Lead Response Management: What it is, Why it’s Important, & Best Practices

If you aren’t taking lead response management seriously, you’re leaving money on the table. 

No, that’s not an exaggeration. A Harvard Business Review study shows that speed and persistence are two of the biggest factors impacting whether a lead converts into a closed-won deal. In other words, lead generation is only Step One of a much longer process. How you manage leads post-conversion determines whether or not you win their business. 

In this article, we’ll walk through some top lead response management best practices to help you accelerate speed-to-lead and get more qualified bookings. 

Key takeaways

• Lead response management is the process of qualifying, routing, and nurturing leads pre- and post-conversion
• According to data from HubSpot, 82% of customers require an “immediate” response rate (10 minutes or faster)
• Manual processes can’t keep up with lead expectations of speed and personalization—automated lead management technology is table stakes

What is lead response management? 

Lead response management is the process of qualifying, routing, and communicating with leads after the initial point of conversion. The primary goal of lead response management is to take potential customers and convert them into business. 

Some common lead response management practices include:

• Setting up automated lead responses to capture interest at the point of conversion and book a qualified meeting
• Routing leads to sales team members through round-robin, rules-based automation, or predictive lead scoring
• Monitoring lead performance during the sales funnel and identifying friction or dropoff points among potential customers
• Streamlining and integrating lead response processes to accelerate meeting bookings

Why is it important to respond to leads quickly?

We live in a fast-paced world. Consumers expect quick responses from the brands they engage with. expectations. According to recent HubSpot data, 82% of consumers expect an “immediate” response when reaching out to a brand for marketing and sales. 

And if you’re wondering what “immediate” means, most respondents define that as 10 minutes or less. As far as average lead response times go, that's pretty wild.

Image source: HubSpot

This holds for B2B sales cycles as strongly as B2C. B2B sales reps who respond to inbound leads in less than 30 minutes makes you 21X more likely to qualify them. Responding in less than five minutes, makes you 100X more likely to get a response. 

In other words, you should shoot for an average lead response time of five minutes or less.

And if you think your competitors aren’t aware of this data, think again. They’re building lead response management systems to get in touch with your ICPs before you do. So the longer it takes for you reach out to inbound leads with a timely response, the more ground you’re ceding to your competitors.

5 lead response management best practices

As you build your lead response management system, here are five best practices Default and our clients use to increase bookings and accelerate speed-to-lead. 

1. Respond to inbound leads as quickly as possible

As mentioned earlier, the best way to ensure inbound leads convert to a qualified meeting is to reach out as quickly as humanly possible. That’s easier said than done. Consider everything that has to happen within those first five minutes:

• Form submission
• Enrichment from third-party sources—this helps improve qualification accuracy and personalized outreach
• Lead scoring and qualification to prioritize the highest value leads
• Distribution and routing to the appropriate sales rep 
• Initial personalized outreach to the lead
• Scheduling and booking a meeting

If you’re trying to do all that manually, there’s no way you’ll get it done in five minutes. That’s one reason why automation is a critical part of this process. 

2. Enrich leads with third-party data

Lead forms only capture so much data. And it’s never enough to effectively qualify a lead or personalize your outreach. That’s where lead enrichment software comes in. Enrichment software pulls hundreds of data points from third-party sources into your customer relationship management (CRM) system, including the following categories:

• Contact details
• Demographics
• Firmographics
• Intent data
• Behavioral data

All of these insights together give you an idea of who your lead is and where they are in the buying journey (especially if you use AI to summarize the top insights from these data). This helps you improve the likelihood of closing your inbound leads. 

3. Be persistent in your follow-up

Not every inbound lead is ready to buy after your initial contact. In fact, most aren’t—80% of inbound leads never close. But they’re interested enough to reach out, which means you’ll likely have more success nurturing and converting these down the line. 

In fact, our original research has shown that automating follow-up with inbound leads can lift conversions by 14%. Unfortunately, by relying on manual follow-up from individual sales reps, revenue organizations are leaving money on the table. 

4. Use AI where it adds value

AI isn’t a silver bullet. It isn’t guaranteed to provide value. It’s how you use it that counts. And here are some ways we’ve seen AI accelerate lead qualification and response rates: 

• Summarizing lead data to accelerate lead scoring and lead qualification
• Building predictive lead scoring models based on attributes of your most valuable customers and prospects that align heavily with your ICP
• Using enrichment data that’s automatically updated and corrected via AI (Clearbit does a great job of this)
• Using AI-generated insights to develop customized lead routing and distribution workflows

The common thread through all these areas is that AI is excellent at automating time-consuming, administrative tasks. This enables your RevOps and GTM teams to invest more of their time and energy in going out and winning new business. 

5. Automate as much of the sales pipeline as possible

The more you can automate your lead management process, the better. For early-stage companies, you have a small team and limited resources, so you don’t want it to be taken up by manual lead routing, lead distribution, and sales scheduling. For more mature organizations, it's impossible to ensure a rapid response when you have a high lead volume.

Inbound marketing automation software, then, is a must-have. And if you don’t want to waste time managing a Frankenstack of various point solutions, you should choose an all-in-one platform like Default. 

What are the five stages of lead management?

Lead management happens in five stages. Sometimes these follow a linear pattern or progression, but not always. In modern, non-linear customer journeys, double-backs, re-entry, and omnichannel touch points tend to complicate this picture. 

Regardless of the exact sequence, here are the five steps lead management typically takes within a B2B organization. 

1. Lead capture

Before you can manage a lead, you first have to capture it. Lead capture can happen through a variety of channels, including forms, chat flows, in-person event sign-up, and more. No matter the channel, the function is the same: capture enough information to contact the lead, and get them to opt into future communications with your organization. 

According to Default’s proprietary analysis of over 88K+ leads and 19K+ qualified meetings, the fewer form fields, the better. In fact, fewer than five form fields can increase conversions by 200%. 

But five questions is hardly enough to learn enough about the lead to qualify, route, or communicate with in a personalized way. That’s where data enrichment comes in. By using lead form automation software that pulls in third-party demographics, firmographics, intent data, and more, you get the best of both worlds. 

2. Lead tracking

As soon as you capture a lead’s email address and IP address, you can start tracking their engagement with your marketing channels. 

Especially if you have lots of top-of-funnel opt-in and conversion opportunities—newsletters, eBooks, webinars, etc.—lead tracking is a great way to monitor engagement. When a lead demonstrates high interest in your product, you can then convert them. 

Some common lead tracking best practices include:

• Use a centralized platform to capture and manage the data—usually this is a RevOps software that orchestrates your entire tech stack (like Default) combined with your CRM
• Don’t track everything—define 3-5 high-impact metrics and focus your efforts on tracking that process
• Track lead sources—this will provide insight into where you should prioritize your marketing efforts
• Use AI/ML tools to accelerate lead scoring and summarize insights from leads—we’ve found this increases qualification speed by 31%
• Set clear qualification standards and marketing-to-sales handoff rules—that way your team is all rowing in the same direction

3. Lead qualification

Your sales team has a limited number of hours in the day. When you’re first building your inbound flow, it may be feasible for them to talk to everyone who fills out a website form. In fact, in those early days, those conversations can be a valuable source of industry and market insight—even if those contacts never convert. 

But as you start to scale up your inbound flow, you’ll have too many leads to respond to them all. Your reps will have to start prioritizing when they spend their time. That’s where lead qualification comes in: only sending good-fit, ready-to-buy leads to the sales team. 

Most lead qualification software will use some kind of lead scoring model to automatically surface the most qualified leads. The most common approaches to lead scoring are:

1. Traditional lead scoring, which takes all the data at your disposal and scores individually on each data point to create a total lead score. Leads exceeding that score are considered to be qualified.
2. Predictive lead scoring, which takes all the data at your disposal and creates an AI model to determine the best predictors of fit based on your current customer base

4. Lead distribution

Once a lead has been qualified, you need to assign a sales rep to handle and service them. The faster this happens, the higher the likelihood of booking a meeting and, by extension, closing the deal. 

Different organizations will distribute and route leads differently. Some common practices include:

• Round-robin lead routing, where leads are distributed evenly across the team
• Rules-based lead routing, where leads are distributed to the rep most likely to close based on certain criteria (e.g. geography, industry, experience)
• Predictive lead routing, where AI analyzes leads and determines the rep most likely to close them based on their current book of business

Whatever lead distribution model you use, the most important thing is that it happens fast. Otherwise, you’ll just end up leaving money on the table. 

5. Lead nurturing

Sometimes, a lead is ready to buy at the moment of conversion. Other times, they need more time to make up their mind. Often other tasks will come up, and the lead will drop off and forget to follow through.

So it’s important to follow-up and nurture leads after your initial contact. While your sales reps can do this manually, this approach has its risks—namely human error. In fact, we’ve found that organizations that automate follow-up and nurture improves conversion rates by as high as 14 percent.  

The importance of automated lead response management practices

It’s hard to manage leads quickly and persistently when you rely on manual action from your marketing and sales teams. Human error, lack of 24/7 coverage, PTO, open positions—any of these realities of personnel management will create gaps in your lead response process. 

The solution isn’t to make your team work around the clock. That’s a recipe for burnout, and it really doesn’t address the problem of human error. Instead, the solution is to build automated inbound sales and lead response management solutions.

But there are better and worse ways to do this. Choosing a patchwork of point solutions—e.g. separate calendaring, forms, workflows, enrichment tools—often leads to more problems than it causes. Broken integrations can ruin the whole stack, and each has its own way of classifying data that often is mistranslated from one platform to the other. 

Instead, it’s important to choose lead response software that meets the following criteria:

• All-in-one platform that handles forms, enrichment, qualification, routing, scheduling, and nurture
• Real-time, automated lead distribution based on real-time enrichment, captured data, CRM insights, and behavioral data from your PLG funnel
• Automated scheduling at the point of conversion
• Drag-and-drop, no-code workflows with a range of advanced customizations
• Deep integrations and orchestration capabilities for your underlying tech stack

Default is the only platform on the market that does all of these things. Learn more about our sales workflow and lead routing software here. 

Lead response management FAQs

What makes good lead management?

According to a recent Harvard Business Review study, good lead management rests on two factors: speed and persistence. These findings align with Default’s own original data, where speed and persistence have a major influence on conversion and booking rates. 

What is the first step in the lead management process?

The first step in the lead management process is lead capture. Most successful organizations use form automation software to capture key lead information (primarily name and email). Then, this software enriches the lead with third-party data to provide a more holistic picture. 

How do you create a lead management system?

Creating a lead management system starts with defining your processes and establishing your strategy. After that, choosing the right software is key to ensuring your automations support that strategy and avoid a slow lead response time.

Final thoughts on lead response management

Lead response management is a critical component of any inbound strategy. If you’re going to all the trouble of generating the leads, you should do everything you can to increase their likelihood to close.

The best way to improve speed and persistence is with sales workflow software that manages the whole sales process from start to finish. If you want to see how our customers have accelerated speed-to-lead by 67% and increased qualified bookings by 200%, schedule a Default demo today. 

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