CRM Features & Solutions > Sales Force Automation > Lead Management
 Every sales lead, if rightly tracked and nurtured, can be a revenue generating opportunity. However, one must have the right process and tools in place to make sure these are properly guided towards the most likely result of sales planning. For this reason, businesses consider Lead management as one of the important activities in their organization-wide sales & marketing process.
What are Leads?
In Zoho CRM, leads are considered as raw details of company, person or business opportunity. These are unqualified sales opportunities gathered at various situations, viz. trade shows, seminars, advertisements, purchases from external sources and other marketing campaigns for the purpose of sales.
What is Lead Management?
Lead management is an important business process that combines tools with techniques to enable effective leads generation, management and tracking of new sales opportunities. In Zoho CRM, lead management is a powerful solution to automate and enhance the most inconsistent, disorganized and error-prone processes involved in acquiring and tracking leads through their entire life-cycle.
The different stages in Zoho CRM's lead management process are:
Lead generation refers to the capturing of consumers interest towards products or services, who may be interested in a purchase. These sales leads are captured through various sources, viz., campaigns, exhibitions, referrals, phone calls, branding, etc. Zoho CRM provides you with different methods to generate leads: Form Filling, Quick Create, Importing, Web Forms and Developer API.
Zoho CRM - Lead Generation Methods
Lead Allocation or Distribution
Manually assigning new leads to specific individual (owner) can be tedious. Zoho CRM allows you to create a workflow rule to assign new leads to sales persons based on specific criteria, such as geographic region, activity, etc.
With the scope for further follow ups, the lead qualification process is essential to lead generation. This stage separates the sales ready leads from the general inquiries that are entered into Zoho CRM.
B2B Process - Lead Qualification
Once there is scope for business opportunity through further negotiations or follow-ups, a Lead is transformed to Account, Contact and business opportunity. At this point, lead management process is complete and there is no reverting to Lead process.
B2B Process - Lead Conversion
What do I Gain from Zoho CRM's Lead Management?
Across all industry sectors, marketing campaigns and brand promotion activities are the initial steps to finding and attracting new customers. However, you must effectively nurture the leads until they grow up to prospective buyers. Zoho CRM's lead management process provides you the necessary tools and techniques in acquiring and tracking leads through the entire life cycle.
Your Benefits
- Manage a 360 degree view of the leads' life cycle (from creating leads to converting them into business opportunities)
- Capture leads online using Web-to-lead form and manage effectively in Zoho CRM
- Import leads from external sources, such as Web downloads, trade shows, seminars, direct mail, and other types of campaigns
- Facilitate faster sales Lead Distribution through the lead assignment rules
- Qualify leads to next stage based on the information captured in lead details
- Customize lead management process (B2B and B2C business scenarios) as per your organization sales process
- Standard reports and dashboards bundled for a fast learning curve
- Export leads data to spreadsheet software for further data analysis
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