Lead the Way: Why Your Company Needs Lead Management?

Every potential customer is looking for a good deal. It is no different in B2B marketing. It is most often seen that when a customer is contemplating over which company would suit his/her needs the best, he’s most likely to opt for a company that provides him with the assistance and specific information that he requires. Consequently, capturing and nurturing a customer’s interest is essential, as it is this interest that will ensure the prospect staying long enough to actually buy the product.  This is what ‘lead management’ is all about.

What is Lead Management?

Lead management is simply a process of coming up with such leads or potential customers, nurturing them, observing and analyzing them, and then forwarding them to the sales team. The sole intent of lead management is to build a relationship with each of a prospective customer in a way that their interest develops into an opportunity for sales. The goal however always remains the same - ‘ensuring complete customer satisfaction’.

What is Lead Management Automation?

Forrester defines lead management automation as “Tooling the process that helps generate new business opportunities, manage volumes of business inquiries, improve potential buyers’ propensity to purchase, and increase alignment between marketing activity and sales results.” And since lead management is now more about using technology, lead management tools have also become significantly important in effective lead generation.

Your Company Needs Leads!

Once you realize the importance of leads and how lead generation can help your sales team ensure higher sales, there are certain elements that should be considered before you buy a lead management automation tool.

• Quality over Quantity

Many lead automation tools help you acquire many leads, and it is quality and not the quantity of leads that matter. It is therefore important that your lead generation tool should necessarily focus on the quality of leads to ensure higher sales.

• Prioritized and Organized Leads

To ensure an increase in the actual sales by the sales team, leads need to be prioritized and organized to be converted into sales. Therefore opt go for a solution that is capable of segmenting and prioritizing leads.

The lead generation process can be efficiently streamlined with the right lead management software. You can be assured of a faithful customer base, if your sales team is following organized and prioritized leads. Enhancing customer relationship will increase sales, and in turn bring about productivity and profitability for your enterprise. So choose your lead management solution with care!

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Step-by-Step Framework to Lead Generation

Lead Generation always takes precedence for marketers. With fierce competition looming around, marketing teams are under tremendous pressure to come up with innovative and effective lead generation strategies to keep an incessant flow of qualified leads through the sales funnel. In addition to this, marketing teams are also required to justify their budgets and clearly demonstrate good ROI.

A successful lead generation seems virtually impossible with these many constraints. However, a well planned framework can cinch a successful lead generation. Here is a step-by-step framework which has proven to be effective for many:

Step 1- Conduct a Lead Generation Audit: Firstly, it is of utmost importance to assess your lead generation capabilities- to understand what methods have been used for lead generation so far, and how efficient or effective these methods have been. Also, does your marketing team have the scope to improve their lead generation efforts, and what skills and resources would be required to generate more quality leads.Your lead management audit should be able to counter all these questions.

Step 2- Plan & Strategize: Once the capabilities have been assessed, it is essential to develop a lead generation strategy. Plan your campaigns and build a lead acquisition model. This model should specify how you will engage the market with your brand, and how you plan to convert them into qualified leads. Therefore a ‘qualified lead’ needs to be defined, for which you need to collaborate with your sales team.

Step 3- Plan Your Communication & Budget: Decide on the channels of communication that would work best for your target market, and come up with appropriate messages that need to be sent out at the right time. Furthermore a budget needs to be drawn at this stage to make sure all likely expenses are covered and approved.

Step 4- Organize Resources, Assign Roles & Responsibilities: Define goals clearly and convey the requirements to your team. Assess the skill-sets of your team and see what you lack. Equip them with the right tools to enhance their skills by providing the necessary training. Standardize a project management policy and methodology.  

Step 5- Make Optimal Use of Your Website: Evaluate the effectiveness of your website by conducting a website effectiveness audit to understand where improvements are required. Consider aspects such as clarity of content, aesthetic appeal, brand consistency, user-friendliness etc. Optimize your website content for search engines and boost traffic through intense backlinking activities.    

Step 6: Consider Marketing Automation Options: It may be difficult and even expensive to track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, if incongruous systems are used for marketing, website analytics, online advertising, etc. Having a sophisticated marketing automation tool technology, can automate marketing processes and drive efficiency even in small and mid-sized businesses. So opt for a marketing automation software that can simplify your lead generation efforts to a large extent.

Step 7- Rollout Your Campaign: Begin your direct marketing activities, implement your advertising plan, intensify your call center activities and make cold calling work for you, schedule webcasts, and podcasts to reach out to your market. Promptly respond to the needs of your target market by assessing the performance of your campaign, concurrently making any changes if necessary.

Although these steps can guide you through lead generation, it is always important to keep your campaigns flexible so that you can adjust your messages to changing market trends and demands- and this is the secret component for successful lead generation software!

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Digital Marketing Brilliance for B2B Elevation

The use of advanced technologies to facilitate new and innovative marketing strategies has become a prerequisite for survival in a fiercely competitive business environment. Marketing today, is forming a strong base with a customer and not just selling a product. The emphasis is more on building and maintaining a strong, lasting credible alliance with customers. Hence, lead nurturing and lead scoring are considered as the most vital components in B2B marketing.

Automated processes like the marketing automation software are fast substituting the usual manual marketing processes, thus refining the process of managing and tracking marketing campaigns. There have been automating marketing strategies that have borne results and those that have failed.It eases market segmentation by identifying target markets, and collecting all the relevant information.

The Digital Marketing Exodus

Digital technology has taken over the world of communication. Email has become the staple of our daily existence. Almost every other individual has an email Id which is is checked regularly.. And the social networking realm has changed the way people communicate and stay in touch. Consequently, the online medium has become ‘the most desirable’ platform for B2B lead nurturing and marketing.

Without huge investments, businesses have gauged the  potential of online media for promoting products.

. By using online channels for sending promotions, newsletters, product releases, updates on services, invitations etc businesses can build a database replete with all the information of customers such as their contact details, demographic locations, their interests and their purchase history. This wealth of information can be further used for lead nurturing purposes.

Nurturing Leads through the Digital Medium

Lead nurturing best practices need to be employed, as the primary objective is to transform prospective leads into sales and simultaneously maintaining a steady customer relationship.

Lead nurturing requires a great deal of planning along with technological assistance. The networking sites provide an appropriate platform for maintaining contact with a prospective customer without being aggressive or intrusive.. Your products and services can be promoted fervently. And the reviews, blogs and comments on these sites encourage active participation amongst customers giving new prospects a good chance to test your product.

It takes a lot more than the traditional marketing processes to sway the business community. Following a niche style with refined processes to make your business stand out in a crowd is what digital marketing automation does.  

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Eliminate Startup Barriers with Marketing Automation

Entering a highly competitive market space, joining the persistent race to attract prospects, and devising strategies to successfully reach out to them can be enormously challenging- especially as a startup, when you do not have an extensive marketing department with sufficient resources. However, plenty of automation tools and programs are now available in the market, which can help make your marketing efforts more efficient and productive.

In competing with already established businesses and other peers, it is important to design effective marketing strategies and campaigns. Also, generating and maintaining a reliable database of prospect information, and using analytical tools to derive value from them can be time-consuming but not very rewarding. In addition to these, the actual task of generating qualified leads can be quite overwhelming without the right tools. All these challenges reinforce the need for marketing automation for startup companies.

Automated marketing can help startups understand and improve customer experience and this in turn can help them stand out from the crowd. For example collecting, organizing and analyzing prospect behavior on a website is not possible without the help of marketing software. Some sophisticated marketing automation solutions also provide accurate and reliable lead analytics, which can add great value in strategic decision-making. And by offering real-time intelligence on prospect intent, these solutions enable marketing teams to create convincing campaigns that effectively spread the word about a company and its products.

Today, there are advanced marketing automation tools which help start-up companies to identify, capture and convert online leads into sales opportunities. These solutions are specially designed to meet the basic needs of startup companies to create and propagate their brand.

Marketing automation software are usually easy to install and implement, and offer several benefits. They help:

• Retrieve important lead insight information, including the best lead source and how you can grow it
• Determine which marketing campaign is a rich source of leads
• Assess your marketing team’s capabilities
• Network with leading social networking sites including facebook, and Twitter
• Achieve improvement in overall marketing outreach

With these immense benefits, marketing automation offers the most lucrative opportunity for startup companies to successfully establish, and carve a niche for themselves in an extremely competitive business environment. 

Marketing Automation for Demand Generation & Lead Nurturing

The art and science of managing the timing, target and content of outbound marketing messages automatically, is Marketing Automation. And when this is done in response to prospects’ online behavior, it becomes efficient marketing automation. For effective demand generation and lead management/nurturing, it is essential that an organization understands and responds to a prospect’s position in the buying cycle. And given the increasing bargaining power of consumers, this is all the more crucial.

However, truly understanding and responding to each prospect’s needs is something that cannot be achieved manually. And therefore, organizations require a software platform that can help accomplish this by enabling customized content and timely, automated communication. This in turn can help in better demand generation and lead nurturing. Here’s how:

Marketing automation software enables organizations to understand prospects’ position in the buying process by studying and interpreting their digital body language. By doing this it gives a clear idea about the interests of the prospects, their intentions in visiting a website, their readiness to buy a product etc.

Secondly, ‘Lead Scoring’ is a key feature enabled by marketing automation solutions. This allows marketing teams to carefully categorize prospects depending on whether they are ‘ready to buy’, or need to be further ‘nurtured’ with suitable messages until they decide to buy.

Also, when it comes to marketing, the key is to deliver the right message to the right people at the right time. For example, a HR team may respond to different marketing messages than an accounts team. Therefore, marketing messages need to be highly personalized depending on the prospect’s role in the buying process. And this is enabled by today’s advanced marketing automation tools.

Buyers today have the ability to self-educate. They use social media websites, discussion forums and other online means to learn everything about a product. They visit multiple websites, including yours and those of the competitors, and compare products, their features, benefits and prices. Hence, by the time they get in touch with you they have already made their purchase decision. This means that your messages have to be timely, and reach your prospects, and impress them before your competitors’ messages do. Therefore in order to guide buyers to consider your product/service, and motivate them to buy it, you need a marketing automation solution that provides precise information about prospects’ needs and preferences.

So it’s time to shift from bulk outbound messaging to a facilitating approach, wherein you understand and guide your buyers in their decision-making process. Engaging prospects is therefore crucial, and this is made possible by sophisticated automated marketing solution  that deliver the right message to the right target at the right time!

The Power of Marketing Automation

Generating quality sales leads, managing demand generation campaigns and evaluating marketing return on investment, can be highly challenging in a scenario where business strategies are increasingly complex and demanding. In order to streamline marketing and sales functions, and to elevate their effectiveness, businesses have started to adopt marketing automation solutions. These solutions help companies to effectively respond to shifting strategies and to the rapidly changing marketing landscape.

Marketing Automation for a Competitive Edge

Shrinking budgets, and demands from sales teams to produce more qualified leads, can put organizations under immense pressure. But automation solutions can enable marketing teams to improve efficiency by strengthening their promotions and campaigns with cost-effective, yet sophisticated tools. These tools simplify processes and functions, and provide end-to-end support starting from the planning stage through campaign execution and reporting.

Moreover, the ability of automation software to integrate and centralize disparate, fragmented processes across marketing and sales teams can be immensely helpful in implementing complex, multi-faceted marketing strategies more effectively.

Also marketing automation tools can help enhance the lead generation process by effectively segmenting and managing prospect databases. This in turn can facilitate more targeted lead nurturing and ease response tracking functions.

Benefits Offered by Marketing Automation Software

- Improved Performance and Productivity: Marketing automation helps organizations get rid of cumbersome manual tasks related to planning and implementation of marketing campaigns. This helps in better performance and enhances productivity.

- Customizable campaigns: Automation software allows companies to personalize campaigns to meet specific needs of the target audience, thereby making marketing messages more focused and relevant. This helps in getting better conversion rates, and shortens the sales cycle.

- Low Investment, Better ROI: Automation solutions for marketing are available at a low cost. While these solutions can help significantly cut down expenses involved in executing manual campaigns, they also bring better return on investment.

- Marketing and Sales Integration: According to the American Marketing Association, “Sales & Marketing need to be integrated in order to build customer relationships, enhance brand, capitalize on leads, improve market share and to boost revenue”. And this can be achieved only with an effective marketing automation solution.

- Better Flexibility & Scalability: With automation software, marketing teams can easily adapt to ever-changing market demands.

- Superior Intelligence: With valuable and timely lead analytics, marketing automation software enables knowledge-based planning and execution of campaigns to generate better responses and ROI.

Marketing automation software facilitates business growth by effectively managing all activities involved in marketing and sales starting from generating qualified leads to converting them into customers. By offering these multiple benefits automation solutions have contributed to the growth of several businesses and won their faith.

Is your marketing automation solution offering you a good ROI?

Why settle for less?

It has been almost a decade since ‘marketing automation’ came into existence. So if you are one who has opted for a particular marketing solution, perhaps it is time to ask yourself if your chosen automation tool has brought in:

• an increase in revenue?
• cost reductions?
• enhanced CRM?

If not, then it is time to reconsider your automated marketing solutions.

A 2009 Forrester B2B Lead Management Automation Market Overview Report states that, "Tools that monitor online activity, match visitors against commercial databases, look up their firms and roles, and help sales proactively chase buyers across the Web take priority over technology that manages demand once it comes in the door…" According to the report, your automated marketing tools need many inherent built-in functions to ensure maximum revenue returns for your enterprise. So why settle for a solution that does not give you what you need - increased ROI? Why not trade up for a tool/solution that will provide you maximum ROI?

Things to remember

Efficient marketing automation software can work wonders for your enterprise. Here is a list of things you must keep in mind before choosing your marketing automation tool. Your tool should:

• Provide real quantifiable and measurable results
• Offer actual cost savings with cost effective lead generation, higher conversion rates with lead nurturing and enhanced sales
• Offer real-time updates and incisive information on visitor intent and behavior
• Get rid of multiple systems required for lead tracking
• Facilitate different campaigns within the system like email marketing, drip marketing, etc.
• Integrate your multiple CRM systems
• Be flexible and scalable
• Improve operational efficiency
• Effectively react and respond to change
• Help in making sales/marketing campaigns be buyer-centric
• Customize content and automate the timing of marketing communication

Look before you leap

Even as studies show that 95% of prospects visiting your website are primarily there for some kind of research, as many as 70% of the same prospects will eventually buy from you or your competitors. Therefore, it is important to optimize the leads you get from your prospects, which can be done with an effective marketing automation tool. Upon accurate implementation, a truly robust marketing automation tool can ensure your enterprise of customer-centric ROI. It can also ensure that your marketing teams add to your revenue effectively. So it will help you to exercise caution before arbitrarily selecting an automated marketing tool.