The 6 Best Sales Lead Management Software for Small Businesses

Staying on top of leads is a very important step in managing your small business, and having the right tools can make all the difference. To help you manage your leads, we’ve put together a list of the 6 best sales lead management tools made just for small businesses like yours.

These tools are more than your basic solutions – they act like your personal assistant for handling leads. They not only help collect leads but also track how customers approach your business, score leads, and even automate nurturing processes. Sales lead management software is a great tool, making lead management a breeze for small business owners like yourself. 

When you’ve got the right sales lead management software, you have the opportunity to turn potential customers into long-time customers. Let’s dive into these amazing tools, specially built to improve your small business.

What is sales lead management?

Sales lead management is a process businesses can use to handle potential customer inquiries or requests. It covers many things including generating leads and evaluating their suitability to distribute them within the business. For small business owners, it’s an important strategy for creating lasting relationships. Rather than just managing leads, it focuses on creating meaningful connections that contribute to revenue growth. Sales lead management is an important part in the journey of a small business, making sure no opportunity is overlooked and every interaction contributes to building a strong customer base.

By adopting a personalized lead management strategy, you’re not only streamlining your sales journey but also making the most of your resources. In the world of small businesses, where every connection matters, sales lead management becomes your perfect tool for creating and maintaining customer loyalty and ensuring a path to sustainable growth.

4 Essential Features to Look For in a Sales Lead Management Tool

When looking for the ideal lead management software for your small business, several key features can make a huge difference in your sales process. Let’s dive into 4 essential features that any top lead management tool should include:

1. Lead Capture Functions

Efficient lead capture is the first step towards building a strong sales pipeline. A great lead management tool should offer seamless lead capture functions, allowing you to gather important information from potential customers effortlessly. Whether through customizable forms, website integrations, or other channels, a tool with effective lead capture ensures you don’t miss out on valuable opportunities.

2. Lead Tracking

Once you’ve captured leads, the ability to track their journey becomes very important. A strong and efficient lead management tool should provide comprehensive lead tracking, giving you insights into their interactions with your small business. This includes monitoring website visits, email interactions, and other aspects, empowering you to suit your approach based on their engagement levels.

3. Lead Scoring and Qualification

Every lead is unique, and a good lead management tool should get that. You should look for software that incorporates lead scoring and qualification features. This functionality enables you to assign values to leads based on their behaviors and characteristics, allowing you to prioritize and focus your efforts on leads with the highest potential for conversion or buying from your small business.

4. Lead Nurturing Automation

Building and maintaining relationships with leads require consistent and targeted communication. A great lead management tool should offer automation abilities for lead nurturing. This includes personalized email campaigns and other automated workflows that keep your leads engaged and moving through the sales funnel without too much effort.

In your search for the right lead management tool, you should prioritize solutions that excel in these key areas. All these features contribute to a streamlined and effective lead management process, empowering your small business to convert leads into loyal customers.

Top 6 Sales Lead Management Software

Selecting the right sales lead management software is significant for small businesses, and several options stand out in the market. Here’s a rundown of 6 leading solutions, each with its unique features, advantages, and considerations:

1. Podium

Podium is a versatile lead management tool that not only captures leads efficiently but also offers unified communication capabilities. It streamlines lead tracking, provides lead scoring, and facilitates automated nurturing.

Podium excels in integrating customer communication channels and enhancing engagement. Its user-friendly interface and seamless integration with various business tools make it a popular choice.

2. Keap

Keap is known for its great lead tracking and automation features. It enables small businesses to create targeted marketing campaigns, manage contacts, and streamline sales processes.

Pros: Cheap offers comprehensive CRM functionality, integrating marketing, and sales, and customer service. The visual campaign builder simplifies automation, making it accessible for businesses of all sizes.

Cons: The learning curve for utilizing its full range of features may be hard to grasp, and some users may find it more suitable for larger enterprises rather than small businesses.

3. Zoho

Zoho is a feature-filled solution that provides a simple view of leads throughout the sales cycle. It includes lead tracking, automation, and analytics, empowering small businesses to make informed decisions.

Pros: Zoho’s scalability suits businesses of various sizes, and its customization options allow users to suit the platform to their specific needs. It also integrates seamlessly with other Zoho applications.

Cons: Users may find the initial setup process hard to understand, and certain advanced features may require more of a learning curve.

4. Lead Docket

Lead Docket is designed specifically for the legal industry, offering lead tracking, client management, and automated communication features tailored to the legal industry’s needs.

Pros: Lead Docket streamlines legal lead management, providing a centralized hub for case details and client interactions. Its user-friendly interface simplifies the management of legal leads.

Cons: Given its legal industry focus, it may not be as useful for small businesses outside the legal sector.

5. Leadfeeder

Leadfeeder focuses on website visitor tracking, helping small businesses identify potential leads by providing insights into website traffic and interactions.

Pros: Leadfeeder offers a unique approach by uncovering leads from website visits, providing valuable data for businesses to target potential customers. It integrates seamlessly with various CRM platforms.

Cons: The software may be more suitable for small businesses with a significant online presence, and some users may find it lacks the depth of features offered by more comprehensive CRM solutions.

6. ClickPoint

ClickPoint, known for its lead management and automation tools, offers features like lead scoring, routing, and analytics to optimize the sales process.

Pros: ClickPoint’s lead distribution and routing features enhance sales efficiency, ensuring leads are directed to the most appropriate team members. The platform is customizable to fit specific business workflows.

Cons: Some users may find the interface less intuitive compared to other solutions, and additional features may require separate subscriptions.

Exploring these sales lead management software options allows small businesses to identify the solution that best fits with their needs and operational requirements.

 8 Sales Lead Management Tips

With the strategies we have below, you’ll be able to create efficient processes that help you quickly route leads to the right person so you can respond faster. By doing this, you’ll increase conversions and sales, and grow your revenue!

1. Know your customers’ communication preferences.

Personalizing the customer experience starts with knowing which channels your customers are on and how they prefer to communicate with you. Yet, research shows there has historically been a disconnect between the communication channels customers prefer and the channels businesses emphasize. 40% of businesses say that engaging customers in their preferred channels has been a challenge.

It’s also important to consider which communication methods your customers prefer based on different circumstances, such as their age, reason for calling, or geographical location. 

Make sure your business is offering your customers the communication methods they want to use—whether it’s phone, text, chat, or email. Having a single, consolidated inbox that converts inbound leads into text messages allows your brand to receive and respond to all leads in one place, keep track of leads and conversations more easily, and respond quickly to each inquiry. And, because you’re responding on the channel your customers prefer, you’ll also be more likely to start a real conversation and ultimately get more conversions.     

2. Make sure your customers can easily find you.

Being visible where your customers spend their time online is a critical aspect of generating inbound leads. Here are some important steps you can take to make it easier for prospects to find you:

• Establish an online presence: Having an online presence for your business is crucial. Most consumers rely on the internet to discover local businesses.
• Invest in SEO: Next, make sure you’re easy to find online by investing in the channels that your customers will most likely use to find you. Typically, this is organic search and paid SEO, but it’s important to know your specific market and customers. Consumers prefer to connect with EPS through organic SEO or their Google Business Profile page.
• Build a solid online reputation: When customers find you, you also want to make sure they’ll find positive reviews about your business. Most consumers (87%) read online reviews for local businesses and less than half would consider using a business with fewer than 4 stars. Google Business Profile (GBP) has become an extremely important method for business discovery in the last couple of years. Here are just a few of the most compelling GBP statistics:
• 94% of local business calls between Monday and Friday are from GBP.
• 64% of consumers have used GBP to find contact details for a local business.
• The typical business sees 59 actions from their GBP listing every month.
• Remember: A credible online reputation includes the quantity of reviews, a star rating of 4.0 or more, recency of reviews, and quality of reviews. Improve your reputation in each of these areas by implementing an SMS-based Reputation Management platform. By sending out review request links via text message, you’ll quickly see more engagement and results!

3. Make it fast and easy for prospects to contact you.

With a solid reputation in place, you’ll increase your search and web traffic, but the next step is to make it easier for leads to raise their hand and initiate the conversation with your local business. Leveraging the power of the SMS channel to create this convenience, here are a few key areas to focus on:

• Your GBP pages: Optimize your GBP pages for new customers by replacing the “Call” button with a “Text Us” option. You can do this by integrating your SMS platform with Google Business Profile. This removes a friction barrier from the process making it easier and less daunting for prospects to reach out. Plus, you’ll catch them while their intent is still hot!
• Your website:  Optimize your website for lead flow by:

• Using forms to collect SMS opt-ins
• Implementing a text-based web chat. You can use a chat box on your homepage to start, but an even more efficient use is to leverage it on your location pages. The right web chat solution will allow prospects to not only select the location they’d like to contact (if your business has multiple locations), but also convert the chat into a text message conversation that they continue with your brand even after they leave your website.
• Adding a “Text us!” CTA on your main site pages, with a textable number

• Your Facebook pages – Integrate your Facebook Messenger with your SMS platform to enable customers to convert messages into a text thread with your business and/or locations.
• Your phone systems – Certain SMS platforms enable you to give customers the option to text you instead of waiting on hold or dealing with phone trees. They can also reduce burdensome call volume by notifying you of missed calls and providing the option to text the customer back.

If you want to draw customers to your business more efficiently and cost-effectively—make sure you’re investing in the channels they’re using to contact you as well as optimizing for each of your locations. 

This will create a more efficient system for you/your locations, and an even better experience for your customers.

4. Implement better response strategies that will save you time and effort.

Once you have the basics of generating inbound leads under wraps by ensuring your customers can find you and communicate with you according to their preferences, it’s time to be more strategic in how you use those channels. Here are a couple ways to do this:

• Convert popular channels into text conversations: First, determine which communication channels are driving the most leads. Then, figure out how you can improve your response time on those channels. Most callers would prefer to text than leave a voicemail. If you can turn calls into texts, you’ll not only save your front desk and other customer or sales reps time, but you’ll also improve the customer experience. This would also help you avoid playing phone tag—and make your response times faster.
• Template responses to common inquiries: SMS platforms with text templates make it easier for you to quickly answer FAQs like business hours or store location, capture lead information, and convert conversations into appointments and/or sales. 

5. Centralize all leads into a single, consolidated inbox.

Is tracking and routing leads one of your biggest struggles? The right marketing and communication platform can make things much easier for your team and your business by providing a single, customizable inbox for all incoming and outgoing communications across channels—social media, text messages, phone calls, web inquiries, and more.

However, you’ll still need to determine how you want to route your leads. Should they go to a specific person or set of people first? Or should they be routed directly to the front desk?

The benefit of routing leads to a specific person or team is that it may provide more accountability—one person or team is responsible for determining which leads go where. 

However, it can also cause bottlenecks in the routing process, significantly delaying your ability to respond with help quickly. This is where having the right technology and process in place is key.

Having all your leads—no matter the channel or the communications format—come into a centralized inbox will make it much easier to keep track of and route leads quickly to the right person. And when you decentralize the process by routing those calls directly to specific employees, you can further boost the customer experience and your response speeds.

6. Don’t forget about customer experience.

Grabbing your customer’s attention online—whether through organic search, great reviews, or GBP—is only the first step in closing the deal. You also have to make sure you show customers that you understand what they need and that doing business with you will be easy. 

If you can deliver on those two customer experience promises—you’ll be ahead of 90% of businesses and more likely to earn new customers’ business.

Chatbots and automated phone trees can speed up a response to a customer, but they are only helpful if the customer experience also remains intact. A well-built phone tree, for instance, can answer a variety of potential customer questions or concerns, which means customers do get an immediate response. However, most customers deeply dislike the automated and impersonal approach of phone trees. 

In fact, 62% of customers would prefer to “hand out parking tickets” than wait in an automated phone tree for service. Chatbots can often offer more personalization than a phone tree. In fact, consumers say chatbots answer their questions faster, transfer them to a human agent, and even help outside of service hours.  But consumers also acknowledge that chatbots still have limitations. At least 60% of consumers would prefer to wait in a queue if it meant they could immediately speak with a human agent.

The lesson here: Most leads are happy to surf your website to learn more about your company, read online reviews, conduct other research as part of their decision-making process, and even use self-service tools like phone trees or chatbots to get simple questions answered. But, when they’re ready to make a purchase, especially with higher-ticket purchases, they want help from a real person—quickly.     

Using a centralized inbox and a decentralized lead routing strategy can help you scale your ability to respond to leads with a human approach.

7. Provide more customer context to employees.

Make it easier for your team members fielding leads to see the contextual history of that 

lead’s website actions, previous interactions, and purchases. This will eliminate customer frustration of often having to repeat themselves and distinguish your business as providing a higher level of customer service and personalization. Almost all customers (89%) say they’ve encountered the highly frustrating experience of having to repeat themselves to multiple customer service reps.

By centralizing inbound leads at the corporate office, they were able to take a lot off the dealership’s plate while also giving customers a better and more consistent experience where they no longer had to explain their situation in person at the dealership. 

Having a single inbox with all the interaction history for a lead has also helped bridge a gap within their own company. Marketing, sales, IT, collections, and customer experience can now work together to attract new customers and put them in the right cars.

8. Keep tabs on employee response times.

Research shows that conversion rates increase by more than 8x when you attempt to respond within the first 5 minutes instead of waiting between 5 minutes and 24 hours. Yet only 0.1% of inbound leads are engaged in under 5 minutes. Given these stats, it’s critically important that your employees respond promptly to all leads routed to them. The best way to ensure this happens is to make sure they have the proper training and processes in place so they:

• Know when it’s their responsibility to respond to leads
• Know that a fast response time is critical
• Know what tools to use to see incoming leads and respond to those leads

In addition, it’s also important to reward employees who are consistently responding to leads and converting those leads to sales. Simple verbal recognition, such as a call out in a company newsletter or a manager praising them for their efforts can go a long way. But you can also create other rewards, such as awarding prizes for responding to a certain number of calls or messages in under 5 minutes or setting up friendly competitions among employees to see who can respond to the most leads in the shortest amount of time.

Put Your Lead Management into High Gear with Podium

Centralizing your lead management and response efforts is the best way to ensure you never miss responding to another lead again—no matter how many channels or types of communication tools your leads might be coming from when they search for a local business online. 

Manage, route, and respond to leads faster with Podium, the marketing and communication platform made for local businesses. 

• Save more time. Manage all communication channels and separate systems through a single, secure platform that converts phone calls and chat messages to text conversations.
• Convert more leads. Attract the right customers with higher local search rankings and relevant reviews, collected in the channel customers use the most—texting. 
• Delight more customers. Create a multi-channel, frictionless customer journey from first impression to post-purchase with visibility into each lead’s interaction history.

Discover the power of Podium’s Lead Drive and take your lead management to new heights. By centralizing all your leads from various sources into one platform, including inquiries from platforms like Angie’s, Thumbtack, Cargurus, your website, and more, Podium ensures you never miss a business opportunity again. The innovative Lead Drive feature channels every customer inquiry seamlessly into your Podium Inbox, offering a simple view of all leads.

With this approach, you gain the ability to respond to leads immediately and automatically, giving you a competitive edge. Stay ahead of the competition, efficiently manage leads, and enhance your chances of converting prospects into paying customers. Explore Podium’s Lead Drive and streamline your lead management like never before.