How to organize sales leads into a well-structured system

If your morning starts with getting through chaotic lead lists, you might lose precious opportunities while searching for the necessary information instead of responding to your leads.

The good news is that you’re not alone: Around 41% of companies struggle to follow up with leads while they are still interested. Another 29% from the same research note that filtering and funneling leads is the biggest challenge impacting conversion to sales.

At one point, our contact lists at Belkins were a pure mess as well. Yet, we found a way out by developing our own systematization approach that makes it a breeze to prioritize our efforts and focus on the most promising opportunities.

So today we’re sharing how to organize sales leads to help you quickly find the information you need and follow up without missing a beat.

Most common ways to store your lead lists

When it comes to organizing sales leads, there are two ways to go: spreadsheets (e.g., Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel) and software for sales management (CRM systems). Ultimately, the best choice depends on the scale of your business and specific needs. Let’s briefly view the pros and cons of each.

Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel

A popular way to organize leads is to arrange them in a spreadsheet — especially when you don’t have a CRM system. Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel both have a bunch of built-in options like functions, filters, drop-downs, etc. that allow you to improve lead management.

Here’s an example of how our lead researchers and salespeople systematize potential clients in B2B lead lists:

Pros and cons of organizing sales leads in spreadsheets

Let’s review the benefits and drawbacks of using the spreadsheet method for storing your lead lists.

If you decide to proceed with Google Sheets or Excel, consider these practical tips from our researchers on how to create and manage a lead list.

Tips to keep your lead list organized in spreadsheets

Once you’ve created a new document, here are the next steps:

1. Identify basic data points. These may include company size, location, lead’s name, job title, and other information relevant to your ICP criteria. You can either create your own template or use a predesigned template and then add custom parameters.
2. Always double-check for duplicates. Add a column to check for repeated entries or matches with your “do not contact” list. Automate the searches using the VLOOKUP function.
3. Use additional formulas. Depending on your requirements, you may need to use other functions to manipulate or analyze your lead data. For instance, our lead researchers use the following formulas: CONCATENATE, COUNT, COUNTIF, AVERAGE, AVERAGEIF, and others to calculate metrics, filter and sort data, perform conditional formatting, and generate reports.
4. Seize the power of add-ons and extensions. They are beneficial both in terms of formatting (like ChangeCase) and automation (like Email Verification).
5. Add drop-downs for status tracking. To gain visibility of what is going on with your prospects, assign custom statuses to each of them. This way you can filter through those you need to qualify, follow up with, or send an agreement to.
6. Establish formatting guidelines. This will help you keep the look and feel of all your lead lists consistent and will save you a lot of time when searching for specifics. 
7. Use inbuilt data cleanup. Options such as ‘Trim whitespaces’ may be extremely useful before sending emails to your leads, as it removes extra spaces from the selected cells or range.

CRM system

Though spreadsheets might be a good option initially, scaling is much easier with a CRM system. In Belkins’ case, we switched to HubSpot, which streamlined our sales processes and helped us figure out how to organize sales activities, including lead management.

Here’s how our pipeline looks:

📚 Related article: Even qualified leads may drop off for multiple reasons. To minimize this negative effect, learn how to build a B2B sales funnel that converts.

Pros and cons of using HubSpot for lead management

Compared to spreadsheets, CRM systems are easier to use and scale. Let’s take a look at the HubSpot features you might benefit from for organizing your business leads.

And now let’s proceed to some practical tips from our sales executives on how to organize leads in HubSpot.

Tips on how to systematize sales leads in HubSpot CRM

To help you gain full control over your pipeline in HubSpot, here are a few life hacks from our salespeople:

1. Systematize your leads by a predefined set of criteria. To take the guesswork out of your lead management, use the same parameters to identify them. Knowing those criteria, you’ll be able to find the necessary information much faster. 
2. Seize the power of active lists. These lead lists update automatically when the leads meet specified criteria or earn a certain HubSpot score.
3. Create custom filters. Save them to speed up future search queries.
4. Launch automated workflows. This is one of our sales team’s most loved features as it helps to execute certain tasks without their direct engagement. For example, you can set up triggers to activate follow-up sequences depending on predetermined events, behavior, dates, and so on.
5. Sort leads by priority and deal stage. Such an approach helps you understand the quality of your opportunities at each stage and allocate your efforts accordingly.

Brian Hicks highlights that categorizing leads by priority not only improves sales team focus but also aligns them with a BDR team:

This also helps your BDRs know the potential of each appointment they are booking with the sales team. You can track all deals to see correlations between priority and closed won deals to ensure alignment.”

How to categorize sales leads

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach or best way to organize sales leads, as it depends on each company’s processes. You can use multiple parameters to systematize and categorize your contacts and keep track of all interactions with them. Here are some general criteria you can customize according to your specific business needs.

Personal data

To speed up lead qualification and empower personal touch in future communication, gather basic contact details:

• First name
• Last name
• Business email address
• LinkedIn profile

Optionally, you can also collect their phone number if you’re going to call them.

📚 Related content: How to qualify B2B leads for better sales closing rates

Job-related information

The next step to organize sales leads is to collect as much professional information about them as possible. For a start, you may look up:

• Job title
• Job tenure
• Company size (number of employees)
• Location (country/state/city)
• Industry they operate in

The source they come from

Categorize your B2B leads based on the ways they discovered you. Did they fill out a lead form on a website, attend a webinar, download your marketing materials, or subscribe to a newsletter?

Here are ideas on how to label your potential clients by communication channels:

• Website
• Social media
• Advertising campaigns, divided by platforms
• Email marketing
• Referrals
• Events and trade shows
• Content marketing
• Direct outreach 
• Partnerships or affiliations
• Offline channels (like print media, radio, TV, outdoor advertising, etc.)

Stage of the funnel they are on

To effectively lead your prospects down the funnel, you need to know where they are at any given time — MQL, SQL, or opportunity. It’ll also help you forecast your sales by knowing the average conversion between stages and adjusting your activities if there is any decrease. Check out some average conversion rates in different industries:

📚 Related content: How to create a B2B lead generation funnel

Buyer readiness

To identify leads that have higher conversion probability and may require more attention, review each of them and assign them a score based on your qualification parameters. There are multiple lead-scoring approaches to inspire you, but we suggest you begin with the minimum:

• Demographic data
• Firmographic data
• Level of engagement with your messages, content, etc.

Estimated deal size

One way to predict future sales is by weighted pipeline revenue. To put it simply, it’s a sum of forecasted revenues from all lead life cycle stages based on the chances to move them down the funnel.

To calculate the forecasted revenue for each deal, use this formula:

Forecasted revenue = Deal size x Conversion rate from previous 3 months

Imagine you have 5 pipeline stages with several potential clients in each stage (we don’t count already-won or -lost opportunities):

In the previous quarter, your conversions from stage to stage looked as follows:

So the forecasted revenue for each stage would look like this:

Forecasted revenue (Discovery call) = $80,000 x 25% = $20,000

Forecasted revenue (Trial) = $250,000 x 55% = $137,500

Forecasted revenue (Offer sent) = $200,000 x 85% = $170,000

Based on these, you can calculate weighted revenue:

Weighted revenue = $20,000 + $137,500 + $170,000 = $327,500

Activity log

Finally, you can sort and organize your leads by interaction history, like the date of first contact, current status, the next follow-up, and so on.

To sum it up

Choosing how to organize your sales leads is a matter of budget, convenience, and taste. To summarize, here are a few takeaways for your consideration:

• Spreadsheets are free, the easiest to start with but hard to scale. CRM systems offer free plans for lead management but with limited functionality.
• There’s no silver bullet: You need to figure out what lead management parameters you need.
• Create criteria templates to use for all future lead lists.
• Always update records after each interaction so as not to miss a single opportunity.

Want a regular flow of opportunities in your pipeline? Contact our team to get a well-structured lead management system that drives revenue.