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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