In today’s technology-driven business world, speed is everything. Just as the internet has changed the pace of communications, it has also irrevocably altered the way we do business.
Gone are the days of pounding the streets to generate leads or cold calling endless lists of potential clients.
Investing too much time and effort into prospects that don’t offer a return on investment (ROI) drains a company’s resources. While huge corporations may be able to afford the added expense of hunting for leads, the time investment can be especially damaging for smaller firms where manpower is limited. These days, any company that wants to remain competitive needs to minimize time expenditure and maximize results.
Enter marketing automation software. Marketing automation software streamlines various sales and marketing processes, including lead generation. In fact, 40% of companies who have purchased marketing automation software indicate that the primary purpose was to improve lead management.
Automated lead generation is a software-driven solution that locates and collects leads and provides critical information to determine a prospect’s likelihood to close. Applied correctly, automated lead generation can increase the scope of your search while reducing the amount of time your company spends looking for leads.
Read on to learn more about how automated lead management can increase your company’s competitive edge in today’s fast-paced marketplace.
Generating and Managing Leads Through Technology
More than ever before, sales and marketing processes are conducted in the online environment. When potential customers go to gather initial information about products and services, they’ll most likely do their initial research online. When prospects make contact with sales reps, they’re increasingly likely to do so online—at least initially. Current customers are even more likely to learn about new products and services online.
The moral of the story is modern business people expect to engage in all aspects of the process from the comfort of their offices. Meeting face-to-face with prospective clients or customers is rare these days. While the boom in online interaction may lead to depersonalization in some areas, the internet is a vast and constantly renewable resource for information about current and potential customers. Because so much business is conducted online, we can now see exactly how consumers engage in different aspects of the buying process.
The challenge with using this information is that there’s so much of it. This is where lead generating software comes in, crunching large quantities of data to present you with useable information.
By analyzing internet traffic and various patterns of engagement, lead generating systems can identify entities who may be interested in your products and services. They can also use data to help predict which prospects are worth pursuing, helping your company focus marketing efforts on the most productive leads.
Reasons to Use Automated Lead Management
- You want to grow your business. The number one reason to try automated lead generation is to reach not just any new prospects, but the right ones for your business. Manually collecting leads can be hit-or-miss and result in many dead ends. Automated lead generation works to minimize unproductive leads by analyzing prospects’ online engagement and interactions. This helps your business focus on leads more likely to close.
- You want to save time. Next on the list of reasons to employ automated lead generation is the time it can save your business. For small- to medium-sized businesses with fewer resources, hunting for prospects can be extraordinarily time-consuming. It’s better to save your workforce for tasks that truly require a human touch.
- Some people worry that increasing automation will dehumanize their company and devalue employees, but appropriate application of automation leads to the opposite. By delegating what you can to systems that can perform those tasks more efficiently, employees are freed-up to focus on high-touch business aspects.
- You want to save money. We’ve all heard that time is money, and this is especially true when it comes to generating leads. A more efficient lead-generating process means less spent finding prospects. It also means greater potential revenue.
- Lead-generating systems provide analysis of potential leads, helping businesses determine which leads are worth pursuing. This information can help increase revenue by allowing your business to focus on the most productive prospects.
- You want to expand your scope. Especially for small to medium-sized businesses, it can be challenging to expand the scope of lead-generating efforts. Using automated software that pulls information from the internet allows smaller businesses to considerably expand the scale of their lead-generating capacity.
- You want to improve communication. The task of generating leads falls at the intersection of sales and marketing efforts. It can be challenging to get everyone on the same page, and miscommunications waste time and money.
- Automated lead management systems allow team members to have a centralized system for tracking leads from start to finish, reducing the chances that leads will slip through the cracks. A centralized system also means that everyone has access to information about which leads closed, making it easier for the entire team to stay on-task and accountable.
- You want consistency. Generating leads the old-fashioned way can be inconsistent. The company must depend on individual marketing and sales team members to locate, assess, pursue, and communicate about each lead. With automated lead management, these processes become organized.
- Businesses can also integrate multiple lead-generating software applications into their systems at once, allowing them to create a steady stream of potential leads for sales reps to follow up on. When lead generation is automated, you can rest assured that leads are being generated without worrying about inconsistency.
The Future of Business
As automation collects and synthesizes increasing amounts of information about potential customers, businesses would do well to stay plugged into the trends. Automated lead management systems not only allow companies to find and pursue more consistently productive leads, but they facilitate tracking those leads from start to finish. This provides a valuable source of information about a company’s successes and failures. With an automated lead management system, your business can build a foundation to stay competitive.
