As potential customers are knocking on the door, you need to know who they are, what they want, where they came from, and how you can serve their best interest. In other words, you need an omniscient tool that would dissect your leads on the fly and deliver these insights in real time to your sales or customer support department.
Gone are the days when marketers relied on traditional lead management methods like spreadsheets, manual follow-ups, and – good Lord of heaven – direct mail. In an era when you can’t afford a split-second of delay and downtime, there’s only one way to succeed: lead management automation.
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An up-to-date lead management automation system can collect customer data, organize it into patterns, and produce real-time insights thousands of times faster than even the best marketers in the world, speeding up lead management and growing its quality.
Luckily, humans are not out of the equation yet. We are still behind the wheel of an already-frightening marketing machine, responsible for strategic decisions and tasks that cannot be automated.
Small talk aside, lead management automation can grow your bottom line exponentially if you synergize it with the human factor – your marketing, sales, and analytics professionals. Let’s walk through three major stages in the customer journey – lead tracking, lead distribution, and lead conversion – and see the place of lead management automation there.
Lead tracking: The customer journey on a silver platter
The customer journey starts as people discover you on the web – social media, paid ads, search engines, etc. – and ends upon conversion with some hindsight analytics. On your side, speed is paramount: how fast you collect customer data as your leads interact with your brand and how fast you interpret these insights into an optimal lead distribution and conversion.
🤔 Something to think about:
Imagine someone discovered your brand on Instagram, subscribed, and left the page. In a week, they returned, found a new offer, and almost took advantage of it before something distracted them. Later, they made a purchase from their PC while leaving most of the bookmarked items unattended.
Would you be able to understand that mobile and PC users are the same person? How would you continue with them: congratulate them on the purchase or remind them of the unattended items?
Lead management automation software can help you in similar situations, finding complex data patterns, interpreting these patterns into actionable marketing insights, and even assigning a probability to an event (for example, whether the mobile and PC user is the same person)
How lead management automation uncovers the customer journey
Marketing Data
Lead management automation software collects two types of data:
First-party data, which is the information collected directly from a customer through your website, mobile app, social media, email, and other marketing channels.
Third-party data, which is the information collected from resources unrelated to your interactions with a customer: demographics, psychographics, behavioral data, purchase intent, and more.
Above all, though, lead management software collects marketable data that can help you move a customer down the sales funnel smoothly while gathering even more insights down the road.
For example, it’s crucial to know the marketing channel that triggered the purchase (including a specific ad and keywords) and all other channels that contributed to the purchase and to what degree, if any.
Customer Data
Customer data unlocks your customer persona, including demographics, psychographics, behavior, and other helpful patterns.
For example, if you sell a wide range of home insurance options, you must know which customers need flood insurance more than others. For that, you should identify leads from flood-prone states. Next, you can offer a flood insurance policy to these target leads even if they do not seek flood insurance openly.
Sales Data
Digging deep into the pinnacle of the customer journey – the sales home stretch – you can understand what lures and scares away your customers and what strategies to double down on. Exhaustive sales data will show how the knowledge of your customers converts into sales and how you can drive more customers to a positive decision.
Lead tracking automation is irreplaceable when you need to know a lot about many customers without spending much time researching and delaying the customer journey. The more data you collect down the road, the more effective your lead attribution, distribution, scoring, and conversion, leading to inevitable growth in your bottom line.
Finding enough prospects ready to buy your products and services is challenging. Paying attention to signals of buying, such as behaviors indicating genuine interest, is essential. These buying signals, valuable to sales and marketing teams, allow for tailored communication and methods to sell products or services faster and guide potential customers through their buying journey.
Lead distribution: Connecting the right leads to the right salespeople
You don’t have much until your leads turn their hearts away – just around eight seconds – making anything with the word “manual” look laughable. Instead, you need a well-thought-out distribution system (yes, designed manually by putting big analytics minds and AI suggestions together) that unmistakably routes customers on the optimal conversion path based on factors like location, language, intent, agent availability, and more.
For all leads, the logic remains the same: interpreting customer data insights into the best customer journey for a particular lead while attempting to collect more data without being obtrusive.
However, there’s no one-size-fits-all lead distribution model. You must design your lead routing algorithms based on your audience, customer data, compliance regulations, and other peculiarities.
Lead conversion: Leveraging real-time customer insights
As the lead journey’s climax approaches, your sales reps must already have enough information to back up their confidence. Selling to a stranger is no match for a data-driven sales pitch that hits the customer's pain points, needs, and true desires. Everything you’ve done before translates into a convincing incentive to buy a particular product or service.
Once the dust settles, lead analytics follows
As you might have guessed, lead management automation software never stops working – not even when the order is there, and you’ve got your money – analyzing data round-the-clock to identify profitable patterns and harmful outliers.
Lead analytics is an art in and of itself, with myriads of ways to interpret customer data – just like there’s no limit to the toolkit you might get.
Among many other tools, lead analytics software can include:
Traffic flow reports to measure lead performance
Comparison reports to split-test lead gen campaigns
Performance analyzer to identify your most successful strategies
Predictive modeling to safely simulate future outcomes
Long story short, picture-perfect lead analytics should help you know your customers better than they know themselves. This may sound overambitious, but it’s more than possible, given the current technological advancements.
How lead management automation takes your business to the next level
Lead quality
Around 65% of businesses struggle with generating high-quality leads, looking for ways to improve their traffic quality. Lead management automation solutions allow marketers to generate more high-intent leads while blocking low-intent and fraudulent customers. You can get an immediate evaluation of the level of intent of a particular lead, calculating your conversion odds on the fly and adjusting the customer journey accordingly.
Lead nurturing
An overwhelming 96% of first-time website visitors aren’t ready to buy on the spot but are willing to exchange some of their data for valuable content. Lead management automation helps nurture your leads throughout the customer journey, providing them with valuable information and relevant choices. As a result, the intent of your leads grows, with more of them ready to buy.
Targeting
The better you know what your leads need and want, the easier it is to deliver personalized content at every touchpoint (email letters, webinars, recommendations, and more). For example, if a lead has shown interest in lead tracking software, you can include a relevant case study or testimonial in the newsletter.
Attribution
Whether you generate leads for your own company or sell them to advertisers, you need to unmistakably connect the customers to the traffic source while evaluating the input of every touchpoint along the way. Lead management automation solutions effectively consolidate data from various sources, factoring in all purchase-triggering actions.
Omnichannel approach
With the most common business-to-business lead gen strategies being email marketing (78%), event marketing (73%), and content marketing (67%), lead management automation software ensures smooth transitions between marketing channels and touchpoints without losing touch with the customer data and intent. This aims to deliver an exceptional omnichannel customer experience across all touchpoints.
Budget allocation
By reducing manual labor costs and increasing operational efficiency, lead management automation allows you to process hundreds of times more leads at the same cost while growing the quality of your services. Software like predictive modeling can simulate future campaigns without any investment before you bring the winners to life.
Sales
With lead management automation software, you can focus on the most promising leads while knowing their true intentions and needs without bombarding them with questions. Third-party data sheds light on demographics, status, budget, and marketable factors, increasing your conversion potential.
Lead Management and AI
Lead management automation has no alternative if you want to scale and improve, processing ever more customers without sacrificing the quality of your services. Around 80% of marketers use lead automation software to generate and convert more leads alongside saving time, increasing engagement, ensuring timely communications, and leveraging up-selling opportunities.
If you haven’t capitalized on lead management automation, do it now not to be left behind.
About Dialpad
The industry leader in AI-powered conversational intelligence, Dialpad delivers everything you need to handle business and customer communications in one beautifully designed platform. Over 30,000 businesses and millions of people worldwide are using Dialpad to unlock real-time insights and provide live automated coaching with Dialpad Ai, a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, which has analyzed over 4 billion minutes of proprietary voice and messaging data.