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A good lead management strategy should enable your revenue management teams to meet potential customers where they are, while providing the necessary tools and resources to persuade them to purchase. However, the buying and selling landscape has undergone some dramatic changes in recent years. Marketing and sales teams have shifted from the role of guides to something more like a concierge as buyers’ journeys have become increasingly self-directed. To manage leads in this new role, teams must be able to anticipate buyer needs and manage personalized interactions. The right technology solutions can help:
Better qualify with lead scoring
Timing is a crucial part of lead management. The right message must be delivered at the right time to be effective. But in today’s nonlinear buying journey, both timing and messaging have become moving targets as potential buyers move back and forth from research to engagement and back again. Tools like lead scoring can take the guesswork out of lead qualification.
Lead scoring software allows revenue operations to assign point values to buyer behavior. Activities in the top funnel have the lowest values and the bottom funnel has the highest. The higher a lead’s score, the further along they are in their buying journey. Scores can be broken down into different phases of the buying journey that then correlate with specific outreach activities. With today’s non-linear buyer journey, organizations must use a lead scoring program that subtracts and adds points to ensure accuracy.
In addition to tracking lead positions within the sales pipeline, implementing lead scoring can also improve collaboration between marketing and sales teams. Both departments should discuss the sales funnel in detail to agree the terms and clearly define the behavior and stages of the buyer journey. These discussions can lead to a better understanding of the other person’s perspective.
Related: Tips and Tools for Better Lead Flow Management and Converting Sales
Maintain engagement and avoid missed opportunities with automation
Most buyers have: extended their timeline to buy Since the pandemic, companies have therefore expanded their food campaigns. Marketing and sales automation software is great for keeping leads engaged, reducing missed opportunities, and optimizing marketing workloads.
With software, employees can set up customized campaigns that automatically trigger actions when certain conditions are met. Marketers can create complex sequences that include various triggers, such as attending events or submitting forms, and assign corresponding actions, such as email, SMS, or instant reach notification. You can even sequence personalization efforts using decision nodes that perform different actions when a lead meets specific criteria.
Automation can be an extremely useful tool for recycling leads that are not ready for sale. For example, let’s say sales get a lead who is interested in buying, but they can’t buy until later in the year. Instead of sales marking the lead for follow-up later and being out of touch for months, an automation sequence can be set up that sends flagged leads back into a nurturing cycle until it’s time for sales to get back in touch. During that time, the lead will receive relevant content and information to keep your brand top-of-mind until they can make a purchase.
Related: Why Implementing Automation Today Is Key to Sales Acceleration
Personalize marketing efforts by enriching data
The recent “Next in Personalization” McKinsey’s report illustrates how important personalization is to consumers and how many businesses can benefit from it. But there’s only so much you can do with a name, a company, and an email address. You need more details and you can get that with data enrichment.
A data enrichment service takes and adds customer data by running it through a collection of external sources and filling in details such as job title, company size, and more. Depending on the data service, you can even specify what kind of data you are interested in. With enriched data, you can further define your customer segments and be more targeted with your marketing and sales efforts. For example, you can create landing pages tailored to businesses of a certain size or design email campaigns that address the key concerns of a specific job title. In addition, your sales and marketing teams can use enriched data to improve personalization efforts in their one-to-one interactions.
Related: Five Actionable Steps to Using Personalization to Drive Sales
Improve collaboration and customer experience with a holistic view of data
The buying journey has only become more complex in the digital age. There are an increasing number of touchpoints and channels to manage, and now there are multiple transfers between marketing and sales. But it also means organizations have access to more customer data than ever before — if they can see it, that is.
Imagine having two puzzle pieces, but never putting them together to complete the picture. That’s what it’s like to have data silos. Traditionally, companies keep customer data separate by department, but this practice prevents them from seeing the buyer journey in its entirety. This segmented view increases the likelihood of sending irrelevant or repeated information to potential customers and losing them.
Businesses need to invest in technology that can centralize data in one accessible location. By doing so, organizations can amplify their revenue operations like never before with a comprehensive list of customer interactions, including email campaigns, sales calls, form submissions, and more. By knowing more information about a lead, teams can better predict what they need next and improve conversion results.
Now that buying and selling is firmly rooted in the digital realm, it is subject to digital expectations. In a world of search engines, advanced predictive algorithms and 24/7 availability, it is quite a task to fill. Fortunately, businesses can also use the digital world to their advantage by equipping their sales and marketing teams with the technologies to effectively manage leads to purchase.
