Importance of Effective Lead Management Software

In today’s competitive business environment, enterprises need to attract new customers to stay ahead of the competition. However, trying to reach new customers is not an easy task since not every lead turn into a winnable opportunity and not every opportunity turn into a sale. Hence, what sales team need is a better understanding of good and bad leads to filter out the bad from the good, nurture the potentially qualified leads so that they become sales ready. Since the process of managing leads is extremely complicated and laborious what is required is effective lead management to speed up the sales process.

Wikipedia describes lead management as “methodologies, systems, and practices designed to generate new potential business clientele, generally operated through a variety of marketing techniques.” In short, it refers to the entire business process and practices in an organization directed towards acquiring new customers, retaining existing customers, and establishing a brand reputation. Lead management is a complex process consisting of lead generation, capturing lead intelligence, filtering leads and distribution of qualified leads to the marketing team for lead nurturing and high priority leads to the sales team for conversions.

The most important aspect of lead management is not the quantity of leads but quality of leads. A good lead is the one that is ready for sales and results in profit for the company. Hence, more and more enterprises are using lead management software to prioritize and organize their leads.

Here is a look at some of the advantages of installing a best of the breed lead management software solution.

Lead Generation
Captures leads generated from marketing campaigns resulting in website visits and converts anonymous website visitors into leads

Business Intelligence
Unmatched lead insight using unique data mining and business intelligence technology, including identification of website visitor intent, resulting in enriched leads

Lead Qualification
Automatically scores and prioritizes leads based on pre-defined parameters related to activity, interest and intent

Lead Nurturing
Enables personalized and intent driven lead nurturing program aimed at building relationships and bringing prospects close to sale-readiness

CRM Integration
Integrates with existing CRM systems thereby aligning Marketing and Sales' efforts and offers a common platform with a consolidated view of the prospects.

Collaboration
Cost-effective collaboration opportunities with partners and affiliates, along with one-click integration with existing social networking platforms

Analytics
Provides an understanding of the effectiveness of the marketing strategies and channels, helping make appropriate decisions to improve overall performance, optimize cost and increase ROI.

Thus with good lead management software in place enterprises can easily ensure that their sales team is productive.

Read more on - Lead Nurturing , Marketing Automation

Enjoy B2B Lead Generation Success with Marketing Automation Solutions

In this competitive world, where business acquisition is the way to move ahead, without leads no business online or offline can attain success. Therefore, to be able to understand the way to form closely targeted leads acts as the powerhouse behind a successful business. However, not every leads are equal in nature just like not every lead generation technique is created equal. For instance, if leads were not qualified in the selling process then you might be frittering time on disinterested projects. As a result the sales response figures drop and the business too suffers loss.

Online and Offline Lead Generation
Lead generation can be a complicated task. Offline lead generation methods requires catering to prospects precisely in physical locations and even touching base with them through the phone.Also the leads that get generated at trade shows and other similar events needs to be placed in a database and the contacted one by one. Similarly online lead generation might appear easy, but it is not. The ones involved in internet marketing and multi-level business have realized that this can be time intensive as they are sailing in a huge sea of consumers who are not even aware of their core business.

Advanced Lead Generation Solutions
Today company’s specializing in lead management campaigns have come up with lead generation and marketing automation solutions to make the task easy.These companies provide a marketing automation platform that enables enterprises to recognize, capture and convert the online leads into sales opportunities by offering actionable lead intelligence.

Lead generation solutions identified anonymous website visitors and intelligently evaluate their intent and interest to help in targeted sales approach. Furthermore it also recognizes the place of the prospects in the purchasing process with a sophisticated behavior analysis.The marketing teams can thus concentrate on lead nurturing initiatives that would lead to improved qualified leads and the sales team can close the deals quickly and lessen the sales cycle. This results in enhancement of the entire sales and marketing productivity.The solution further allows you to capture qualified leads that are rich with the required data.The pre-qualified leads generated have a higher conversion rate than the other contacts with which the sales target can be attained quicker.

It is essential to understand that your lead starts and ends with you when the deal is closed. Therefore, what most companies require is a lead generation system that offers details about the latest technologies of attaining the qualified and centered leads.This apart, the system must also keep the companies on the same page with innovative marketing strategies that would help in building and enhancing the business better.

Read more on - Lead Management , social media campaigns

Successful Lead Generation Is All About Effective Strategy

The B2B marketer is judged by one the number of qualified leads generated.  Today with intense competition around marketing teams need to come up with innovative and effective lead generation strategies to ensure that there is an incessant flow of qualified leads through the sales funnel.

When it comes to lead generation, marketers are always talking about planning and strategy. Most lead generation methods are largely built on trial and error, and businesses may fail a few times before actually succeeding. The most effective tools available for lead generation requires a changing of perspective and strategy. Developing a demand generation plan is the first step to demand generation success. The key to developing a truly effective plan is to understand the best practices and tactics from competition to build  a successful strategy  designed to win.

Producing quality, actionable leads for a robust sales pipeline on a daily basis is an all encompassing function. The discipline of prospecting requires a unique set of attributes and skills. The key to lead generation is using a variety of strategies at the one time. Just as a regular print advertisement  won’t generate a large number of leads, it is important to understand that a business needs to be using  marketing  tools simultaneously to really reach your target market and draw them to your business.

Settle on the best lead generation techniques, so that those best practices going forward to keep failure to a minimum. The first step is to realize that not all potential clients are at the same stage of the buying process. Understanding the target audience and their needs is a key essential in creating a successful inbound marketing plan. Once the  buyers and their needs are understood, businesses can ensure that they are better equipped  to provide and offer content or services that will benefit target audience.  This content could consist of eBooks, webinars, articles, or videos that are attractive to the potential buyer.

Simple and cost effective lead nurturing strategies combined with your other marketing activities will ensure there is a constant stream of new leads that can be converted into customers. Networking groups, Alliances, Trade shows/expos, Testimonial/word of mouth are cost-effective ways to generate leads and it is recommended  that all businesses engage in at least some of them.

Whether your business outsources the lead generation function or strengthen the  internal demand generation process—the strategies, metrics and performance requirements need to be able to produce quality leads. Establish the best processes and strategies in order to produce an ongoing, successful sales pipeline of quality, actionable leads that meets and exceeds your forecast.

Read more on - social media campaigns,  Lead Management

Why Should Companies Invest In Lead Generation Solutions?

One of the most common challenges of B2B marketing is to understand the basics and importance of lead generation and nurturing. Starting with the ways to generate inquiries through challenging follow-up and hand-off by the sales team, and the ways to evaluate the outcome, this field witnesses much wasted capital, missed opportunities and other downright errors that any other domain in business-to-business marketing and sales.

Today with the use of certain conventional direct mail methods, i.e. Multivariate testing, A/B splits on the internet, such as email marketing, web design, pay per click advertising, search engine marketing, social media, web 2.0, landing page optimization the lead generation and nurturing process has become even more complicated to set up. However, on the other hand it has become simpler to manage than before.

Importance of Lead Generation and Nurturing
It is essential to pay attention to the lead generation and nurturing process because of three main reasons. They are:

• There is always scope for improvement – The ROI from enhancing the lead generation program is mostly worth that time and effort of the B2B marketer.
• Scope for establishing a competitive advantage – In majority of industry verticals your competition lies in the essential managing lead generation and nurturing process at the same level where you are. The initiatives that you take can help you attain a competitive edge and attain greater market share than other market players.
• Making efficient use of the budget – When you assess your results, then you are able to put your capital where it’s best working and line it up with your capital to attain strategic goals.

Today service providers specializing in lead management  programs have come up with lead generation and marketing automation solutions. They provide end users with a marketing automation platform that enables them to recognize, capture and convert online leads into sales scopes by offering actionable lead intelligence.

The solution further recognizes anonymous website visitors, but also analyzes intelligently their intent and interests to help in the targeted sales approach. The solution is also efficient in identifying the stage where the prospects are in the buying process with the help of sophisticated behavior analysis. The marketing teams can thus give greater attention to lead nurturing programs that will lead to higher qualified leads and sales teams can go ahead and close the deals faster and lessen the sales cycle. This brings in an overall enhancement in the sales and marketing productivity. With advanced lead generation solutions you can attain qualified leads, pre-qualified leads, rich with data and have a an increased higher conversion rate than the cold contacts that helps the sales team to attain their targets quicker.

Read more on - Marketing Automation software, Lead Nurturing

The New Age Marketing Automation Software

Enterprises from ages has been operating in a neo classic mode  with  mainly two forces involved in  revenue generation- marketing  and sales.  Even today the business world revolves around marketing and sales funnel. However, to withstand the  aggressively competitive business environment, enterprises struggle to  meet customer demands by replacing the repetitive manual processes with automated solutions. Technological innovations has seen  enterprises  communicating digitally and  operating  efficiently with the help of a number of software applications.

Marketing automation refers to the software platform designed to automate repetitive tasks as well as empower the sales funnel as powerful tools. Discord between the sales and marketing teams are always detrimental for the enterprise as it reduces the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and also reduces the efficiency of the sales teams in closing deals. The marketing automation platform  thus helps enterprises to streamline the sales and marketing functions in the organizations.

Nevertheless to develop a strategic marketing plan, enterprises need to understand customer demands . The marketing automated tools are so designed to aid marketers in understanding customers, developing, analyzing and management of marketing campaigns, as well as organizing   customer data and storage. The marketing automation software platform  provides information across all phases of  marketing including demand generation, lead management, lead scoring, lead nurturing, lead generation, campaign analysis and sales effectiveness.

The  marketing automation software   facilitates the enterprises to understand their prospects' position, their interests and  readiness to buy the product.  In other words, this software focuses on moving the leads from the top of marketing funnel to the bottom of the funnel as a sales-ready lead. The lead scoring feature enables the marketing teams to categorize the prospects according to their activities. Further, these leads are nurtured with  drip campaign messages through emails and social networking channels and are used generally for the B2B markets , B2Cmarkets, longer sales cycle based  business-to-government . The traditional organizational boundaries limits the scope of existing automation solutions. Although these distinctions were no hindrance to organizational structures  in earlier days, the present scenario calls for the need for more integration, transparency and a single point of accountability for a organization's revenue generation activities.

The industry statistics from various sources  states that-

• Companies using marketing automation for lead management saw a 451% jump in qualified leads. --Aberdeen Group
• Companies see a 70% faster sales cycle and 54% improvement in quota achievement post a marketing automation solution. -- Bulldog Solutions

Based on these insights , it can be inferred that the use of  marketing automation software developed by the leaders in the industry segment facilitates enterprises with more qualified leads, raises the engagement rate and increase revenues, while lowering customer acquisition costs and reducing the time needed to execute marketing campaigns. The marketing automation platforms thus  are the de facto sales managers for the enterprises and provide concrete touch points for all participants in the funnel process.

Read more on - Lead Management software , Lead Management