Author, speaker Zig Zagler, once stated, “You are out of business if you don’t have a prospect.”
Every business or organization aims at attracting and attaining an increased number of customers regularly, and they apply various methods to generate leads and achieve their business goals. Leads can be the potential customers who have expressed interest in your solution but have not yet made a purchase. The ability to convert leads into loyal customers and to manage them efficiently comes with practice and systems. High-tech sales lead management software becomes the backbone of this strategy.
This article covers the aspects of lead management software solutions for the growth of business organizations. It also emphasizes on the popular free and open source lead management software solutions that are preferred by the majority of businesses today.
What is Lead Management?
Lead Management is a critical component of the sales and marketing department of a business primarily focused on tracking and managing prospective customers. It is sometimes also referred to as customer acquisition management or contact management and generally encompasses the following process:
- Lead Generation
- Customer Enquiry and Capture
- Filtering, Grading, Distribution, and Contact
- Lead Nurturing
Nurturing leads is as important as acquiring them in the first place. Effective lead management strategies can significantly help companies to improve their sales pipeline and these strategies cover a wide range of activities like lead scoring, nurturing, and marketing automation.
Lead Management Software
A recent lead generation research suggests that around 53% marketers spend their 50% or more budget on lead generation tools and technologies. Usage of automated lead management tools, and AI-powered LMS to monitor prospects, engage with relevancy, and convert them as clients is flourishing as the latest trend in lead management.
The sheer volume is the biggest reason for leveraging the power of technology to manage leads. Software-driven automated programs are quite capable of processing leads at lightning speed by introducing new practices for winning opportunities.
Lead management software allows businesses to merge their sales assignments and processes. From lead generation to conversion, all tasks are perfectly handled by the automated lead management solution using advanced reporting methods and comprehensive competitor analysis. They bring together important sales information within minutes. Much better than traditional spreadsheets, lead management solutions help users analyze critical data such as conversion rates, lead time, and win-loss ratio. They also provide you an insight into the performance of your sales team for various products, services, locations, and customers.
What are the types of Lead Management Software Programs?
Varying from basic and free tool suites to accurate and ultra-costly – different types of lead management software solutions are available in the market these days. Features can also come under the categorization criteria. However, certain specific programs just summarize leads, whereas others are more robust and allow the users to track the entire sales cycle, monitor lead behavior, and perform some custom branding. Deployment is also an important criterion that divides software into the following categories:
- SaaS or Software-as-a-Service Lead Management Software: It is a paid software (on a monthly basis) hosted on the vendor’s server. Software installation, update, and maintenance jobs will be done as per the choice of the vendor. This kind of software handles lead generation-related activities.
- On-Premise Lead Management Software: This is a single-licensed, client-server hosted software. It is expensive and requires a complicated setup. It occasionally requires some hardware installation.
- Cloud-hosted Lead Management Software: It is an affordable and easily accessible software solution with free basic plans. Some of them also come as free and open source lead management software solutions that users do not even need to update or pay for the maintenance.
What are the critical features of Lead Management Software Programs?
The detailed comparisons given below will throw light on the main features of typical lead management software:
- Lead Storage and Distribution: This includes handling leads gained through email, web forms, etc. Then such leads can be stored in a database, evaluated, and sent to the right sales representative.
- Lead Scoring and Nurturing: This includes identifying promising leads based on online behavior, job title, demography, and buying behavior. Nurturing tools are used to automate lead follow-ups to bolster the relationship with prospects until they are ready to buy the product.
- Lead Analytics and Reporting: This includes generating lead reports to obtain sales and marketing results. The reports brief you about the most prominent business leads and successful sales campaigns.
What are the benefits of Lead Management Software Solutions?
Here is a list of benefits that users or businesses can experience by utilizing a reliable lead management system:
- Lead management software streamlines the lead lifecycle until conversion.
- Lead prioritization becomes possible with the lead scoring and nurturing features and with proper follow-up until it closes.
- An efficient software-based operation that saves your time and unnecessary paperwork.
- Easy to eliminate or filter out the non-promising leads that are not going to work for your business.
- The software lets the users understand the buying patterns of promising prospects.
- It helps businesses with lead segmentation to deliver tailored experiences.
- Lead management software offers automation features for enhanced productivity.
- The lead management tools are typically scalable as per business requirements.
- It also lets businesses track submissions in real-time.
- Lead generation software also reduces the business risks and chances of human errors.
What are the targeted businesses that use Lead Management Software Solutions?
Lead management software can be a useful tool for every company’s marketing and sales strategy. There are still two scenarios where a lead management system can have the most significant impact on the overall business revenue:
- B2B Businesses: They are engaged in more extended sales interaction lifecycles, and hence, these buyers should have strong hands-on lead scoring and nurturing features.
- B2C Businesses: They use lead tracking features for organizing a large amount of customer data. They also utilize analytics to identify consumer segments for boosting their sales strategies.
Now, let us have a look at some of the popular free and open source lead management software solutions that are in huge demand in the market today.
The comparison chart given below covers diverse aspects of each of the above-listed lead management software solutions.
Let us discuss all of these software solutions in detail.
1. LeadFeeder
LeadFeeder is a free and one of the most reliable lead management platforms that promise to turn visitors into actual leads. The software comes with unrivaled data quality and native integrations with full 2-way sync. It is a performance-driven tool that generates leads from website analytics. The software follows a systematic and well-defined procedure to identify, qualify and connect with potential leads.
(Source: LeadFeeder)
Features:
- LeadFeeder is a web app that enhances your sales intelligence by integrating your marketing and sales data.
- It can easily get connected to Google Analytics to generate free leads for your business without needing to install any additional script.
- Additional features associated with the software include LeadFeeder Booster, automatic lead scoring, versatile lead filtering, and CRM automation.
- You can add as many users as you like to your LeadFeeder account to ensure that you never miss another online lead.
- Personalized email alerts are sent if any specific company visits your website for timely follow-up
- Web activity-based automated lead scoring
- Automated lead data transfer to CRM or marketing automation system
- List segmentation based on geography, industry, web activity, employee number, custom properties, etc.
- Page visits, target accounts and website form tracking
- Easily create custom feeds and filters
- Behavioral and demographic filters for lead segmentation
2. ClinchPad
ClinchPad is famous for closing leads faster. It is simpler than the traditional CRMs and better than using spreadsheets. Basically, it is built for small teams and offers a free account for users with up to 100 leads. It is ideal for all types of organizations and provides a more organized and centralized way to manage and track leads than other tools.
(Source: ClinchPad)
Features:
- Easy visualization of the sales pipeline at the start of every day. Cards and stages are represented by columns to view the sales pipeline. Multiple pipes and filters can be created.
- Quick actions are made possible to add or remove leads.
- Every lead is assigned notes and a to-do list to register meetings, calls, emails, and tasks with a date and time.
- Custom fields, notifications, massive document and file storage, and daily activity snapshots are offered with the software.
- Easy to process, user-specific, preset charts and reports are made available to the users.
- Easily store and manage lead contacts and organizations
- Quick integration with MailChimp, Mad Mimi, Campaign Monitor, and GetResponse
- Bulk import contacts through CSV files or Excel spreadsheets
- Product-wise lead sorting and tracking
- Geography-based lead segmentation
- 256 bit SSL security with regular data backups
3. Catalystk
Catalystk is an open source and free lead management software to automate, manage and track leads. The software is quite popular among SMB traders and manufacturers for improving sales, growth rate, time efficiency, user adaptability and follow up process. It is easy to set up and use with an intuitive user interface. This lead management software is must have for businesses looking to easily nurture, segment, capture and qualify their leads.
(Source: Catalystk)
Features:
- Missing customer identifier
- Late paid client list
- Multi-currency support
- Separate deal management module
- Supports integration with Justdial, Sulekha, Indiamart, etc.
- Ability to generate a wide range of reports
4. LeadCenter
LeadCenter is an AI-powered lead management solution to improve conversion rates, automate sales and marketing processes and make informed business decisions based on advanced insights. The tool offers exquisite features such as pipeline management, conversation intelligence, call and voicemail transcription, form builder, etc., for better lead capturing, management and intelligence. These features and functionalities also help finance professionals and advisors eliminate time wastage and excessive resource utilization in the entire lead management process. Not only this, but the software can integrate with leading CRM solutions like Salesforce and Redtail CRM.
(Source: LeadCenter)
Features:
- Real-time lead analysis
- Chat-GPT integration
- AI-powered lead intelligence and automated lead engagement
- Easily capture leads from forms, calls, email, calendars, etc.
- Support virtual numbers for calling
- Integration with WordPress supported
- Bulk CSV uploads
- Lead tracking to determine campaigns with most leads
- Specifically assign leads to campaigns
- Alerts and notifications through email and SMS
- Robust analysis to track the performance of lead capture campaigns
- Customize lead statuses to match sales processes
5. Leadmanage
Another free to use lead management software solution is Lead manage, an unique tool designed to quickly track, manage and convert the leads as clients. Anyone who wants to centralize their lead reporting can use this tool for improved results. Not only this, but businesses who desire to understand the potential sources of leads, reduce sales costs and optimize the lead capture process can also leverage this tool. All type of businesses from various industries can use Leadmanage to manage and monitor the entire lead management process from a single screen.
(Source: Leadmanage)
Features:
- Staff account creation and lead allocation
- Easy lead contacts management and maintenance
- Easy lead bifurcation
- Leads source list management
- Send pre designed mail to leads
- Drag & drop email builder
- Inbuilt Whatsapp templates to connect with potential leads
6. Lead Angel
Lead Angel is a smart lead management to clean, match and route leads on a real time basis. This free to use software offers features like lead to account matching, calendar scheduling, on the spot hand off, offline scheduling and actionable reporting metrics. The software is great to use for automating the duplicate lead management process without compromising on accuracy and quality. Through this software, businesses can also assign leads to representatives based on account ownership and availability, thereby increasing the speed to lead.
(Source: Lead Angel)
Features:
- Quickly merge, delete, and convert duplicate leads
- Instant lead routing with advanced lead distribution
- Live-transfer leads from sales representatives to account executives
- Inbuilt calendar scheduling to automate appointment booking
- Integrate with Hubspot, Dynamics 365 and Salesforce
- Robust lead-to-account matching and data cleansing options
- Intelligent routing configuration to track leads
- One time lead reassignment
- Auto dedupe new leads
EnterpriseLead is a free and state of the art lead management solution to help businesses easily manage and grow their clients. The platform was the first one to introduce the ping post two step delivery system which is widely used by modern CRM platforms. It offers full hosting and marketing and technical support with no setup and monthly fee. This software uses Round Robin lead delivery method to dynamically change the delivery priority with each lead. It is a great tool to accept and deliver leads through HTTP POST, GET, SOAP, XML, etc.
(Source: EnterpriseLead)
Features:
- Easy to use navigation toolbars
- Built in CRM system with unlimited users
- Instant call back to potential leads
- Custom filters and tabs
- Branded email auto responder
- Lead validation to get rid of duplicate data
- Call center integration
- Targeted email marketing based on geography, gender and user preferences
- Web-based platform for easy access from any device
- Ability to set volume caps and lead delivery date restrictions
- Detailed source level reporting and analytics
Pipedrive, Sugar CRM, Copper, Leadscampus, LeadManager, noCRM, Follow Up Boss, and LeadMethod are other lead management software solutions popular in the market.
If you are already using one of the software solutions listed above, you can freely share your reviews here.
Conclusion
Technology plays a significant role in shaping different business functions and so is lead generation and management software. Things were not that scalable earlier, but today, tools based on AI technology have the capacity to help many companies in lead generation and management. Businesses using AI-based solutions get better close rates for a sales deal, more traffic and engagement, an increase in revenue, and higher conversion of leads.
Machine Learning practices have also contributed significantly to the highest conversions. Businesses utilize the data they gather through chatbots and use it for further analysis and strategy development.
The sole aim of using a lead management system is to maintain a seamless customer acquisition process through all stages of a business deal. When businesses have an agenda of obtaining an increased number of leads online, tools like lead management software works best to bring the desired outcome within the stipulated time and budget. Whether they are free, open source, freemium, or popular ones; you can choose them as per your needs and explore the benefits of the lead management software solutions.
