Lead management is vital to keep your pipeline fresh and full of potential customers. However, knowing how to succeed at lead management can make the difference between converting them and losing them.
Once you generate your leads, proper lead management will score them, guide them through the sales funnel and convert them into customers who pay.
In this article, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about lead management. We’ll also show you how to choose lead management software and how to create an effective lead management system.
But what is lead management? How can you develop an effective lead management system?
What Is Lead Management?
Lead management refers to the process of finding, pursuing and managing leads until they complete a purchase. Unlike traditional sales and marketing, lead management requires salespeople to look at potential clients or leads and manage them individually to improve the chances of conversion.
So lead management is applied when you generate individual relationships with customers to make a sale. For instance, the industry average for the lead management conversion rate in B2B sales is up to 10%. This percentage is far better than traditional advertising, which only achieves a 2-5% conversion rate.
Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities compared to non-nurtured leads. Effective lead nurturing programs can deliver a 10% or greater increase in revenue within 6-9 months. Nurtured leads have a 23% shorter sales cycle.
So how can you set up your own lead management process?
What is the Difference Between Lead Management, CRM, and Marketing Automation?
Lead management is the specific process of capturing, tracking, qualifying and nurturing leads until they are ready to be passed to the sales team. Its primary focus is on the initial part of the customer journey, from first contact to becoming a sales qualified lead (SQL). Key activities include lead generation, capturing contact info, lead scoring based on their engagement, segmenting them into groups and nurturing leads with targeted content. The goal is to filter and prepare potential customers for the sales pipeline so no opportunity is lost.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a much broader technology that acts as a central hub for all interactions a company has with its current and potential customers. Its focus is on managing the entire customer journey. A CRM centralizes customer data, tracks communication history (emails, calls, meetings), manages the sales pipeline (deals, opportunities) and provides analytics on sales performance. While it includes lead management capabilities, its main purpose is to provide a single source of truth for sales and marketing teams and customer service teams to build and maintain long-term customer relationships.
Marketing automation refers to software used to automate repetitive marketing tasks at scale. Its primary function is to nurture leads, often in large numbers, by delivering personalized content. Examples include automated email campaigns triggered by user actions (like downloading a file), social media scheduling and personalized web content. While it is involved in the lead nurturing process (a part of lead management), its core strength is efficiency and personalization across the top and middle of the marketing funnel, often before a lead is ready for direct sales interaction.
These three concepts are distinct but connected. Marketing automation is often the tool that generates and nurtures leads at the top of the funnel. The lead management process then takes these marketing-qualified leads, scores them and qualifies them. Once a lead is deemed sales-ready, it is passed from the lead management system (or module) into the main CRM platform. The CRM then becomes the system of record for the sales team to manage the deal, track the relationship and handle all post-sale customer service. This creates a smooth journey from prospect to loyal customer.
Lead Management Process: Steps + How to Set It Up
Here are the five steps for setting up lead management:
Step 1: Find Your Leads
This step is the basis for your lead management process. You need to find out who your potential clients are and where to find them.
Start by identifying your buyer types and client personas. They should have clear identifiers, such as their general location, behavior, demographic and source. Based on these identifiers, build up your client persona. Include their needs and wants and how they interact with your brand (if at all).
Step 2: Score Your Leads
Some leads have a far better potential of converting than others. So it’s vital for you and your marketing team to score them. Then you can focus your attention on the leads that are more likely to convert.
You don’t need to see the future to determine which leads are more likely to convert. You just need a lead scoring system .
A lead scoring system is a system that allows you to assign your leads points based on scoring factors. So you’ll know how to pursue the ones with the highest lead scores.
Some of these factors may include:
- Physical location
- Brand engagement
- Industry
- Stage in their client journey
- Lead source
- Revenue potential
You can add points to the ones with positive scores and subtract those with negative scores. The more important a factor is, the more points you should assign. For example, their physical location may not be a significant factor when dealing with SaaS sales, but their industry is.
Step 3: Nurture Your Leads
Once you’ve found and scored your leads, it’s time to figure out which ones to place into lead nurturing campaigns. You can complete this step by pursuing the leads that score higher and finding out what else they need to convert. Are they close to finishing their trial period? Did you reply to one of their questions but didn’t hear back from them? Have they indicated interest but didn’t finish a purchase?
You can pass them to sales teams if they’re ready to be given a sales pitch. If they aren’t ready, assign them to a lead nurturing campaign that will foster their interest.
Identify where they are in their sales process and nurture them. For example, if they’re still in the awareness phase, nurture them by offering more information on the value and importance of your solution. If they’re in the buying process, you can notify them about your promotional offers and the solutions you offer that are best for them.
Step 4: Transfer Leads to the Sales Team
Once a lead is ready to buy, it’s time for the sales team to pitch your solution. You can complete this step manually. A good CRM lets you automate this process through simple marketing automation, so your sales team can do it right away. Make sure the sales rep has all the lead information they need in advance so they get to know your lead, their needs and the perfect solution for them.
Once the sales rep gets the lead, they can see it in the form of an intuitive lead profile. Then they can get a better understanding of the lead and contact them right away.
Step 5: Evaluate Lead Generation Process
No process is complete without analysis. So your entire lead management system should be under the constant analysis of stakeholders to identify possible bottlenecks and find out better ways to convert leads.
Keep up your conversion rates and find out what you’re doing right. How can you make improvements based on the market fluctuations, the competitor’s behavior and the data analysis?
To fine-tune your lead generation process, don’t be afraid to experiment every now and then.
Lead Management Best Practices You Should Follow
Here are some of the best practices for lead management and ways some companies have implemented them with success:
1. Carefully define your ideal lead
Your product or service is the perfect solution for someone out there. The better you know who that person is, the better you can find it.
Why?
If you know your ideal customer, you can focus all your marketing and sales efforts on finding them via direct marketing or lead providers. And the more qualified that lead is, the easier it’ll be to manage them to conversion.
How to apply it:
Start by looking at the data on your current customers. Which leads are the hardest to convert? Which leads convert more often? What do they all have in common? Figure out who has the biggest need for your solution. Then use the data to enrich their profile and engage them.
Don’t let assumptions get in the way of defining your ideal lead. When you define your lead’s location, preferences, wants and needs, let your data do the talking.
2. Plan out your nurturing campaigns
To get great results, you need a great plan. To figure out how to more effectively convert a lead, you need to take data from your leads and sales funnel into account. If you plan ahead, you can see great results on your first try.
Companies that respond to leads within an hour are 7 times more likely to have a meaningful conversation with a decision-maker. A response within the first minute can increase lead conversion by as much as 391%. On the lead prioritization front, using AI-powered lead scoring can improve marketing ROI by up to 35% and result in 2.3 times higher lead-to-deal conversion rates.
How can you apply it
Use all of your lead data to plan your lead nurturing campaigns and lead them to conversion. Don’t improvise your way around a campaign, even if it’s cheap. Instead, study your target audience and build an integral campaign that leads them through the funnel.
3. Segment your leads
Nowadays, there are so many ways to automate lead generation and management, so it can be easy to fall into the trap of automating everything. However, there are still areas where a human being is better than an algorithm.
For example, a provider of OEM equipment created a campaign that combined an automated approach with direct mail, email and great prospecting to manage leads—before and after a trade show. Through lead segmentation, the provider came up with relevant and attractive incentives for the leads. They saw a 300% ROI.
How can you apply it
Since all your leads aren’t equal, why treat them like they are? Even when advertising the exact same thing (such as an event), collect leads and gather all the information you can about your leads in order to segment leads based on their characteristics. Then you can cater to their needs.
The more relevant your content is, the more likely it is that they’ll reply.
4. Manage your leads to give you more leads
Even if a lead doesn’t convert, they may still lead you to someone that will. Referral programs can be effective when implemented correctly.
According to 2024 research, brands that combine their influencer and affiliate marketing programs see 46% higher sales from their affiliate channel compared to those who keep them separate. This demonstrates the power of integrated marketing efforts in lead generation efforts.
How you can apply it:
You can get your leads to work for you if you offer a good reward. It doesn’t have to be something big or expensive as long as you give value to your leads. You can also use gamified processes set up by your lead management software that users are more likely to interact with. That way, you can use your lead management solution to keep your sales pipeline busy and handle lead scoring at the same time.
5. Closely collaborate with your sales team
If you want to see conversion, you need to use lead management to establish a good connection between your marketing and sales teams. Your sales team needs to know your marketing team’s criteria to qualify leads and send them over. And they need to be in the loop to know what to sell and how to sell it.
When you send your leads to a sales rep, they should notice no change. The transition should be smooth and keep the same tone and expectations you set in the beginning.
How you can apply it:
Manage your sales team by keeping them informed of what the sales and marketing teams are doing and encouraging collaboration between them. Listen to the sales team’s feedback on your leads and apply it as much as possible. Keep them in the loop with good communication tools that allow the marketing and sales teams to communicate the tone they should follow.
6. Don’t forget your cold leads
Even though leads go cold for many reasons, that doesn’t mean you should kick them out of your lead management software. In fact, according to Jim Obermayer, author of Managing Sales Leads: Turning Cold Prospects Into Hot Customers, 56% of leads who are looking to buy are still in the market within the next six months. 35% remain in the market after a year of initial contact.
Marylou Tyler, the author of Predictable Prospecting, found these results in a great marketing campaign focused on cold leads. With a designed campaign, Tyler’s marketing team engaged cold prospects by writing fun emails based on their information on them. They got opens and lured them in with a free course (that would guide them into completing a purchase later).
Within just five emails, they could increase their sign-up rate by close to 300%.
How can you apply it?
If a lead goes cold, don’t assume they’ll never convert. Instead, try to engage them through inexpensive sales and marketing efforts (such as content marketing and email marketing) by discovering how to reignite their interest and capitalize on it.
The lure can be a free eBook, a great offer or an invitation to keep them in the loop with your newsletter until they’re ready to buy.
What are the Common Challenges in Lead Management?
Effective lead management is crucial for converting prospects into loyal customers, but many businesses struggle with common pitfalls that can derail their sales and marketing efforts. Here are six key challenges and how to solve them:
1. Poor Lead Quality and Inaccurate Data
A frequent issue is filling the sales pipeline with low-quality leads that are unlikely to convert. This often stems from inaccurate or incomplete data. Sales teams waste up to 50% of their time on unproductive prospecting. Data quality issues include outdated contact information, duplicates and missing details. These undermine targeting and personalization efforts.
Implement a robust lead qualification and lead scoring process. Frameworks like BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) help standardize what constitutes a qualified lead. Cleanse and standardize data within your CRM to ensure accuracy. Use multi-step forms that ask qualifying questions about project scope or timeline. This can help filter out less serious inquiries and provide valuable context for the sales team.
2. Misalignment Between Sales and Marketing Teams
When sales and marketing teams operate in silos, they often have conflicting definitions of a qualified lead. This leads to friction and lost sales opportunities. Marketing teams may focus on lead volume, while sales teams need high-quality, conversion-ready prospects. This misalignment can damage financial performance and result in inconsistent messaging.
Foster alignment by creating a shared definition of an ideal customer profile (ICP) and establishing common KPIs. Hold regular joint meetings to review progress, share insights and co-create campaigns. This collaboration ensures marketing efforts generate leads that the sales team values and can convert.
3. Ineffective Lead Tracking and Routing
Without a centralized system, leads from various marketing channels (website, events, campaigns) can get lost, assigned to the wrong person or ignored. This lack of visibility makes it impossible to determine which lead sources are most effective or what happened to a lead after the initial touchpoint.
Utilize a customer relationship management (CRM) system to centralize and automate lead tracking. A CRM provides a single source of truth. It allows you to monitor a lead’s entire journey. Implement clear rules for lead distribution to ensure prospects are assigned to the appropriate sales representative for timely follow-up.
4. Slow or Non-Existent Lead Follow-Up
Time is critical in lead management. The odds of qualifying a lead decrease after just 30 minutes. However, many companies fail to respond. This allows promising leads to go cold or engage with a competitor.
Establish a clear process and set expectations for timely follow-up. Automate initial responses and notifications through your CRM to ensure every lead receives immediate acknowledgment. For high-priority leads, instant alerts can be sent to the sales team via email or SMS to trigger a swift, personal response.
5. Lack of a Cohesive Lead Nurturing Strategy
Not all leads are ready to buy right away. Many businesses make the mistake of either pushing for a sale too early or failing to engage leads over time. This causes them to lose interest. Without a structured nurturing process, potential customers who need more information or time will fall out of the sales funnel.
Develop a lead nurturing strategy that delivers relevant, personalized content based on the lead’s stage in the customer journey. Use marketing automation to send targeted emails, case studies or educational content that addresses their specific pain points and builds trust over time. This keeps your brand top-of-mind until the prospect is ready to make a purchase decision.
6. Difficulty Measuring ROI
Many organizations struggle to measure the return on investment (ROI) of their lead management efforts. Without clear metrics, it’s difficult to justify marketing spend or optimize lead management strategies for better sales performance.
Define and track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as cost per lead (CPL), conversion rates and customer lifetime value (CLV). Integrate your CRM with analytics tools to implement attribution modeling. This helps credit specific channels and campaigns for their role in generating revenue and provides a clear view of what’s working.
Lead Management Software
You’ll need great lead management software if you want to manage leads. Here are the best options for lead management tools.
UpLead
Here are some of UpLead’s best features.
List Building
With accurate information on over 180+ million contacts in 200+ countries worldwide, UpLead is the perfect way to build lead lists. You can search among the vast amount of contacts and narrow down your potential leads by using over 50 criteria. These include industry, job title, location, revenue and more!
Input the information of your ideal lead and let UpLead show you who they are and how to contact them.
Rich Profiles
The more you know about your leads, the better. That’s why UpLead offers you detailed, intuitive profiles you can interact with and share with your sales team. Then they’ll be able to picture who they’re contacting.
Technology Tracking
Target new accounts according to the technologies they use.
UpLead helps you identify new targets via specific technologies, such as their CRM. With a list of over 16,000 technologies, you can narrow down the ones your perfect lead uses and gather new qualified leads.
Data Enrichment
Do you have a database? You can enrich it by uploading it to UpLead and letting it enhance it with information like email addresses, phone numbers and contact titles. With over 50 fields, Uplead can enrich your database and fill up the holes within a matter of seconds.
Lead generation doesn’t have to be all that painful. With UpLead, you can easily connect with high-quality prospects and leads to grow your company.
HubSpot
Besides offering marketing solutions, HubSpot has lead management software. With it, you can automate emails, record calls with your leads and share notes with your sales reps to optimize your lead management.
Among their features, you can find:
- Lead personalization
- Easy sales-activity tracking
- Live Chat & Bots
- Facebook & Instagram Lead Ads
- Email Templates & Documents
- Pipeline Management
- Contact & Company Insights
Pipedrive
Founded in 2010, Pipedrive claims to be the first CRM platform made for salespeople, by salespeople. This cloud-based lead management software is built around activity-based selling and visual pipelines that are easy to put together.
Here are some of the things they offer for lead management:
- Visual sales pipelines
- Chatbot helper
- Customizable web forms
- Products Catalog
- Deal probability and rotting
- Caller service
Salesforce
A global leader in CRM and related activities, Salesforce also has a great lead management feature. You can use it to track active leads, score leads and redirect them to the appropriate team. You can also use the data it generates to learn from your process and update your lead management.
The key differentiator in 2025 is its deep AI integration with Einstein AI for predictive lead scoring, forecasting and automated insights. Einstein lead scoring analyzes historical data to predict conversion likelihood with scores 1-100, while Einstein Copilot automates tasks like email drafting and Einstein Forecasting improves accuracy.
Here are some of the features you get with Salesforce:
- Lead tracking
- Automatic and manual lead assignment
- Marketing-activity tracking
- Detailed lead profiles
- Great reports and dashboards
- Salesforce forecasting
- A mobile app
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is a comprehensive, cloud-based platform designed to manage sales, marketing and customer support activities in a single system. It is a core part of Zoho’s extensive suite of over 40 business applications. This makes it a strong contender for an all-in-one business solution.
Key features include:
- AI-Powered Assistant (Zia) for predictive sales analysis and task automation
- Deep Customization with Blueprint process management
- Omnichannel Communication integrating phone, email and social media
- Broad App Suite Integration with Zoho One ecosystem
Pricing starts at $14/user/month (Standard) with a free edition for up to 3 users. Best for small to medium-sized businesses that want a powerful, customizable and affordable all-in-one platform.
Freshworks CRM
Freshworks CRM (formerly Freshsales) is another sales type of CRM software with great lead management capabilities. It has a 360-degree customer dashboard, where you can track lead activities and have a built-in lead scoring system to classify them. Freshworks CRM makes collaborations between sales and marketing teams easier via a built-in calendar, a file management tool and a good note function that makes sharing ideas and information on leads easy.
The platform emphasizes its AI-powered assistant, Freddy AI, which provides predictive contact scoring, deal insights and lead generation bots across different plan tiers.
Some of their other features are:
- Lead enrichment & tracking
- Auto profile enrichment
- Lead segmentation
- Role-based access
- Custom views
- Smart fields
- Marketing automation capabilities
Keap
Keap is an all-in-one CRM, sales and marketing automation platform, formerly known as Infusionsoft. It is positioned for small, service-based businesses like consultants, coaches and professional services.
Key features include:
- CRM & Automation with visual campaign builder
- Appointments & Scheduling with automated booking
- Quotes, Invoices & Payments processing
- Email & SMS Marketing with dedicated business phone line
Pricing starts at $199/month for 1,500 contacts. Best for established small to mid-sized service businesses, coaches and consultants who need to automate client acquisition and management processes.
Monday Sales CRM
Monday Sales CRM is a visual and customizable customer relationship management platform built on the flexible monday.com Work OS. It transforms the traditional CRM experience into a dynamic, no-code workspace where teams can manage everything from lead capture to post-sale activities.
Key features include:
- Visual & Customizable Pipelines with Kanban-style boards
- Automation & Integration with recipe-based workflows
- Real-Time Dashboards & Reporting with instant insights
- AI-Powered Features including email generator and workflows
Pricing starts at $12/seat/month (Basic) with a 3-seat minimum. Best for small to medium-sized businesses and growing sales teams that need a flexible, easy-to-use and visual platform.
What is the Role of AI in Modern Lead Management?
In modern lead management, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transitioned from a futuristic concept to a tool that drives efficiency, accuracy and revenue growth. By automating and optimizing key processes, AI empowers sales and marketing teams to focus on high-value activities and build stronger customer relationships. Organizations using AI for lead generation report significant gains. They receive 50% more sales-ready leads and reduce customer acquisition costs by up to 60%.
1. Predictive Lead Scoring
AI-powered predictive lead scoring models analyze historical and real-time data—including demographics, behavioral signals and lead engagement patterns—to predict a lead’s likelihood of converting. Unlike traditional, rule-based scoring, AI learns and refines its predictions. This improves accuracy over time. It eliminates guesswork and human bias. Sales teams can prioritize their efforts on high-potential leads with genuine buying intent. This can shorten the sales cycle and increase conversion rates.
2. Automated Data Enrichment and Hygiene
AI tools clean, update and enrich lead data within a CRM. They can append missing information like job titles, company size and contact details by tapping into public and private data sources. AI also ensures data hygiene by identifying and merging duplicates, correcting errors and verifying information in real time. High-quality, enriched data is the foundation of effective personalization and targeting. It saves sales reps significant time—20% of which is often spent correcting data—and improves the accuracy of all sales and marketing activities.
3. AI-Powered Chatbots for Lead Qualification
AI chatbots engage website visitors 24/7. They ask intelligent, pre-defined questions to qualify them in real time. They can determine a prospect’s needs, budget and timeline (BANT). They can even schedule meetings within the chat interface. Chatbots ensure instant responses. This prevents high-intent leads from dropping off. By filtering and scoring leads, they ensure the sales team engages only with sales qualified leads. This can increase qualified pipeline by up to 300%.
4. Hyper-Personalization at Scale
AI analyzes vast datasets to enable hyper-personalization across all touchpoints. AI agents can craft tailored email outreach, suggest personalized talking points for calls and recommend the next best action for each prospect based on their unique lead behavior and profile. Personalized communication is no longer a luxury but a necessity for cutting through the noise. By delivering relevant content at the right moment, businesses can create a better customer experience, build stronger relationships and improve lead engagement and conversion rates.
5. AI-Driven Sales Forecasting
AI sales forecasting tools analyze historical data, pipeline health and deal engagement signals to predict future revenue with greater accuracy than traditional methods. These tools provide real-time insights into deal progress and identify potential risks in the pipeline. Accurate forecasting is critical for strategic business planning, from resource allocation to setting revenue targets. By providing data-driven predictions, AI reduces the impact of human bias and helps sales leaders make proactive decisions to mitigate risks and ensure targets are met.
Lead Management: Conclusion
Proper lead management is key to the success of your sales pipeline. You can keep your pipeline healthy and effective by scoring your leads, communicating with your sales team and applying your learnings to improve your lead management system.
If you want to succeed at lead management, use the right lead management tools and you’ll convert leads.
