sales specialists based on their specific areas of expertise, such as a product or line of business. This model works a lot like the specialisation approach, except each team as a whole is responsible for converting their leads. For example, rather than passing a prospect from one team to another, all team members will work together to guide them through their journey with optimum success.

The takeaway here is: your team structure will form the foundations of your sales lead and opportunity management strategy, so taking the time to get it right and clearly communicate it to your team is essential.

Enrich your marketing & sales content

Did you know? Content marketing generates three times as many prospects as outbound strategies and costs 62% less.

Today, content is one of the most powerful mediums for lead generation and nurturing. If you’re using lead scoring (which we recommend) as part of your nurturing and management strategy, creating value-rich content will keep your prospects engaged at every stage of their journey.

Once you’ve segmented your sales leads according to funnel stage and level of interest, you can drill down into your data and develop articles, case studies, infographics, blog posts, or videos to build trust or spark attention.

For instance, if you’re an ethical clothing retailer, and you have a warm lead that is on the cusp of buying a sweater, you could create an article based on the benefits of buying sustainable winter clothes and share it with them (via email or social media) when they’re most likely to engage.

Content should be an integral part of your lead management process. With an increasing number of channels and touchpoints to utilise, it will increase your sales figures over time.

Forecast the right way

One of the most effective ways of streamlining your sales leads and opportunity-nurturing activities is with weighted sales forecasts.

A weighted sales forecast or pipeline is a method where you give each stage of your sales funnel, or each sales opportunity, a certain probability to close

By having a weighted forecast process in place, your sales team will gain a clear-cut snapshot of which sales leads or opportunities to invest their efforts into and when they should start which activities.

Along with lead scoring, you can use weighted forecasting to really “trim the fat” and take valuable actions to connect with your highest-valued prospects the right way and, ultimately, increase your conversions.

Wasting time on leads or opportunities that are unlikely to yield positive results is a glaring issue for sales departments across industries, and weighted forecasting is a viable productivity-boosting solution.

Embrace digital technology

To bring all of the above elements together and optimise your lead management activities for ongoing success, you need to work with the right tools.

Fortunately, we live in a digital age where the tools and technology exist to optimise sales strategies across the board. By working with the right customer relationship management (CRM) tool, you will gain a panoramic snapshot of all of your sales channels and activities from one accessible dashboard.

With a cloud-based CRM, your sales team will be able to manage their most valuable sales data anywhere, anytime.

Through gaining access to your most critical sales data and information in one intuitive location, you will be able to:

• Create accurate sales lead forecasts.
• Manage essential consumer insights.
• Benchmark the performance of your lead nurturing strategies and activities.
• Track your sales opportunities and leads.
• Score your sales leads with pinpoint accuracy.
• Improve your sales team’s communications and boost productivity.

With a CRM, you can optimise your sales lead management strategy and take charge of your activities. This will empower you to identify weaknesses, capitalise on strengths, and engage your prospects in a way that will ensure the best possible outcome and return on investment (ROI), time after time.

Bonus sales lead & opportunity management tips:

Here are some additional lead management tips to help you refine and optimise every key element of your sales strategy:

• Use your improved team structure to engage warm leads and guide them along the funnel swiftly to improve your productivity.
• Utilise an integrated CRM to ensure your sales reps have as much information about their specific sales leads as possible to boost motivation and increase their chances of closing sales.
• Hold regular sales team meetings, using the performance data from your CRM to make continual strategic tweaks and improvements. This will ensure your lead management activities remain effective and keep your business on track.

Either You Run The Day, Or The Day Runs You.” – Jim Rohn

At Workbooks, we have a host of sales-boosting CRM solutions for businesses across industries. If you’d like to find out more about what we do or what we offer, please get in touch.

To further improve your opportunity management strategies, read our guide on four things marketing can focus on to drive revenue