Looking for free lead management software? It is possible. The basic principles of lead management can be cobbled together with free tools. Depending on your sales goals and quotas, these just might do the trick.

Let’s build a free lead management system.

Lead Capture: Email, Contacts, and Spreadsheets

Most sales leads are coming from business cards, website contact forms, or phone calls. These are easily captured in email, contact databases, or spreadsheets. The key is centralizing that process. Consistently use one method or the other. Lost or misplaced leads are one of the top reasons for poor conversion rates or low sales numbers.

Most lead management software automates the lead capture process. Typically the automation will capture lead data directly or allow for simple imports–quickly and efficiently adding leads to a central database.

Lead Distribution: Email or Spreadsheet

Getting leads out to others on your sales team can be as simple as emailing or forwarding a spreadsheet. The challenge becomes syncing these various leads with associated actions or annotating updates and notes.

Popular lead management software often simplifies this process by allowing leads to be transferred or routed within the database. There is little change for loss and all of the past history and notes travel with the lead–important bonus.

Lead Tracking: Folders or Labels

Any good sales person will attribute their long-term success to their database. That means never losing track of a lead. This can be difficult for most. We (sale people) are an easily distracted bunch. Each new shiny object that pops in attracts our full attention, while more productive leads spoil.

Tracking these maturing sales can be as simple as using some of the most basic filing techniques. Remember folders and labels?

I am not necessarily advocating your investment in filing cabinets, manila folders, sticky labels, and a good Sharpie. I am telling you to get organized so you can find and tune into these valuable leads on a regular basis. Whether you are using email or some file system on your computer, get a filing system.

This can be as simple as breaking your sales process into statuses and stages. Move your leads from one folder to the next. Label each lead with a priority or probability of success. This gives you easy retrieval and a simple count of items in these folders and of these labels will easily give you feedback on progress.

Sales Pipeline: Calendar and Alerts

Pipeline management is a critical skill for squeezing more out of your leads and accurately forecasting sales revenue. Your sales quota depends on you mastering this process. Doing it with a free system can be challenging, but it is possible.

Get a good electronic calendar–one that can alert you on your computer and your phone. Good pipeline management means forward motion. That means you need to schedule forward and attend promptly to what is ready to be attended to.

I like Google Calendar, but your organization may use Outlook or other enterprise calendaring system. Whatever it is get your sales process integrated into it. This will give you a realistic sales pipeline. One that accounts for those miscellaneous sales meetings and reporting requirements. It also ensure real sales get equal or more priority than simple (but necessary) administration and reporting.

Task Management: TODO List

With your leads tracked and sales pipeline under control it is time to get down to work. This is the job of your TODO list. Lucky for you there is no shortage of free task lists. The trick is finding one that you will use.

My suggestion is a good legal pad and pen. Something about scribbling out tasks and striking them off the list motivates productivity. However, there are a lot of great electronic solutions as well–Remember The Milk (RTM) and TaskPaper are a few of my favorites.

In my experience the closer you keep this solution to your email the better. This is especially true for free lead management as most of your tasks are invariably generated from and maybe moved forward by email.

Lead Nurturing: Email and Calendar

Finally, you need to manage those leads that aren’t quite ready to convert, but may given time and contact. Again, your email and calendar are the right tools to keep up the appropriate touch points and frequency of contact.

Set-up triggers and integrate them into your regular calls and email correspondence. These prospects will be impressed you remembered them and you will be glad you did. Lead nurturing is probably one of the most effective ways to build a healthy and consistent sales pipeline.

There you go, free lead management. A bit more work and less functionality than proper lead management software, but for a single sales person it can get you by. The calculation you need to do is what will a small investment in integrated sales lead management do for your business?

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