Let’s start with the basics: what is Lead Management? And how does it relate to Marketing Automation, Demand Generation, Lead Generation, Inbound Marketing and so on? First some pointers: Forrester’s Laura Ramos has written about it, Adam Needles wrote about it as part of his graduate research, and I’ve also covered it on the LeadSloth blog.

In short: Lead Management is capturing, nurturing and scoring your leads to provide the sales team with sales-ready leads.

In B2B online marketing there are a number of challenges:

1. Getting people to your site
2. Getting them to register (conversion)
3. Nurture and score the people in your database
4. Work with sales to ensure proper follow-up on sales-ready leads

These are the 4 steps to developing a solid lead management program.

My take is that the terms I mentioned above have a lot of overlap. Inbound Marketing starts in phase 1: getting people to your site. However, the Inbound Marketing University now also covers conversion and email nurturing. Demand Generation and Lead Generation are close cousins, and could include anything that generates demand for your products, even cold calling or list rentals. Marketing Automation is about automating internal marketing processes: this is also very broad, and could include categories like Marketing Asset Management or marketing project management. Lead Management (or Lead Management Automation) is about phase 2, 3 and 4: conversion, nurturing, scoring, and sales & marketing collaboration. So that’s probably the most descriptive.

But let’s not get bogged down in terminology. The goal of lead management is to generate more and better leads, so eventually you will need all 4 steps. To get the most out of Lead Management Automation you should start with the step that makes the biggest difference to your bottom line. If you have a huge database that hasn’t been contacted in a while, step 3 may be a good place to start. If your database is still empty but you have plenty of website visitors, try to convert more of them, and so on. This is one area that I will write about.

In my upcoming posts I will talk about best practices to improve steps 1 to 4. That will include social media, email nurturing, lead scoring, real-time notifications, analytics & reporting, and much more.