Sales lead management is an all-inclusive marketing strategy for nurturing leads into customers. So basically, content is written, edited, and published to entice engagement, captures leads’ information, evaluates their needs, educates them through carefully segmented nurture campaigns, and passes them to sales to sign as customers.
Piece of cake. (Yeah right.)
With everything else you have to schedule, balance, and track throughout the workday, establishing a lead management process can be tossed to the side. Maybe you don’t even know it’s something you’re not doing.
Without a sales lead management software, your sales reps can quickly become frustrated by the unqualified and weak leads being thrown their way. Of course, there are free lead management software options on the market, but why invest in a new tool, even with nothing more than your time, when you can call on your marketing automation system to the rescue?
The days of using marketing automation as a fancy email batch and blast tool are over. That’s so 2009. Here are some tips and tricks to turn your marketing software into a lead management system:
- Define a sales qualified lead and stick to it: This is where that sales and marketing alignment you’ve worked so hard to perfect comes in handy. Marketing may think all webinar attendees are qualified leads, while sales may think the attendees need to be nurtured even further. Get the two teams together to brainstorm which online behaviors, lead sources, and demographic characteristics deserve a sales call.
- Lead scoring, lead scoring, lead scoring: Sick of hearing about it? Then you must not be updating it as you should. Chances are your original lead scoring model includes scores for non-existent pages or events that have passed. You should be updating and testing your model at least once a quarter to keep your content fresh and your leads engaged.
- Measure all the things: If your marketing automation software integrates with your CRM lead management (which is absolutely, totally, 100 percent should) then you have the ability to track lead campaign interactions at the CRM level. At the campaign level, measure the total cost of nurturing a lead, the most successful campaigns, and length of your average buyer cycle.
