You must quite familiar with the terms like lead, prospect, opportunity, and many other terms if you work in sales or marketing. These terms have different connotations in an educational organisation, we’ll clarify the differences between lead and opportunity management for you and assist you in better understanding it.
Lead and Opportunity Management is a crucial aspect of sales and marketing that helps organisations to identify, nurture, and convert leads into paying customers (candidates). This process helps to maximise the return on investment in sales and marketing efforts and achieve the desired business outcomes.
What is a Lead?
A lead is a potential customer who has shown interest in a course offered by an educational organisation. Leads are usually generated through various marketing channels such as social media, email campaigns, webinars, and events.
What is Lead Management?
Lead management is the process of identifying, capturing, nurturing, and converting leads into customers. The goal of lead management is to prioritise and manage leads based on their potential and convert them into paying customers. Steps involved in Lead Management Process:
- Lead Generation: Identifying and capturing leads through various marketing channels.
- Lead Qualification: Evaluating leads based on their potential value to the organisation.
- Lead Nurturing: Building relationships with leads through targeted communication and education.
- Lead Conversion: Closing the sale and converting leads into paying customers.
How CRM helps in Lead Management?
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system helps to automate and streamline the lead management process. It provides a centralised database to store and manage leads and helps to track and analyse lead behaviour and engagement. It also enables organisations to personalise communication and tailor the lead nurturing process to meet the specific needs of each lead.
What is an Opportunity?
An opportunity is a potential sale that has been qualified as having a high likelihood of closing. In order words, an opportunity can also be known as a potential candidate. Opportunities are usually tracked in a sales pipeline and are managed through the opportunity management process.
What is Opportunity Management?
Opportunity Management refers to the process of tracking and managing sales opportunities. The goal of opportunity management in CRM is to increase sales and revenue by providing visibility into the sales process and ensuring that all sales opportunities are tracked and managed effectively.
What is a Sales Pipeline?
A sales pipeline is a visual representation of the sales process showing the end-to-end progress of each opportunity. It helps organisations track the status of each opportunity and provide visibility into the sales process. A sales pipeline contains various stages and in order to move from one step to the next, the lead must meet certain requirements. These demonstrate a lead’s level of interest in your organisation. An individual who has progressed through several phases and is currently in the last or second last step, just before closing the deal, is said to be a sales opportunity.
When does a Lead become an Opportunity?
Leads that have high chances of getting converted into sales deals often have many opportunities associated with them. For a lead to qualify as an opportunity is mainly done with the help of the sales team and their assurance based on certain pointers, making sure that only authentic opportunities go into the sales pipeline.
Lead and Opportunity Management: A Closer Look at the Difference
Lead management focuses on identifying, nurturing, and converting leads into customers, however, opportunity management prioritises tracking and managing sales opportunities. While lead management is a crucial part of the overall sales process, it integrates with opportunity management to ensure sales potential. Lead Management and Opportunity Management are interrelated concepts in sales and marketing which focus on different stages of the sales process
- Lead Management: The goal of lead management is to identify and nurture leads to convert them into customers. It involves activities such as lead generation, lead qualification, lead nurturing, and lead conversion.
- Opportunity Management: The goal of opportunity management is to track and manage sales opportunities within a sales pipeline to increase sales and revenue. It involves activities such as opportunity creation, opportunity qualification, opportunity tracking, opportunity forecasting, and opportunity analysis.
Both concepts work together to achieve the desired business outcomes wherein opportunity management is an evolved version of lead management.
Lead and Opportunity Management in a CRM
A CRM system provides a centralised platform to manage both lead and opportunity management processes. It provides a centralised database to store and manage leads and opportunities and helps organisations track and analyse lead and opportunity behaviour. CRM also enables organisations to personalise communication and tailor the lead nurturing and opportunity management processes to meet the specific needs of each lead and opportunity.
A CRM allows leads to automatically collected, stored, distributed, and nurtured, and this comes under Lead Management. Additionally, it enables you with drip marketing and allows you to create landing sites. You can integrate it with other platforms like social media by utilising a variety of third-party APIs.
Coming to opportunity management, leads can be prioritised for that too by the CRM suite. It provides you visibility as to which lead you should concentrate on first using data-driven predictions. Since every lead in the system has a progress bar that you may follow. A CRM provides you with a thorough overview of every contact you have. You can monitor the revenue, anticipate closure and the prospects that require urgent action. Additionally, it serves as a central location for document storage, the sending of quotations and invoices, team collaboration, and the use of robust reports to assess your sales and marketing initiatives.
By combining lead and opportunity management under one roof, CRM software makes both processes simpler.
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