In a downturn, you can’t afford to let a single lead go to waste. But too often, lead generation is neglected and left to go cold. This is one of the cardinal sins of selling.
The importance of Lead Generation
Having the right tools in place to for your lead generation and manage the leads all the way through the sales funnel – however long that process takes, is critical. Whether your prospect arrives at your site via an online search, starts following you on Twitter, watches one of your videos, comes to one of your live events or simply calls you up, you need to be able to capture their details, gauge their level of interest and start developing a relationship that will ultimately lead to a successful handover to Sales.
Lead Generation – Simple rules to follow
1. Use Landing Pages to Turn Inbound Traffic into Leads
Today, an astonishing 93% of B2B buying decisions start with online research. However many companies aren’t equipped to capture and profile the search traffic they get. Rather than bringing search traffic en-masse to your homepage, use targeted landing pages to guide visitors to specific products and services. Once they’re there, take the opportunity to learn more about them by offering a relevant download, webinar or video in exchange for a few details.
2. Maximize the Value of Every Lead
In a world where most lead generation happens inbound via online routes, automated lead management tools can help you to generate, score and nurture leads more cost-effectively. Use lead scoring to evaluate how engaged each prospect is, so you can decide whether they’re ready to hand over to sales or need nurturing first. By knowing more about each lead, you’ll be able to focus your limited budget and resources on the ones most likely to convert, enabling you to hand over fully qualified leads to the sales team.
3. Make Better Use of Existing Contacts
Make better use of existing in-house customer and prospect databases by cleaning up the data, scoring (or re-scoring) old leads, and developing targeted content and nurturing strategies to revive leads that may have gone cold.
4. Nurture Leads until They’re Ready to Buy
Lead nurturing tools can help you to build relationships with prospects who are too early in the buying cycle to be ready for sales. Profiling prospects and delivering regular, relevant content in line with their interests can yield a four-fold improvement in the conversion of qualified prospects into sales opportunities over time. That’s a lot of return on your marketing investment.
5. Save Money and Spend More Wisely with Marketing Analytics
Every year brings advances in marketing analytics, and today, marketers can monitor and evaluate the success of each campaign as it’s being rolled out. That means campaigns can be stepped up, refined or discontinued on the fly, to ensure that each one delivers the best value for money. You’ll also be able to monitor in fine detail the returns on your marketing investment – vital information for negotiating additional budget or for demonstrating Marketing’s effectiveness to Sales.
How a CRM can help with Lead Generation
A CRM system benefits an organisation through the visibility of its sales activities. This visibility is fundamental to managing sales performance and control of the sales process. This visibility enables management to understand why, when, who and how opportunities are being won, stalled, or being lost. If it cannot be monitored, it cannot be managed. The visibility offered within the CRM system also allows management to make educated business decisions based on hard data. A CRM system will enable structured data to be used to access performance. This assessment should indicate which sales person is out performing others.
ProAptivity are an independent CRM solutions provider with over 30 years experience in helping clients successfully onboard user-customisable CRM solutions. We focus on the implementation, training, and support of highly customised CRM software solutions. Our CRM software supported by our training provide customers with the tools needed to deliver successful business process management.
Fundamentally, we help organisations embed CRM best practice throughout their organisation. This helps organisations become more competitive, customer focused and ultimately more profitable.
If you need help in understanding why my business needs CRM, maybe some of our video’s or eBooks could help! Alternatively visit Maximizer CRM for more information. You can contact us today on 0330 223 6362 or via email at info@proaptivity.com. Contact us today for a free CRM consultation that will assess if your business is CRM ready.