How Automated Lead Management Amplifies Your Sales Strategy

Just attracting a lead to a business is a tricky process. A process that can be expensive, uncertain, and time-consuming.

And that’s only the beginning of the sales cycle.

When a lead comes in, marketing teams and sales representatives might have a long road ahead of managing the lead, doing whatever it takes to up the chances of this person or company eventually doing business.

Today, we’re going to look at how automation can help speed up and take some of the manual effort out of that lead management process.

Basics of Automated Lead Management

Lead Management, Defined

Lead management is a fairly broad term, encompassing everything a salesperson might do with a lead through the course of the sales process.

Accordingly, lead management might mean completely different things at companies depending on the length of their sales cycle. It might be a 30-second process for a hot dog vendor, compared to a 1-2 year process for a rep selling enterprise resource planning software to a large company.

At the shortest and longest stages, though, lead management is essentially about what it takes to attract a potential customer and eventually help guide them to the point of doing business. It doesn’t have to be aggressively over-the-top, but some kind of formalized process can help.

Stages of Lead Management

• Lead generation, which is about creating pathways for a potential customer to contact your company, whether it’s a button on a blog post, phone number on a website, email contact form, or any number of other touchpoints.
• Lead qualification and segmentation, which separates out people more likely to do business than more casual visitors.
• Lead nurturing, which continues to grow lead interest in a company.
• Lead scoring, which helps quantify when a lead can be distributed to a sales team.
• Lead distribution, where the lead is given to the sales team.
• Lead conversion, when a potential customer goes from a prospect to a buyer.
• Tracking and adjusting, which reviews the leads who became customers, those who didn’t make it through the sales funnel, and how to capture more business next time.

What it Means to Automate Lead Management

Automated lead management might sound complex. Basically, though, it can be thought of as the process of using modern tools and technology to automate simpler and more repetitive parts of the above lead management steps.

As it is with many things related to automation, automating lead management can take away rote tasks from human marketing, sales and support staff, freeing them up for more analytic or nuanced work.

5 Ways Automation Amplifies Sales

Higher Close Rates

When a lead comes in for a business, there’s maybe around a 20% chance of it converting into a paying customer, according to HubSpot. In other words, for every five potential customers for a company, just one is likely to stick around.

Clearly, businesses need every trick to increase their chances of closing deals. One option is identifying visitors to your business website. Businesses can also consider automated lead management to boost their close rate. It makes it so that there is no guesswork on what needs to happen at every step of the sales cycle. This can make the process more predictable and lead to higher close rates.

Easier Lead Routing

Lead routing is the real-time process of gathering leads and assigning them to the best people on your sales team.

Easier Email Campaigns

Through customer relationship management (CRM) tools like Salesforce, reps can have templated emails set to go for each part of the sales cycle.