How to boost your lead gen with project management

Do you feel like your lead generation efforts aren’t going anywhere? You’re not alone – as 61% of marketers rank lead generation as their top challenge. That’s more than half of us wondering why our efforts aren’t translating into impactful results.

What if there was a way to solve that challenge? The solution you might need is project management. It brings streamlined processes, clear goals, and measurable results to the mix.

In this actionable guide, we’re going to show you how to improve lead generation through effective and iterative project management practices.

What is the relationship between lead generation and project management?

Lead generation focuses on attracting and converting potential customers for a business, while project management is the backbone of the business, ensuring all processes run smoothly and efficiently. Combining these two can bring transformative results.

Effective project management drives successful lead generation campaigns by bringing a structured approach to what can be a chaotic process. It ensures proper resource allocation, which helps businesses use their time and money wisely.

Additionally, it introduces risk management to the business, identifying and mitigating potential issues before they disrupt your lead generation efforts.

Arguably the most beneficial thing that project management introduces is the continuous improvement cycle. When a business treats lead generation as an ongoing project rather than a one-off task, it can consistently refine its strategies based on real data and results.

In fact, organizations with proven project management practices waste 28x less money than those without any practices. That’s a real game-changer when it comes to making your lead gen efforts more effective.

Why are defining goals for lead gen so important?

Marketers who set goals are 376% more likely to succeed in their efforts than those who don’t. That’s why setting clear and measurable goals is the cornerstone of any successful lead generation campaign. 

Here are the essential things clear goals can bring to your lead generation campaigns:

• Direction: Setting clear goals makes sure that everyone on your team is moving towards the same outcome.
• Motivation: Having a specific target to strive for can bring in more focused performance.
• Measurement: Setting measurable goals helps you to determine success and areas for improvement in your lead generation efforts.
• Resource allocation: Well-defined goals help you allocate resources more effectively, ensuring you invest in the right areas of your lead generation efforts.

Introducing project management to lead generation provides the framework and tools to set crucial goals and to track progress towards them. 

For instance, project management methodologies often use the SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) to set clear and actionable goals. But that doesn’t stop at goal-setting.

Project management frameworks allow you to easily track KPIs related to your lead generation goals. They typically include regular review cycles, which make sure that progress toward your goals is consistently monitored and adjusted accordingly.

As you make full use of project management techniques, your business can properly set goals and achieve them with more control and efficiency.

6 steps for planning and organizing lead generation campaigns

Effective planning is the foundation of any successful lead generation campaign. Organizing complex lead generation campaigns can be much easier with a project management tool.

Such a tool can help you create task lists, set deadlines, and assign responsibilities – keeping everyone on the same page and ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.

Let’s break down the steps on how to organize lead gen campaigns effectively.

1. Clearly define your target audience

Your first step should be to clearly define your target audience.

For example, your company provides an efficient client reporting and dashboard tool. Let’s say that your target audience is marketing agencies with 11-50 employees. Is there any easy way to find these agencies without doing it 100% manually?

You can use a B2B lead database to find the desired agencies and the leads they bring. Using such a tool streamlines the target audience definition process by searching for companies by: name, similarity to other businesses, location, size, type, and keywords.

By using these filters, we found 109 potential marketing agencies located in LA, SF, and NYC. We could filter more by different locations to fill up the list of potential leads. You can also find emails from various members of the company, which will help with the outreach process.

2. Set specific goals

The second step is to set clear objectives using the SMART framework. 

Let’s say that your main objective is to generate 500 qualified leads in Q3. This goal is specific and achievable, and you can measure it within a certain period  – which fits within the framework.

3. Choose a marketing channel

Next, you need to choose your channels wisely. There is a variety of marketing channels to choose from:

• Social media: 62% of B2B marketers say that lead generation on LinkedIn produces desirable results.
• Cold email: Email can be 40x more effective at securing customers compared to social media.
• Content marketing: Content marketing is most effective when it targets leads in the early stages of the buyer’s journey – think about landing pages or blogs that explain the benefits of your solution.
• Paid advertising: You can place bids to make your solution appear on various websites, search engines, or social media platforms.

4. Create a timeline

Once you determine the marketing channels to focus on, you want to develop a timeline for your lead generation campaign. A timeline is important to set a scope for your campaign goals.

Based on the defined goal, the campaign should start on July 1st, and its deadline would be on September 30th. Inside that timeline, a major milestone would be to fulfill the defined goal.

5. Allocate resources

As you have your goal and timeline in place, you have a high-level outlook on how demanding the campaign will be. When you are still in the planning stage, it’s essential to allocate your resources effectively.

In this case, the resources are:

• Budget: For example, a $10,000 marketing budget.
• Personnel: For example, 2 full-time marketers and 1 part-time designer.

6. Set up tracking

Define important KPIs relevant to your lead generation campaign. This final step is essential because it keeps you on top of the campaign performance and provides data-driven insights, which allow you to make informed decisions, optimize your strategy, and demonstrate ROI. For example, lead quality score, conversion rates, and cost per lead.

Tips for successful project management in lead generation

Now that you understand how important it is to integrate project management with lead generation, let’s explore some practical tips to make this integration successful.

1. Collaboration and communication

Lead generation isn’t a solo gig. You will either need an in-house team to do it properly or delegate parts of the process to qualified professionals. Effective collaboration and communication are keys to a successful lead generation campaign.

Here is why teamwork is crucial in lead generation:

• Diverse skills: Different team members bring unique strengths to your project.
• Fresh perspectives: More minds result in more innovative ideas.
• Faster problem-solving: Challenges get tackled quicker when you have more qualified people on board.
• Increased productivity: Synchronized teams will get more done in less time.

How can project management boost your team collaboration efforts?

For starters, project management tools to keep all communication in one place. This will prevent important information from getting lost in endless email threads or chat messages. For instance, you could create different groups/channels for different aspects of the project.

While having clear roles and responsibilities is important, don’t be afraid to encourage collaboration between different departments to optimize processes.

Ultimately, make sure to be transparent with your team about the campaign results. This keeps everyone informed and helps everyone to own their wins and losses.

2. Automating and scaling your lead gen efforts

76% of companies use marketing automation, so you might not want to get left behind. But, as more companies use automation to scale their efforts, you want to stand apart and use automation without sacrificing quality.

Here are the areas of the lead generation efforts best for automation:

• Email automation: A cold email software can help you automate cold outreach, as you can set custom attributes to target your ideal audience, schedule follow-ups, and create templates for different target groups.
• Web scraping: Getting leads from different parts of the web is easy with web scraping tools. This way, you can get leads easily from social media, real estate sites, customer reviews, and much more.
• Lead scoring: Manually reviewing if the lead shows signs of converting can be time-consuming. Automating this process can streamline the prioritization of leads based on the engagement that signals their likelihood to connect.
• Social media scheduling: Lead generation via social media often requires daily effort. Scheduling posts in advance with social media management tools ensures your consistent presence to potential leads.
• Chatbots: These tools can increase sales by 67%. Based on that, it’s beneficial to have a chatbot solution that will engage with visitors 24/7. Perhaps that can convert a visitor to a valuable lead.
• CRM integration: Integrating all your lead generation campaign data in a CRM ensures that all data is centralized, and all the campaign details are automatically updated. 

It’s not just about tools – repeatable processes are key to your lead generation efforts. Make sure to create easily replicable templates, workflows, and SOPs. This will help scale processes even further.

Task delegation is essential as well. Use your project management skills to assign tasks effectively. With task delegation in place, you can handle more leads without drowning in operative work.

Remember that automation isn’t about replacing your team – it’s about amplifying and scaling their efforts to focus on high-value tasks like strategy and relationship-building.

3. Monitoring progress and performance

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. That’s why regular monitoring and analysis of your lead generation efforts are important for continued success.

Start by setting KPIs that align with your goals. These can be metrics like: number of generated leads, lead quality score, conversion rate, cost per lead, and ROI.

Incorporating insights from your customer experience program can provide valuable data on how well your lead generation efforts are resonating with your target audience.

Use analytics and reporting tools to gather data on your KPIs efficiently. These tools can help you set up visual dashboards to track data more intuitively. We suggest creating weekly and monthly reports to track progress toward your goals accurately. 

Remember to continuously test different aspects of your lead generation campaigns to improve performance. For example, you could perform A/B testing on email subject lines, ad copy, or landing page designs.

Another important aspect is to schedule regular check-ins with your team members. You can use these to discuss:

• How is the project progressing so far?
• Are there any blockers or challenges on the project?
• What are the ideal next steps for the project?

If something doesn’t go according to plan don’t be afraid to change it. Being responsive and adaptive is the essence of project management in lead generation.

4. Leveraging Nulab’s project management tools

Using the proper project management tools can dramatically enhance your lead generation efforts. Nulab has one of the most effective tools for managing projects that incorporate lead generation, with its number of handy features.

Let’s see how to integrate Nulab’s project management tool stack into your lead generation process.

Nulab helps you break down your lead generation campaign into specific tasks, lets you assign them to team members, and track the overall progress of your campaign. 

You can use Gantt charts to see upcoming deadlines and check who is working on what. This can be essential when you have different lead gen processes in place, but perhaps some of these might require more time or additional effort.

Resource allocation is important for every project, not only for lead generation campaigns. For example, you want to easily allocate your team members from qualifying a lead to nurturing that same lead.

Nulab also allows you to centralize all campaign-related documents so that everyone on the team can easily access them. This is essential for larger lead generation campaigns, as you want to have all the lead information and documents in one place.

As you integrate Nulab’s project management toolkit into your lead generation process, your team can work with more efficiency – resulting in more high-quality leads.

Final thoughts

Lead generation and project management are a powerful combination for business growth.

When you apply these project management principles, you can take your lead generation to the next level by introducing more structure, improving team collaboration, and scaling your efforts.

With the right blend of project management and lead generation, your business can achieve sustained growth and long-term success.

Author bio  

Antonio Gabrić is an outreach manager at Hunter. For the last three years, he’s been helping SaaS companies grow their organic traffic and revenue through link building. At Hunter, Antonio is leading a link-building and outreach team to build backlinks that move the needle and connect with industry leaders. To get in touch and follow his experiments, say him on LinkedIn.