How to Organize Sales Leads: A Comprehensive Guide for SDRs

You may have a vast sea of potential clients. But, it all can go to waste if you don't approach them as per their unique needs and preferences. 

You may feel surprised, but:

41% of companies struggle to follow up with leads quickly. It's because leads often come in large numbers after business hours. And it gets difficult for them to segment and approach leads properly. 

Now, you can imagine the lost sales opportunities. 

This is where you need to learn how to organize sales leads — putting leads into proper categories and prioritizing them accordingly.

By doing so, you will no longer be shooting in the dark but hitting your target with laser precision.

What do you gain from it?

Well, efficiently generating sales leads and organizing them can boost your business’s productivity. Plus, it provides your sales team with valuable insights. 

How can you achieve it? Let us tell you all about it.

How to Organize Sales Leads

When you organize sales leads, you systematically arrange your potential customers’ details. It helps discover needed lead information while performing your sales and marketing efforts. Thus, you can streamline the sales process and maximize conversion rates. 

Benefits of Organizing Leads for Your Business

Here are four key benefits of effective B2B lead organization for your business:

1. Improved Efficiency

Efficient lead organization helps your sales and marketing teams save time and resources. 

How? 

When you segment your leads into specific categories, your sales and marketing team can quickly determine how to approach them. Your team can pinpoint leads that are more likely to convert. It results in increased productivity and better resource allocation.

2. Enhanced Lead Nurturing

You can tailor your communication strategies based on where each lead stands in the buying cycle. Such personalized nurturing shortens the sales cycle by 23%. Thus, your likelihood of driving leads ahead in the sales funnel rises exceptionally. 

3. Better Targeting

When you know each of your leads based on their industries, size, needs, or other relevant criteria, you create highly targeted marketing campaigns. 

4. Data-Driven Decision-Making

Organized lead data provides valuable insights into your sales and marketing efforts. By analyzing the performance of different lead categories, you can:

• Adjust your strategies
• Allocate resources more effectively
• Continuously improve your approach based on real data

Now that you have learned the prime benefits let us tell you how to organize leads in the best ways. 

4 Steps to Organize and Manage Your Sales Leads

Here's the 4-step process to organize your B2B sales leads: 

1. Collect, Store, and Clean Lead Data 

Follow the below steps for effective collection, storage, and cleaning of your lead data: 

A. Collect Lead Data 

Here are a few ways to prepare your lead database: 

• Identify various sources that can help you gather your potential target's data. These can include you:
  • Website contact forms
  • Social media analytics 
  • Industry events
  • Webinars 
  • Email sign-ups
  • Purchased lists

• Offer gated lead magnets like case studies, or free trials in exchange for the lead's contact information. Craft compelling content and calls to action to encourage prospects to share their information willingly. 
• Implement user-friendly forms on your website and landing pages.
• Run customized and tailored cold email campaigns to encourage sign-ups on lead forms and exclusive offers.
• Attend industry events and trade shows to meet potential leads and get their contact data. You can do the same via virtual events, like webinars. For instance, you can host webinars to capture attendee data.
• Use chatbots on your website to engage interested visitors and collect initial lead information.

B. Store the Lead Data

We recommend these two ways, depending on your business needs: 

• Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel: These are suitable for businesses with a small lead count. You can create spreadsheets to input lead data, including name, company, contact information, and other relevant details. However, we recommend dropping this method if your business is about to scale up in a few months or years. It's because you may struggle to find practical tactics on how to manage sales leads of a growing business via a spreadsheet. 

• CRM Systems: Customer Relationship Management systems, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, or Zoho, are more appropriate for businesses with a larger volume of leads. They offer robust features for lead organization, automated follow-ups, and analytics. If you are wondering how to stay organized in sales efforts while your business shoots up, then using CRM is the answer. 

C. Clean the Collected and Stored Lead Data

We understand you spent precious time gathering and storing your lead data. But, not all lead information you have will be valuable. You may even find it hard to drive desired results via the information you have. But what if we say you can boost your data quality by 75%? 

That's possible once you start cleaning your stored data regularly for data enrichment. 

Do the following to clean the data: 

• Regularly update and validate your leads' contact information to prevent communication errors. 
• Use data validation tools to ensure email addresses and phone numbers are correct. You can use tools like Datameer, Talend, or Informatica.
• Remove duplicates and outdated leads to keep your database streamlined.

2. Categorize Your B2B Leads

Once you collect valid and clean lead data, put them in appropriate categories. 

This method is the backbone of your well-organized lead information. Here are the categories to segment your leads: 

3. Prioritize Promising Leads  

Now, let's move on to learn how to prioritize sales leads that may turn into opportunities soon!

After categorizing your leads, set high priority to leads with comparatively more potential to convert. It maximizes the likelihood of closing deals.

We recommend you take the following approach to prioritize your leads precisely: 

A. Lead Scoring 

Lead scoring systematically assigns numerical values to leads based on various criteria to gauge their potential. It helps you distinguish between high-quality and low-quality leads to allocate resources effectively.

While applying lead scoring, consider the following factors: 

• Engagement: Assess the lead's interactions with your brand, such as website visits, email opens, and social media engagement.
• Fit (Alignment with Ideal Customer Profile): Evaluate how well the lead matches your ideal customer persona.
• Behavior: Analyze lead behavior, like downloading resources, attending webinars, or requesting product demos.

• Buying Signals: Identify actions that indicate the lead's intention to purchase, like requesting a quote or pricing information.
• Weighting and Scoring System: Assign points to each factor, reflecting their importance. For example, engagement might receive a higher score than fit. The total score determines the lead's priority.

B.  Lead Qualification/Prioritization Frameworks

Around 34% of salespeople say lead qualification is one of their main challenges. 

But you can easily tackle it by implementing lead qualification frameworks. This way, you can standardize your lead qualification and provide a structured approach to evaluating leads. Thus, you can prioritize who to focus on based on the specific criteria most relevant to your business. 

Some of the best qualification methods for B2B business are:

3. Lead Segmentation

Once you get a qualified lead list, put promising contacts into different categories. It’ll help you tailor your approach and run targeted campaigns for high-priority leads. 

Here are the prime lead segmentation categories and details on how they help customize your content: 

• Company size: Classify leads based on the scale of their organization (number of employees, market capitalization, etc). It’ll help in aligning product recommendations. 
• Revenue: Segregate leads by their financial performance/budget to tailor your subscription package offers.
• Name: Personalize outreach by categorizing leads according to individual names/company names for more effective interactions.
• Job Title: Target decision-makers by sorting leads based on their professional roles within your target organizations.
• Country: Organize leads by country to account for regional variations and target market-specific needs.
• City: Refine targeting further by segmenting leads based on their specific city locations. It’ll help you align your content with local marketing trends. 
• U.S. State: Localize strategies by categorizing leads according to their U.S. state, considering regional preferences.
• Industry (SIC or NAICS): Group leads based on industry codes to align marketing efforts with sector-specific trends.
• Status: Classify leads according to their engagement status or readiness to enhance lead nurturing strategies.

4. Follow Best Practices 

Make your lead organization process more effective with these best practices: 

1. Run Regular Data Updates

No need to say that outdated or incorrect information can lead to wasted resources.

Thus, you must keep your lead data accurate, scheduling routine data cleansing and validation. This way, you can ensure your lead database is up-to-date.

It may involve verifying contact details, company information, and other relevant data.

2. Perform Lead Segmentation for Personalized Outreach

Lead segmentation allows you to tailor your messaging to different types of leads.

Make different lead groups based on criteria like:

• Industry company size
• Location
• Behavior, etc. 

Further, craft customized messages and offers for each segment.

3. Maintain Collaboration Between Sales and Marketing Teams

You can enjoy a smooth lead-handoff process if you maintain close alignment between sales & marketing teams. Plus, it gives you a better understanding of lead requirements.

Some of the best ways to do so include:

• Regularly scheduled meetings to foster communication between both departments.
• Using collaboration tools like Slack, Trello, Zoom, etc. 

Ensure both teams define lead qualification criteria together to avoid any blunder later. 

4. Review and Adjust Lead Scoring Criteria

This practice helps you prioritize leads that show sales opportunities. However, it should evolve as your business and market change.

Periodically hold a meeting to review your lead scoring system with the marketing and sales departments. Gather feedback from both teams to fine-tune criteria.

5. Test and Iterate Lead Qualification Frameworks

What works today may not work tomorrow. You should regularly test and improve your frameworks to optimize lead qualification. 

We suggest implementing A/B testing of different frameworks. Also, experiment with multiple lead nurturing approaches and measure their impact on conversion rates. This is how to keep track of sales leads that are promising.

Conclusion

Lead organization isn't just for convenience. It also creates systematic segmenting of your lead. Hence, you can easily identify high-potential prospects, optimize your outreach efforts, and improve conversion rates.

Besides regularly updating and refining your lead management strategy, getting expert guidance can put you ahead of the competition. And Revnew, a thriving outbound lead generation agency, has it all. Our experts help you identify and apply the best lead management practices exclusive to your business. Contact us today to learn how we can help you.